While you can crack the safari nut countless ways, we decided to save Serengeti National Park for last, spending our final four nights...

From Tarangire, we’d head northwest to our middle stop: Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Most famous for Ngorongoro Crater (actually a...

Moving east to west from Arusha, you hit Tarangire National Park first, making it a common sense first stop on our three-part safari. ...

Need to provide some full disclosure on our Tanzanian safari plans. Actually, we need to provide some full disclosure on how we paid for...

Arusha's Twiga Brewery - The First Craft Tanzania Beer It’s been a recurring theme in our stories, but we’ll reiterate here: Chipp’s...

Tanzania City Life After getting settled into our Arusha hotel and taking a much-needed nap, we headed out to A) explore the city, and B)...

We loved Turkey. We may have ended up there largely due to COVID restrictions, but what an awesome time. Stir crazy is stir crazy,...

Datca Vineyards and Wines After our time in Urla, we wanted to stay on the Turkish wine train. Fortunately, we’d have an opportunity just...

Life along the Marmaris Promenade We had a blast in Izmir - but we kept moving the whole time. With an African safari on the horizon, we...

Urlice Vineyards Turns out Turkey makes wine - really good wine. But, for a variety of reasons, people outside of Turkey don’t know much...

Visiting Izmir, Turkey Similar to our time in Istanbul, Izmir just offered too many cool experiences to not include a catch-all post...

Personal elevators are cool. Personal elevators up the side of a cliff are cooler. Formerly personal elevators up the side of a cliff...

Whether you go for religious, historical, or just aesthetic reasons, if you find yourself in western Turkey, make the trip to Ephesus....

Eating in Izmir - Kokorec and Other Adventures Anytime you visit a new town – especially a seaside one in another country – trying the...

As with all family reunions, eventually our time in Ukraine had to come to an end. While certainly better than five-year gaps between...

Khortitsa Cossacks - somewhat like dachas - have made plenty of appearances in Western popular culture, but most Americans (Chipp...

To many Westerners, Soviet dachas maintain a near mythical aura following a Cold War’s worth of media and pop culture references. From...

Georgian Food After spending three months with the Marines living outside Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (plus another seven months...

If it’s not clear already, our lives largely revolved around food during our time in Zap. Family, sure. Booze, you bet. But food...

As a Marine Corps officer commissioned out of the Naval Academy, Chipp basically kicked off his service in the deep end: What semester do...