Honeymooning Around the Earth in an Amphibious Jeep

My heroes are up there with the Amelia Earharts, Aloha Wonderwells, Ernest Hemingways, and the Jacques Cousteaus of this world; names that conjure up the romance of adventure and inspire us to take risks in an age where travel has been made too easy. But in all my travel reading, I’d never heard of the…

A Time Traveler’s Guide to Amsterdam

Most people know Amsterdam as the city of legal weed and the Red Light district. But that’s not all – or the most interesting – that Amsterdam has to offer. Amsterdam’s historic city center houses many old buildings – most of which have been around for many centuries – rebuilt and repurposed to fit the needs and preferences of each…

She’s been Drawing her Road Trips in Sketchbooks for 20 Years

There’s something about art and travel that goes so well together, something that’s more romantic about taking out a moleskin notebook and drawing the view than simply snapping it with your phone. Of course, it helps if you’re a gifted artist like Chandler O’Leary who has been recording her travels in sketchbooks for over 20 years. The Washington-based illustrator…

5 Off-Beat Reasons to do a Weekend in Belgium

MessyNessyChic and the team (of two) took a winter weekend break from Paris and hit the road for Belgium, visiting Bruges, followed by Antwerp. And since we had such an awesome time, we thought we might share a few travel notes from our off-beat finds… 1. ‘Secret Bruges’ Bruges had me fooled. I was waiting…

30 Years Ago, You Could Buy a Lifetime, Unlimited First-class Travel Pass with American Airlines. Now They’re Regretting It.

The Golden Ticket worth every penny… Imagine without hesitating, you could fly to Paris, just to catch the latest exhibition at the Grand Palais, pick up a friend who needed a lift from Milan, maybe swing by the Greek Islands for dinner and be back home the next morning in time for breakfast. In 1981,…

The World’s First Solar Powered Train is a 70-Year-Old Vintage Charmer

You might have expected Japan’s next bullet train or even the Eurostar to have figured out solar-powered rail travel first, but instead, on a disused old railway track along the sandy coast of New South Wales, Australia, a little 1940s “engine that could” has become the world’s first solar-powered train. Chugging up and down Byron…

A Compendium of Vintage Postcards from the Great American Road Trip

The annual weekends of sparklers, parades and sending your neighbours smoke signals is soon upon us, and there’s no other way I wish I could be spending the 4th of July than on the great American open road, visiting the weirdest and kitschiest roadside attractions America has to offer… However, since I’m a (half) American in…

B&B of the Month: The Wander Inn

They’re the Renaissance women of the wild, wild west, and today Amie and Jolie Sikes are giving Messy Nessy a taste of their little haven in Round Top, Texas: The Wander Inn. It’s the stuff of southern fairytales, a bed & breakfast where the longhorns graze and the fireflies glow, where folks “can see the…

So in Albania, the Number of Abandoned Bunkers is Kind of a Problem

Once upon a time, during the Cold War, Albania’s paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha forced his country to build 700,000 bunkers, one for every four citizens. Today, the country is still trying to figure out what to do with his concrete mushrooms that have become synonymous with the landscape. A number of them have been creatively…

The Vault

A Greek Poet’s Abandoned Summer Refuge

Deep in the Peloponnese hills of Monemvansia, past a little turquoise olive grove, I found a forgotten place. As the sun sets over the hills, following the sound of trickling water, I come upon a hidden Spring below the road in the shade of the trees. It lies at the entrance to the remains of…

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