Leave It To Mel Travel

Some updates:

Corfu, Greece

I woke up in time to watch us arrive and berth next to the pier here – a beautiful setting and our last day in Greece, a nation we have come to love.

Corfu is the northern-most part of Greece, an island to boot, a mere three mile straight separating it from the mainland [...]

This morning we transited the Corinth canal aboard the Seabourn Spirit.  What an incredible experience!  We had crossed this canal by road when we travelled the Peloponnesian Peninsula last year. Then, we had seen a small sailboat which seemed to fill the canal. Today, our ship totally filled it [...]

Back to travel posts. This was written Monday June 25th:

As I compose this post Mel and I are flying back to South Lake Tahoe from Norfolk, VA where we participated in our friend Lisa’s wedding. We didn’t make our air reservations till late and ended up booking an award on American Airlines. [...]

Halong Bay is in North Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin near Haiphong. We travelled by train from Hanoi to Haiphong, and then by hydrofoil to the island of Cat Ba where we stayed a few nights.

One day (Dec 24th, 2005 to be exact) we and 4 fellow travellers boarded a small junk [...]

Mel and I found ourselves in Athens last summer with a long week on our hands before embarking on our Yachts of Seabourn cruise to Istanbul (see post below). We spent a little time looking into going to one or more of the Greek islands. This was July, and the ferries were [...]

For our honeymoon we booked a one-week cruise aboard Seabourn, a fabulous cruise line with small ships (‘yachts’ as Seabourn prefers to say) carrying up to 208 passengers. We had 180 on ours, the Seabourn Spirit. We were thinking of booking a three-week Venice to Istanbul itinerary, but being first-time cruisers, were afraid [...]

Ran into our friend Doyle at the hardware store yesterday. Mel told him about starting her own travel agency. We started talking travel and places we like to go and have been. Doyle and his girlfriend went to Cabo San Lucas recently and stayed at an all-inclusive time-share place for two weeks. [...]

Mel and I have always been independent travelers. We are also foodies. We were not drawn toward all-inclusive resorts. We feared being trapped at a place with bad food and nowhere to go.

One December after teaching Fall quarter I was fried and asked Mel (the great researcher) to find us a trip. [...]

This place is awesome! Located in the central party of Turkey (nearest big town is Kayseri), this region is dominated by a large volcano. The rock formations from its ash deposits are soft, and nature erodes them into fantastic shapes, many of them like big mushrooms.

People work the rock too. The region [...]

Mel and I have a real passion for travel – we travel when we can, and we read and talk about it all the time. We (especially Mel) research extensively and find places we want to visit, and accomodations we dream of staying at.

In our travels we meet locals and fellow travellers and we [...]