Things to Do

Destinations

For more about the everyday experiences that shape these journeys, read about expat life on La Vie Overseas.

Travel notes from life abroad often begin with a single striking image, the kind you scroll back to later. This page gathers those impressions into a loose, chronological record of places where I have lived or visited, written in the plain voice of someone who wandered in rather than toured. Nothing here is a ranking or a checklist; it is more of a notebook kept between longer blog posts about moving, working, and raising a family far from home.

The destinations span Central America, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and Hawaii, which sounds like a grand itinerary but was really accumulated over years. A market in El Salvador, a trail in Guatemala, a quiet stretch of coast in Nicaragua — each entry stays short and observational. The emphasis tends to fall on local attractions, hiking, diving, and the cultural details that reward a slower pace of travel.

Some of these places were home for a season and others were only ever a stop, and the writing changes subtly between the two. Longer stays bring out the ordinary routines, the food eaten on a weekday, the way a neighborhood sounds in the early morning. Brief visits leave behind sharper, more sensory snapshots instead, captured while still slightly disoriented by a new language and unfamiliar streets.

Reading these notes is a good way to plan, but it is also a way to remember. The entries carry the texture of the rest of this blog — a wife, a husband, a household in motion, a family adjusting to life overseas. They are best read slowly, the way travel itself is best experienced, with room left over between one account and the next for your own impressions to settle in.

Travel is only one thread in a larger story of expat life, and this page deliberately sits beside the longer reflections on moving countries, careers abroad, and making a home somewhere unfamiliar. The practical advice lives in other posts; what belongs here is the sense of place. Consider it a companion piece, a shelf of travel notes that grows each time the family packs up and moves again.