After our full day of hiking in Aoraki / Mount Cook, we were ready for… more hiking! We spent 2 days in Wanaka exhausting ourselves in pursuit of gorgeous views.

Crisis Averted
After our full day of hiking in Aoraki / Mount Cook, we were ready for… more hiking! We spent 2 days in Wanaka exhausting ourselves in pursuit of gorgeous views.
After a wonderful day in Lake Tekapo, we continued our New Zealand adventure by driving to Twizel. This is a small town a little under an hour away from Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park. We had planned to spend both Wednesday and Thursday hiking at Mt. Cook, but unfortunately on Wednesday it was raining heavily. We opted to spend our rainy day taking a “foodie tour” of Twizel and condense our hiking plans into one day on Thursday.
Our long-postponed (thanks, COVID!) trip has finally begun. We left on Saturday and, after 3 flights and a major time change, arrived in Christchurch on Monday.
So far, I haven’t done a single blog post on a country we’ve lived in because condensing 1-3 months into a single blog post felt intimidating. But today I decided to finally go for it and at least share part of our adventures in Romania with you all! Romania was the very first country we “based” ourselves in while teaching with VIPKID. We stayed in the capital, Bucharest, from October to December 2018. It was great stepping stone for us because it has a relatively low cost of living, high-speed internet, pretty scenery (I wanted autumn leaves & snowy winters!), and an airport with tons of cheap flights. We spent a lot of time teaching, but also did some sight-seeing around Bucharest and Transylvania. I’m saving Bucharest for a second post because we did actually visit Transylvania twice (once in October by ourselves, and once in November with my parents), so this post is pretty photo-heavy already! Anyways – on to our cheap European fairytale!
Tommy and I spent a couple weeks back in the Midwest while we were in the process of switching continents (we are now back in Asia!), so blogging once again took a break. Whoops! But I am still dedicated to catching up on each and every place we visited this past year, so I return with some photos from one of our longest-ago trips – Paris, back in late September/early October 2018!
As Tommy can attest to, you cannot take an art history major to Paris without them going absolutely bananas. Over the course of 6 days, we went to 5 art museums and a whole bunch of chapels and other historic buildings that were either full of art or fell into the category of architecture-as-art. (I also spent a lot of time eating cheese plates, drinking cheap wine, and talking about how romantic everything was. I love France!)