What the Blog?

Not every traveling experience is perfect, and traveling with young kids can be especially challenging. Stuttgart brought out more than the usual challenges for me. Although we spent 3 days in the city, we could have spent 1 and returned home via the comfortable train. That's because my biggest takeaway was that hotels in Stuttgart are expensive! I looked for a while before settling on the Hotel Unger - mostly for location, breakfast, and the four-star rating. At 161 euros / night, it wasn't exactly cheap. Although the staff and breakfast were great, it was more in line with a 2-star Ibis hotel in any other city - older interior, poor ventilation in the rooms (and importantly, no air conditioning until the outside temp was 24C. I was melting at night), and near a bar which got very noisy between 12-4 am. Our experience at the Ibis Styles in Nice (still my favorite) far outranked this one, at nearly half the cost - in Nice, no less! Our friends stayed at the Schlossgarten ...

One of the first things I do when I move somewhere, is find a gym. Even though I've never been one to make friends with people I meet through the gym, it somehow feels familiar, and helps me get into my familiar routine of being able to regularly work out, no matter the weather. When I moved to San Francisco 14 years ago, as an AmeriCorps volunteer on an extremely tight budget, I did monthly trials for nearly every gym in the city (this could warrant its own blog post). No matter the neighborhood - if I could take a bus there, I would try it out for a month. It worked for a while, until I eventually convinced my boyfriend (now husband) to sponsor membership to a place near my apartment until I could afford it myself. What a guy. Flash forward to moving to Mainz, and I learned my company had a fitness reimbursement plan and discounts already available, with Fitness First . There was one within running / bus distance to our flat, so I tried it out and quickly signed a contract. ...