While planning for our year, both in advance and on-the-go, TripAdvisor became our sixth family member. We poured over reviews and suggestions of restaurants, apartments, hikes, hotels, trains, and self-guided tours. As a school writing assignment, we even studied what makes a good review and published some of our own.

Because it was so useful to hear from those who have gone before, we want to share some of our recommendations for YOUR trips abroad. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just many of the great things that come to mind when we look back on our year.

Sorry there are no helpful comments here, but we wholeheartedly recommend all of these places and activities linked below (we DID have some disasters and some less-than-ideals, we just left them off the list). If you want the full story, feel free to email us and we will talk your ear off!

GENERAL TRAVEL

AirTreks Round-the-World Airfare

Renault Eurodrive Lease/Buyback Program

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor CityGuides App

HomeAway Rentals

Holiday Lettings Rentals

AirBnB Apartment Rentals

Rick Steves Audio Europe

ICELAND

Iceland Camping Card

Hotel Keilir, Keflavik

Northsailing Whale Watching, Husavik

FRANCE

Hotel Esmeralda, Paris

Le Manoir Quinquis, Bannalec

Cro Bique, rental in Beynac-et-Cazenac

Font-de-Gaume Cave Paintings, Les Eyzies

Beynac Castle, Beynac-et-Cazenac

Transmanche Ferries

ENGLAND

Broadhembury Campground, Kent

Dover Castle, Kent

Farriers Arms Pub, Kent

London Eye

Tower of London

Blenheim Palace, Oxford

Helm Lune Cottage Rental, Bowness

Holiday Inn Maidstone, Seven Oaks

Car train through the Chunnel

BELGIUM

Maison Antoine Frites, Brussels

European Union Visitors Centre

SWITZERLAND

Chalet Im Batzenboden, Wengen

Trummelbach Falls, Lauterbrunnen

CROATIA

Montona Gallery Pizza, Motovun

Perfectly Charming House, Viganj

Antony Boy Camping and Windsurfing, Viganj

Jadrolinja Ferries

ITALY

L’Arcobaleno Apartment, Rome

Il Sorpasso Ristorante, Rome

MOROCCO

Riad Safir, Meknes

Rough Tours Company, Sahara

TUNISIA

Novotel, Tunis

GREECE

Hotel Phaedra

TURKEY

Villa Blanca Rental, Davutlar

Ephesus Archaeological Site, Izmir

Perge Archaeological Site, Antalya

Flintstones Cave Hotel, Cappadocia

Red and Rose Valley Trails, Goreme

Sedef Restaurant, Goreme

Hitchhiker ATV Rental, Goreme

Sahkulu Place Apartment, Istanbul

TANZANIA

Nomad Tanzania Safaris

RWANDA

Solace Guesthouse, Kigali

Kigali Memorial Centre, Kigali

Meze Fresh Burritos, Kigali

MALAYSIA

Petrosains Science Museum, Kuala Lumpur

Novotel City Centre, Kuala Lumpur

THAILAND

Thailand Elephant Conservation Center

Sojos Cafe, Chiang Mai

Khaomao Khaofang Restaurant, Chiang Mai

Free Burma Rangers

Medici Restaurant, Bangkok

Navalai River Resort, Bangkok

Bumrungrad Hospital, Bangkok

VIETNAM

V’Spirit Cruise, Ha Long Bay

Hanoi Charming 2 Hotel, Hanoi

CHINA

New Day Foster Home Guesthouse, near Beijing

Huanghua Great Wall of China

Olympic Water Cube Water Park, Beijing

Xian HQ Apartments, Xian

Mt Huashan Hike, Xian

Terra Cotta Warriors, Xian

JAPAN

Japan Railpass

Sakara Kyoto Guesthouse, Kyoto

Sakara Gion Machiya Rental, Kyoto

Musashi Sushi, Kyoto

Hiroshima Memorial Park, Hiroshima

Andersen Kitchen, Hiroshima

Toyota Plant Tour, Toyota City

Pepper Lunch, Tokyo

KOREA

Cozy Residence Apartment, Seoul

… AND SOME ORGANIZATIONS WE HAVE GROWN TO LOVE

St. James Muswell Hill, London

Friends of the Lakes District, Kendal, UK

Lakes Christian Centre, Bowness, UK

St. Paul’s Cultural Center, Antalya, Turkey

World Relief Rwanda

Sonrise School, Musanze, Rwanda

Akiba School, Nairobi, Kenya

Light and Power Centre, Nairobi, Kenya

The Ocean Church, Tanzania

Kenya Connection, Kenya

Dave and Lucy Chaves, Nairobi, Kenya

Christ Church Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya

International Justice Mission Thailand, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Grace International School, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Free Burma Rangers, Chiang Mai, Thailand

New Day Foster Home, China

HAPPY ADVENTURES TO YOU ALL!

When we started this journey, our itinerary was a list of PLACES we would visit.

Looking back on our journey so far, it is PEOPLE who are the milestones. We REMEMBER the steps of our journey through the litany of people we met — and loved.

These are a few dozen steps of the many hundreds of thousands of steps carved in to Mount Huashan in central China. We went there for the view — and the exercise. A small number of stair climbers were there to work … step by step … balancing massive loads of building supplies for new trails and repairs on their back. (He’s barely visible at the top of this section of stairs.)

One of these porters passed us as we were resting on our descent. He played a flute … while walking and balancing his load of concrete mix bags … and he paused to play a mini concert when he saw me listening.

We finished our descent of Mount Huashan just as a group of elderly women finished their climb. (!) They were singing what sounded like Chinese show tunes. Heartily. And their tuneful energy exploded when they saw us lingering to listen.

When you think of Kyoto, Japan — you think of a “hamburg(er)” restaurant decorated like an Alabama southern cookin’ joint playing “You make me wanna roll my windows down” to a host of empty booth tables, right?

Pass the fried chicken. Seriously. At Kyoto’s Bukiri Donkey restaurant.

That’s where we were last night on the final moments of an epic, three-country journey in three days — China to South Korea to Japan.

W’s luggage was flagged — and wrapped in an unbreakable alarm gizmo, a little bit like a car boot — because of a nerf gun packed inside. We rode a grand total of five train-like vehicles — a mag lev train in China, a people mover in South Korea, a “regular” train in Japan, a bullet train in Japan … and then finished off with a Japanese subway ride. (We had Subway sandwiches for dinner, standing over our luggage in the terminal of Nagoya’s Chubu Centrair Airport.) No luggage was lost or missing. We opened some airplane sickness bags for real — thankfully, for naught.

The trip tested us — still testing us, as we’re still a bit testy. And it apparently rains in Japan.

But we made it. We’re making it. We’re already remembering bits from our journey over the last few days with giggles. The boys are sleeping now. We’re in a beautiful guest house a few minutes walk from the old temples of The Philosopher’s Walk. S and I are making final plans for South Korea. We read Chapter One of “The Last Battle” tonight from the Narnia series.

And — moment by moment — we’re building a grand story.

Ah, the joys of the universal language of….. Adele??

Last July, during the first week of our adventure, our family cozied up for pizza around a tiny wooden table in one of only two restaurants in a little coastal town of southern Iceland.  We were giddy with anticipation of our year — and with the addition of E’s new stuffed puffin, Sven — so when Adele’s “Rollin’ in the Deep” came over the restaurant speakers, we could only barely stop ourselves from bursting into song.  Fortunately for our pre-teens, our sense of propriety won out and we were satisfied with only a strong lip-synch of the song.

After that pizza dinner, we went for a fabulous hike with a mind-blowing view.  It was just the beginning of a year chock-full of gaining a new perspective.

So…

…fast forward nearly 11 months.  Yesterday we took in the crazy and electric Shanghai skyline, from both the bottom and the top.  Imagine our delight when, at the Hyatt lounge on the 91st floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center, Adele got our toes tapping — and our lip-synch going — with “Rumor Has It”.  Anyone care to dance?

More than a few of us did.

When S called out from inside our Xian bathroom for a volunteer to cut her hair, E was the first to scramble off the sofa and take the scissors from her hands.

She’d been inspired by a friend who described how you can grab a fist of hair just so on the top of your head … cut it … and end up with a reasonably layered head of hair.

The pictures above chronicle the hair journey.

(Her hair still looks awesome.)

As rush hour clogged the Bell Tower area of Xian’s old city this evening, a handful of women stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of a busy sidewalk. They shouted from their military-like formation at young, smartly dressed women who passed by.

The scene was puzzling. Had the modesty militia shown up for a rumble with the mini skirt set? Was this beginning of a popular protest, had these women at the bottom of the economic ladder finally had it? I scanned the plaza for security personnel helping each other don riot gear.

I found an English speaker waiting in a long line for his bus. He explained that these were seamstresses … hawking their wares, so to speak, at women passing by who might need sartorial aid.

Though bummed I wouldn’t see riot gear, it was still a revelation.

These are the images from our recent adventure through history in and around Xian, China — from a visit to see the famous terra cotta warriors and a visit to see Xian’s lesser known Nestorian stele.

You may remember how Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified a warring China, started construction on the Great Wall, forced all his subjects to start using the same written language … and built a tomb for himself that was packed with terra cotta warriors who would serve him after death. Farmers stumbled on the tomb structures in 1974 while digging a well … and the Chinese government has since built a sprawling facility to house the warriors and ensure their preservation.

The Nestorian stele is a calligraphy-covered limestone slab more than 9 feet tall tucked in to the “Second Display Room” of a less imposing museum in Xian’s old city. It is said to have been erected by 8th century Christians, perhaps the first in this part of the world, who were celebrating their new roots in imperial China after fleeing persecution from the Catholic Church in Rome.

We’ve starting watching slideshows of photographs from our journey each evening, averaging a show a night from each country we’ve visited. So far, we’ve made it through Iceland and France, Part I.

It’s a slightly arduous experience to sit through e-v-e-r-y-s-i-n-g-l-e-p-i-c-t-u-r-e taken in these places …some blurry, some overexposed, some under exposed, many repetitive, many repetitive … but we’ve also had blissful oh-yeah! moments.

Sure, the milestone photographs of things like the terra cotta warriors and the Nestorian stele jog our memories about important places we’ve visited … but the images that generate the most excitement on our sofa are the random photographs of our journey’s everyday happenings that jog our emotions.

Like … the picture of W, H, and E walking through various light sources at the terra cotta warrior museum.

Like the image of street seamstresses hawking their wares.

Or the picture of J and S’s room in their Xian apartment.

These are our journey’s real revelations.

Monday afternoon in Xian, China:

Two blocks of vendors hang calligraphy brushes and stack thick parchment rolls in stalls under canvas umbrellas. A dozen women in comfortable clothing move through the delicate choreography of a sword dance, as their teacher — an elderly man — leads them through lunges, body sways, and toe points with encouragement in a cadence. A calligraphy artist balances his massive brush in one hand, dips it in a mixture of ink and water, and marks his parchment with slow stroke after slow stroke. And, while customers prod, poke, and blow on various items in his stall, an instrument salesman turns away from his stall to play a xun.

We’re sleeping tonight in the eastern-most city of the ancient Silk Road. Opting for four berths in a sleeper train over camels or horses, we completed the 12-hour journey earlier this morning in Xian, China … home of the formerly buried terra cotta warriors.

The center of Xian’s old city is a grand bell tower, built more than a thousand years after the first travelers on what would become the silk road … but, still, a super long time ago. The bell inside the tower is said to come from around 700 AD.

So tonight … I write of this history … inside a Starbucks with free wifi … with the view of Xian’s bell tower. The smartphone of another customer in the armchair next to me keeps ding-a-linging with chat updates. A pop crooner sings the latest version of “Moon River.”

And no matter how many updates and revisions and versions and years gone by since the original (ancient?) classic — it’s still a great song.

–

Some photos from our recent journey and current home:

I first entered a conflict zone as a journalist in Iraq in 2003. The international invasion had just ended. As my colleagues and I tried to make sense of things, the Jordanian Embassy was attacked … and the United Nations Baghdad headquarters was decimated by a truck bomb. It turned out to be quite tricky to make sense of things. We were witnessing the beginning of a new phase of Iraq’s conflict in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

Soon, I would make my first of five trips to war in Afghanistan … witness upheaval in Pakistan … and report from bombing in Libya.

Some of my NPR colleagues specialize in reporting from conflict zones. It’s a kind of expertise in conflict tourism — not an inappropriate craft necessarily, but they have a particular dexterity in providing (and discovering) perspective about cities or communities beset by war or unrest or dissent or anxiety.

My family recently stayed in one of these cities, just a few blocks from one of its most important and contentious places.

Policemen in plain clothes (carrying black umbrellas like assault rifles) march in full view with uniformed soldiers. Knots of surveillance cameras hang from nearly every light post. Fire extinguishers are placed at even intervals a few feet away from guards standing at attention — perhaps to douse people who try to set themselves on fire?

My point: even my most accomplished colleagues and conflict tour guides have a difficult time conveying all the cultural and historical and political and emotional aspects of complicated sights and sounds.

We do the best we can with our ears, our eyes, our best guesses — and Google — to explain what we’re seeing in China. Much of it, however, is a mystery.

Today — the boys took turns teaching each other Chinese script characters. A fine, illustrated book was our reference book — but how can you really explain thousands of years of history tightly wound up in a few strokes of a calligraphy pen? H chose to share about the word “tail,” because it’s used with another word to convey the idea of “epilogue.” He thought that was really cool.

Who needs a tour guide with that kind of spirit of adventure?

We spent our last afternoon in Beijing at the Temple of Heaven. Apparently, it’s a popular gathering spot among the elderly set for games, conversation, exercise — and singing.

Who knows why a group of a dozen men gathered in a circle around a single music stand to sing a capella? Who knows what they were singing?

I thought it was so cool nonetheless — and it was the latest unexplained mystery on our journey to be so pleasantly vexing.

J has a cool app on his phone that will speak Chinese for us. It has helped us out on several occasions, ordering tea, sorting out larger numbers, settling a time when a driver would pick us up.

It is not super sophisticated — it is more of a phrasebook than a translator — and has worked great for most of our needs, but it is also limited in scope.

For example, this app can request or declare many wonderful, but possibly unnecessary, things:

• May I have a seat next to the toilet?
• I would like 2 eggs.
• Pasta without tomato sauce.
• My camera has been stolen.
• I would like to buy a swim cap.
• I would like to rent a beach chair.
• May I have a piece of cake?

However, it has no translation for:

• Will you please stop the van so I can go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW?!?!?