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!

I had the most beautiful ice cream cone the other day. The rain was just stopping, and the Kyoto street colors were accentuated by the wet. Red lanterns, dark wood, carefully arranged potted plants, flocks of bright umbrellas.

As I savored both the green tea color AND flavor, I remembered other brilliant and meaningful colors from our year. Each of these colors is packed with memories and emotion — of growth, joy, loss, wonder, hope, friendship — that Benjamin Moore would covet to create.

Here are just a few of my ColorFull encounters (clicking on any thumbnail will launch a larger gallery):

So thankful to have these ColorFull memories added to my palette for my NEXT year.

We had an incredible week in the “Land of a Thousand Hills” — beautiful land and beautiful people who have touched us deeply.

Some highlights to narrate our (quite large) photo gallery:

A day visiting World Relief staff and projects around Kigali — staff devotion, Dr. Nicholas and Ikirezi Natural Products farming cooperative, Village of Hope, water filter project, Savings for Life group, afterschool care group.  Brilliant, dedicated, caring visionaries doing great work!

A moving morning at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre.

A regional bus adventure from Kigali to Musanze region, learning why Rwanda is called “Land of a Thousand Hills.”

A morning spent at Sonrise School in Musanze, with the highlight of spending some time with a young lady sponsored by some women at our home church.

Warm, welcoming hospitality of  medical missionaries Caleb and Louise and their kids.

Connecting with friends of friends in Kigali — and gaining some of our own!

This was my view of E’s brief walk with a young man named Geoffrey this afternoon. Scenes like this have led to some great writing the boys have been producing in World School.

I’ve given them some fairly broad topics to tackle about our recent experiences in Rwanda and Kenya … and they’ve responded with thoughtful paragraphs. Their work is sometimes begrudging and slow to launch … but it has remained honest and raw.

Earlier this week, we said goodbye to dear, long-time friends Alex and Sherilynn and their three kids as we left Tanzania.  In our last few minutes together, we had a frantic 10 minute dance party, took some crazy PhotoBooth pics, and sniffled our way through hugs and goodbyes.  Good times, hard goodbye.

This scene is very familiar to us this year — the choking back tears, having one last look, trying to focus on when (not IF) we will see a certain special family again.

I did not imagine that this would be a year of goodbyes.  Goodbyes are not my forte (!), and it turns out that I have passed that trait down to the next generation.  No amount of preparation or self-talk or rationalization seems to help.  I know it is an indication of how we have touched or been touched in deep places, or wishing that the time had been longer, but it’s kind of like the saying, “Wrinkles are the trace of where smiles have been.”  That doesn’t mean it’s going to be pretty…

We have found this year that we have a much harder time leaving PEOPLE than leaving PLACES.  When we leave a PLACE there is a sadness (and I admit that a few of us may have shed a tear when leaving the Swiss Alps).  But when we leave PEOPLE, there is a longing.

And after just 48 hours in Rwanda, we are longing for people we have already said goodbye to here.  A great gift of wrinkles I wouldn’t trade for the world.

Get out of bed, Jerusalem!

Wake up. Put your face in the sunlight.

These were the words I happened to read this morning from Isaiah, as we woke up to brilliant sunshine today in Musanze, Rwanda.

Adding to the morning glory, the daughter of our current hosts was reciting this poem to the rest of us at breakfast:

My first soccer practice was at E. Rivers Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia in 1977. I jumped out of my mom’s car and then ran pell mell down a steep, tree-lined hillside to the soccer field below. It’s a vivid memory still.

The number on my jersey that year was number 8 — and I’ve stuck with that jersey number for the last 36 years.

Imagine my joy when I saw this during a two-hour bus ride earlier this week in Rwanda:

In a way, our experience in Rwanda has so far lifted me like that long-ago hillside run. The adventure — open, unknown, raw, Glorious — has been every bit as exhilarating as the expectation of a young man’s first-ever soccer practice, on the eve of running and running and running with a sport and a great Gift for decades to come.

We’re told that the Rwandan genocide essentially touched EVERY Rwandan in some way. S and I struggle with how it’s to touch us.

Above, is a photograph taken from The Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre. Those long cement rectangles are mass graves for the remains of hundreds and hundreds of people who were killed in 1994.

Notice the young man in a white shirt, between the two images of W walking by. R was our companion during the visit, our guide for our last morning in Kigali. We learned once we arrived at the Centre that he’d lost both parents and two brothers in the genocide. In the photograph, he’s looking for their names on the Wall of Names.

So picture this: just prior to the scene pictured above, as we approached the rows and rows and rows of mass graves … one of our sons said: “What! Do we have to look at them all?!”

My first reaction was anger. Oh, the selfishness! Where is the respect, the empathy, the humility? Where is the sadness? Where is the heart that can say a thing like that?

S and I knew we’d be seeing hard things during our time in Rwanda, and we planned on letting our experiences take the lead on crafting the Message … not us. We do demand an appropriate level of respectful behavior … but in instances like the comment described above, we’ve chosen NOT to respond, and to let it go.

In the end, we asked R to tell us his story in a shaded part of the Centre’s gardens. His words were the last words any of us have spoken about the pain of the past — and the healing that goes on.

I tried to explain the Rwandan genocide to our boys in a few minutes this morning. They really tracked with the information — from colonial rule, to the creation of Tutsi and Hutu labels, to civil war, to mass murder … but they stopped me when I started talking about reconciliation and forgiveness.

“No way,” was the essence of the their response. “There’s no way everything has been forgiven.”

That conversation preceded a day-long tour of help projects for Rwanda’s most vulnerable people — many of them widows and orphans from the genocide. Our visit was organized by World Relief, an organization that connects churches with these kinds of projects around the world.

It turns out that the first man we met was able to speak to the boys’ doubts about reconciliation.

Nicholas Hitimana led us through a hillside of geraniums — not the kind of geraniums you plant in your yard, but the kind that smell divine … and fetch large profits from businesses that make things like perfume. He runs a farming cooperative that harvests and distills the plants. The cooperative is now breaking even, and there are plans to secure millions of dollars in funding over the next few years to expand production.

All of the hundreds of farmers in the collective are or were poor, and many of them are genocide widows. Nicholas introduced us to some of them in a village he founded for them. The village is called Hope.

On the outskirts of Hope as we said our goodbyes, I asked Nicholas about the work he does … why a man with multiple doctorates, a stellar resume, and a brilliant business plan is investing his expertise and the rest of his life in helping the poor.

I pass along what Nicholas said … because he also speaks of reconciliation.

Listen for the bird that starts singing during his last answer: