Bringing Down the White Picket Fence
A Couple's Quest to Live Globally
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A few years ago we took the ultimate sampler tour of the United States, adding 9,000 miles to our new Jeep Wrangler in 30 days. Our coast-to-coast adventure included mostly sleepless nights in the great outdoors, with glorious hotel stays in the big cities in between. Since it was impossible to fight the ultimate collapse into the lush linens and fluffy pillows of a comfy hotel bed, fatigue often limited our sightseeing…. Read More
We are thrilled to announce that we are now officially Starwood Preferred Platinum guests! We reached our goal on December 31st, and we are looking forward to our first year of shiny, platinum SPG benefits. So where did we get our final stays in the Countdown to SPG Platinum? The answer is: New York City and New Orleans. Two incredibly unique cities. Two separate blog posts. It is not unusual for us to… Read More
It’s an annual thing now. Every fall we head down to Carolina to see a Gamecock football game. Sometimes we fly into Charlotte, other times, Greenville, depending on how convenient Southwest Airlines can make it for us. Then we rent a car and make the hour or so drive to Columbia. But this year, we changed it up a little. This time we flew into Charleston to meet up with one of our… Read More
Until this past weekend, I’d never been to Princeton. I feel I only have the SAT’s to blame for this… Since I never quite fulfilled my quest for the perfect score with the Educational Testing Service, the terms “Ivy League” were just as foreign to me as the vocabulary words that plagued my young teenage mind in cold classrooms on early Saturday mornings at Manasquan High School. As a result, places like… Read More
After Paris, Paul and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary in the city of Aix-en-Provence. After a week of doing the lazy and relaxing “eat, sleep, pool-shuffle” in the south of France, we returned home to New Jersey only to pack up our Jeep and set off on a road trip to Canada. We were only home one whole week! While we always remain fully equipped to blog during our travels, we don’t always… Read More
I’ll never forget the first time we rented an apartment for a month in Paris. In the weeks and days before the trip, I envisioned waking up every morning to the Eiffel Tower out my window and smooth jazz serenading me to sleep each night (think opening track to Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris”). Then the taxi dropped us off on a tiny side street leading to our temporary home in the 1st Arrondissement (Les Halles)… Read More
Shh…Paul is sleeping. This gives me the perfect opportunity to showcase his latest photos. While I may be the storyteller of our journeys, he’s the talent behind capturing the beauty in all of the places we visit. Tonight, his photos tell the story of a mid-afternoon stroll through one of our favorite cities in the world. This is Paris on a summer day. © Paul and Michelle Shappirio and Bringing Down the White… Read More
As much as we love Paris, the city life gets a tad exhausting, with crowds flocking to the city in the heat of the summer. We love the ease of train travel in Europe and find it a pleasure to whisk ourselves away to small towns and the French countryside whenever possible. In all of our trips to Paris, we had yet to make a visit to Giverny, France, the site of Monet’s exquisite… Read More
This is just one of the bustling cafes we spotted on our recent “Paris Walks” tour of the Marais. These highly informative and interesting tours are two hours long and just 12 Euros per person! Just find the tour that interests you on their website (http://www.paris-walks.com) and meet at the designated location. The tour guides speak English and are tremendously knowledgable about the city. We’ve taken Hemingway’s Paris and The Marais Circuit 1 and… Read More
Aviation is an amazing thing. In the span of about seven hours, I went from having this very expensive $12 glass of fine Newark airport wine… to this… Here, you can buy two bottles of wine at the local supermarket for about 4 Euros a bottle. With the current exchange rate, that equals less than $5 a bottle, which makes that aforementioned glass of Newark airport wine a huge rip off. Plus, the 4… Read More
Bringing Down the White Picket Fence 