Rome, Italy (part 2)

As I mentioned in the previous post, we spent  most of our time in Rome just hanging out and enjoying. We went to our favorite restaurants (like Taverna La Scala below) and also discovered some new ones.

Rome, Italy (part 1)

Rome is a city we've spent a lot of time in over the last almost-two-decades. It was a city Doug spent a month in when he was 19; he fell in love with it then, and I was utterly enchanted by it the first time we visited together. Rome is a sort of enigma -- it's not the cleanest or most beautiful city in the world, nor is it set in a stunning location. It can be noisy and chaotic, and hotter than hell in the summertime, but it always has an indefinable sort of charm.

And of course, there's all the incredible Roman ruins everywhere.

Bucharest, Romania

Short post here! From Mfuwe, Zambia, we flew to Lusaka, where we spent the night before catching a flight to London early the next morning. The flight was ten hours long, but it went very smoothly, and we made it to our hotel at London Heathrow with no difficulty.  And of course, our arrival in London meant that we've now visited seven continents in 2013.

South Luangwa (part 2)

In the previous post, I wrote about the house we stayed in and shared some pictures of many of the animals we saw. Here are even more pictures from our week in South Luangwa.

South Luangwa, Zambia (part 1)

Our third and final safari stop was in an area we'd never visited before: South Luangwa National Park in eastern Zambia. We kept hearing great things about it everywhere we went in southern Africa, including the fact that this area has the largest concentration of leopards of any place in the world. Since it had been nearly a decade since we'd seen leopards in the wild, we were really excited about that.

We flew from Livingstone to Lusaka and then on to Mfuwe on small prop planes.