We took a MyDayTrip [go to MyDayTrip.com] to Skopje, North Macedonia from Thessaloniki, Greece. MyDayTrip is an amazing service that provides a car and driver to take you from Point A to Point B, and provides a list of up to 6 tourist destinations that you can stop at en route. They operate in many …
Moldova [and Romania en route]
We took another MyDayTrip from Brasov to Chisinau, our 4th route with MyDayTrip. The drive from Brasov to Chisinau was long – approximately six hours, but we didn’t want to miss out on going to Moldova, and we would have wasted a lot of time if we’d had to drive back to Bucharest to fly. …
Brasov, Romania
We wanted to see Brasov, Romania as it is was near some of the castles that are supposed to be the inspiration for Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, and is the heart of that region of Romania. We took our 3rd MyDayTrips route, and had selected two castles to see en route from Bucharest and Brasov. …
Bucharest
We stayed at the JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel [on points] which was beautiful and amazing. It was near the Palace of Parliament. To be honest, I was floored by Bucharest’s scale. Everything was bigger and grander than I expected. The scale of the city was off the charts, which had been part of Ceausescu’s …
Thessaloniki
We had not originally planned to go to Thessaloniki, but consider our visit there serendipity. When we shifted our flight to Athens, we needed to find the best way to get to Skopje, which was our next target city. While we could have flown from Athens to Skopje, there were no direct flights at the time …
Bulgaria
We took a MyDayTrips car service from Skopje, North Macedonia to Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the second route we’d done with MyDayTrips so we were feeling more confident with the experience. MyDayTrips provides a car and driver to take you from Point A to Point B, and allows you to select a few tourist destinations …
HOW to Plan Your Balkan Itinerary
We decided we wanted to visit Bulgaria and Romania, then stretched the itinerary West hit North Macedonia, and East to Moldova [the least visited country in Europe according to numerous sources, so of course we wanted to go!]. We thought we’d use Bucharest as our entry/exit point as we could book with airline points, but …
Why Travel to the Balkans
Why the Balkans? In all honesty, why not? We want to go everywhere and see everything, and we hadn’t yet been to the Balkans. Also, we had visited the Baltics a few years earlier and loved that region, and we wanted to continue exploring Eastern Europe. Now having been there, our top reasons to explore …
Plan like a Pro [travel planning!]
There are a lot of moving parts in trip planning, especially when there are multiple people and if you are planning for multiple locations or countries. Here are some of our best recommendations for laying out and executing your tour plan. As you can see, much of the HOW needs to be done before you …
Daytrip from Baku – Gobustan, Mud Volcanoes and Fire Temple
As fascinating as we found Baku with contrasting quaint streets and shiny modern architecture, we were excited to take a city break to the outskirts of the capital. Because Tauni & I made a pact not to drive on this trip (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia roads–it’s a jungle out there), we once again signed up for …