Austin TX: When your time in the city has limits

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In my nearly three decades of business travel, I’ve spent hundreds of nights all across Texas (I submit exhibit A as proof: Houston, McAllen, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Midland, Amarillo, Lubbock, Hereford) but this was (oddly and sadly) only my second time to Austin and Melissa’s first. We had limited time to visit this state capitol, music town, home of the University of Texas Longhorns and Live music show, Austin City Limits. We started with watching the Longhorns playing the OU Sooners in the Big 12 Championship game at our hotel and then struck out to find some music…

Best Portugal Food Experiences

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By Melissa First off, I’d like to start by saying these choices are not happy accidents. I do copious research before embarking on a trip. Why? One of great joys of travel is the opportunity to experience the food of another culture and no matter where you are in the world finding the best a country has to offer culinarily takes a little leg work. The internet is now a plethora of information and, while I take every opinion with a grain of salt, there are many websites that make finding the best meal options relatively easy. I also don’t…

Top 10 Portugal tips and experiences

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Now that we’ve been back in the routine of our daily lives, we’ve been reflecting upon our trip and thinking about our favorite parts of our trip to Portugal. The following is our list of our favorite experiences while there and some tips for those traveling there. 1. Music. We didn’t quite expect this. Particularly in Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto, music is everywhere. We’d read about the Fado bars in Lisbon and definitely wanted to check them out but the music isn’t limited to those establishments. The street music on the Rua das Floras in Porto and in Lisbon, the…

Halloween comes to Denver, 19th century style

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This weekend, we enjoyed one of our favorite annual traditions which was a trip to the Molly Brown House museum in Denver for the Victorian House of Horrors.   We stumbled upon this event by accident and through a referral from one of Melissa’s coworkers about ten years ago and have been going ever since. In the two weekends leading up to the actual weekend of or before Halloween, Historic Denver presents this event at the Molly Brown House (of unsinkable, in reference to her Titanic survival, fame). There are about 5-6 readings in various rooms of the house performed…

Cascais: a great way to end a holiday

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We ended two terrific weeks in Portugal in the beach town of Cascais (pronounced: Kish-kaysh). This town has a lot going for it: close proximity to Lisbon, beautiful beaches to its west and along its promenades, a lovely historic old town and like the rest of Portugal, great food and people. We didn’t do much sight seeing here, mostly just kicked back and prepped for our return home. I will let the photographs describe this great seaside town. Adeus Cascais and Portugal, for now.

The Sintra National Palace, I mean who doesn’t have a Julius Caesar room?

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Since we still had our aforementioned car, we skipped our train back to Lisbon and Cascais and detoured en route to Sintra. Sintra sits at the foot of the Natural Park of Sintra-Cascais. We had limited time as we wanted to get to the beach and Cascais so we strolled about a bit, had a lunch and hit the Royal Palace. Tip #1: Sintra is very touristy. Not that other places we went were not, but this place is built for tourists. Tip #2: While all of Portugal seems to be paved with cobblestone sidewalks, these ones seemed particularly steep…

Evora. More than just a bone church.

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Nestled among rolling golden hills of cattle ranches, vineyards and cork trees sits Evora. This area is known to have been inhabited since BC. 4-3,000 BC to be exact… Since we had a car (unplanned, since the trains were on strike the day we needed to make it to Evora) we visited Anta Grande do Zambujeiro. This is an ancient funerary outside of Evora in the middle of the aforementioned cattle ranch land. It makes one wonder, how the heck did they move those stones? Hmmm… Fast forward to the Romans, Evora was a major city on the trade route…