Travel

The Flight Network, a deal-focused travel provider, polled over 1,000 travel writers and agencies (including Costa Rica FIRE!) to come up with its 2019 list for the 50 most beautiful cities. And the top 10 winners are: ParisNew YorkLondon Venice VancouverBarcelonaCape TownSan FranciscoSydneyRome Downtown New York City from Governor's Island In addition to our hometown New York City, I voted for Tamarindo, though it’s really a town, not a city. [...]

The purpose of our visit to Cleveland was to attend the Real Wealth Network Income Property Showcase event. You can read all about that event over here. We added a 2nd day to the trip so we'd have more time to sample what Cleveland has to offer! Fun fact about the hotel hosting the Real Wealth Network event: it was also host to the National Yo-Yo Championships! Unfortunately, we didn’t [...]

After four full days in Provence and just under four days in Lyon, we had a 10+ hour road trip for our final stop in Paris. We were scheduled to spend our final days in Tours in the Loire Valley, but changed to Paris because of the heat wave. Temperatures were projected to exceed 100-degrees each day, and the Loire Valley activities would be mainly outdoors. In addition, our AirBNB [...]

After just under four days in Lyon, we hit the road for our next stop in Aix-en-Provence. We picked this region because lavender is in season June through August. As it turns out, sunflowers also bloom in July and August, so we would get to see both! We did see some impressive sunflower fields along the way, but as the drive was several hours, we didn’t stop for photo opportunities. [...]

We have been to Paris once before for a few days, but exploring the rest of France was high on my bucket list. Thanks to the flexibility that FIRE affords, we were able to jump on a ticket sale and ended up paying just over $600 per Paris/ NY round-trip ticket in July! We scheduled 12 days in total to go around the French Alps region, the lavender fields of [...]

Not one week after returning from a six-day, 3111-mile road trip, we spent Saturday thru Monday of Memorial Day Weekend on another thousand-mile journey, essentially to buy a shirt! Our youngest enters college this fall and only made her enrollment decision after we had already visited the school. She wanted some branded shirts to wear for her final weeks of high school to show off her college. We were scheduled [...]

We go a little bit crazy with our road trips. We bought a new car in December 2016 and have already put 88,000 miles on it! Even crazier, I don’t drive, so Scott has driven the entire 88,000 miles all by himself. Last week, we spent six days on a road trip from New York City to Fargo, ND for the Fargo marathon (Scott’s 16th state in his quest to [...]

I wrote previously about how 2019 is going to be a big travel year for us, after our younger child goes off to college in August. One of our trips is expected to be to Spain, Portugal and France in September and October, and we are starting now to think about an itinerary. Our intent is to 'slow travel' and stay at reasonably priced AirBNB's off the beaten path, so [...]

2019 will be a major transition year for us. After 23 years of raising two kids, our younger child goes off to college in August. Caroline and I have had the year 2019 circled on our proverbial calendar for a loooong time. We've always been interested in travel but never really had the luxury of doing it, partially because my full time corporate career didn't leave a lot of room [...]