re: What was the best out of the country vacation that you enoyed

Japan is pretttttyyy hard to beat.

I also loved Costa Rica.

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I also loved Costa Rica.

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I loved Costa Rica as well. If you like outdoors, hiking, etc. and don't want to be in a place that's cold, Costa Rica is a great fit. There is so much ecotourism there and you can see all types of animals, birds, vegetation, etc. The people were fabulous as well. We found them educated and felt very safe there. It's basically Central America's Switzerland with no army. One of my favorite vacations. We ended it with a bit of beach time. I really felt like it was a place I could live.

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Agreed. There's no need to clutter up a thread with dozens of pictures and walls of text copied/pasted from a thread from earlier this year when he could just post a link.

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I loved seeing the pictures and think that place looks amazing! Pictures help tell the story. In the past, if I had more than one, found it best to set up an album to share like through Google Photos. Then it's just a link and people can chose to look at them or not.

I will definitely page you for more info, closer to that time!

Also, great pics. Thanks for sharing.

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but he does it every freaking time

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I, for one, enjoy it every freaking time.


And I also agree with the sentiment, with 4 kids and 2 businesses to run, when we go on vacation, we unplug from everything. We go to remote, hard to reach places. We try our best to find and enjoy the world in its most natural and undisturbed beauty as we can find.

Spent 2 weeks in India. First week was for a wedding in Anand (about 1.5-2 hours outside Ahmedebad) and the second week doing the Golden Triangle of New Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. The week long wedding ceremony was a blast and got a decent look of what it's like everyday in India. Food was incredible, so many tours of palaces/temples/forts that left you in awe of the detail they were built with so long ago, and just a totally different world there. The culture shock never really subsided the entire time there and that's what I liked most about it.

I found Belgrade and the parts of Serbia I did get to visit very fascinating.

I'm generally the kind of person that's very fascinated with Eastern Europe particularly in recalling the war. Serbia is not without its challenges. They are still not an EU country and employment is very difficult. You see many Serbians moving out of the country to other parts like Germany to get work.

I enjoyed Belgrade. The Fortress and the Cathedral are the main tourist sites, but I found their war museum one of the most comprehensive I've ever seen.

The people are very friendly surprisingly to Americans given what happened during the war.

I still stay in touch with some people through Facebook that I met in Serbia. It's a hoot to see them post in Cyrillic because you can't understand a thing they say but most of them speak perfect English. I posted some pictures of us drinking rakia and they got a hoot out of it. It's their version of moonshine and you can see them beam when you start talking about their homemade brew!

I don't think that many Americans visit Serbia frankly. The restaurant and bar scene at night was pretty active. I found it to be very safe overall, just like all Eastern European countries. You may have petty crime but violent crime is rare. Not going to lie it's a poor country and parts of it do look sketchy to Americans but generally always felt very safe. I would love to go back and explore other parts of the country. You'd go there for the people, the food, the rakia! The recency feeling of a country that our country helped bomb into capitulation less than 20 years ago. The "cultural immersion" in a struggling yet hopeful nation free of political corruption.

As a side note, we went the month after this: LINK. We were actually worried about getting caught up in this and being American. Nope. Not at all.

My wife frankly has had enough of Eastern Europe! Just not "developed enough". I disagree, but have lost that one so far! So our next trip is to Germany.


Some selected pictures

Italy and Australia.

Italy for the great food and the way the historic and modern weave so well together there.

Australia for the people, beaches and outdoorsy stuff to do everywhere.

Amalfi Coast last year and Tuscany this year ('19)...