2025: A Look Back

my once-in-a-lifetime moment of the year

Overall, 2025 was a very good year for us. We rang in 2025 in Vienna, Austria and rang in 2026 on our Antarctica cruise!

As family, friends, and frankly, anyone who has ever read any other post related to our travel knows, C is the travel planner. And by that I mean he is THE TRAVEL PLANNER. He does all of the research, he finds flights, he finds hotels, he finds things for us to do and see, he works out all of the logistics...you name it, he does it.  I usually have very little idea about what's going on...a happy and blissfully ignorant "travel princess" who follows him blindly because I have been so incredibly fortunate to experience beautiful places around the world as a result of his efforts. He is amazing! My contributions are usually limited to two things: providing the parameters of my restrictive schedule so he can select travel dates and sometimes choosing between two or three hotels once he has whittled down the endless options. The only exception to our dynamic is that I typically book the hotels for our Disney trips and purchase any special event tickets; C still handles all of the other details and reservations!

obviously I am Partner 2
LOL

Our two big trips in 2025 were going to Africa over the summer and going to Antarctica over winter break and I am so pleased to share that I played a very active role in the planning! I was the one who researched and booked both our safari and our Antarctica cruise! C did all of the flights and hotels for those two trips outside of what I booked, since they involved traveling to multiple countries before and afterwards. I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about everything working out with the safari and the Antarctica cruise since I was the one who booked them and handled the communication about them for 17 months and 22 months respectively! Fortunately, the two companies we chose handled all logistics, down to the most minute detail, with extreme precision and we were able to visit our sixth and seventh continent and check that off our very lengthy travel bucket list! Having now been to all seven continents, I am even more in awe of my mom, who accomplished this back in 2014, with 3 of the 7 (Europe, Antarctica, and South America) being done with women's travel groups as opposed to family - meaning that for all intents and purposes, she did these three continents on her own. She wanted to go, so she went. She wasn't going to let anything stop her from getting to all seven. She was, and will always be, an inspiration to me. I often feel her presence, and as I wrote about back in July, I felt her acutely when we were in Kenya, but she was definitely with me in Antarctica, too.

In addition to our two big trips (Antarctica offers some of the most beautiful scenery we ever enjoyed and our safari was beyond life-changing!), we went to WDW twice (March and August), Disneyland twice (June and September), on a Disney cruise for spring break, as well as New Jersey, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Tampa, several trips to Canada, and some day trips to visit family! Plus I did a there-and-back-in-one-day trip to WDW with one of my best friends! It was a busy travel year for sure! New countries in 2025 were Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, and Argentina, and we returned to Germany and Austria (and obviously Canada and the U.S.).

I like to compile our travel data each year and when C and I were going through our 2025 calendars, it was pretty surprising to see our final numbers!

• total of 69 hotel nights (this number includes nights on a cruise ship)
• total of 25 flights (6 of which were red-eye flights)
• total of 9 nights spent in Canada
• 2 nights spent driving through the night to Canada

...which is a total of 86 nights not at home! 86 nights! That's so crazy!

2026 is looking pretty good in terms of upcoming trips! We've got four Disney Cruises scheduled this year, some quick weekend trips planned, and a long trip to Asia mapped out for the summer!

2025 marked 29 years of me being a vegetarian and 30 years of me living in the U.S. I also got my first new car since buying my Honda Pilot in November 2007! Most importantly, we celebrated three full years of having Avalanche in our lives! The joy he's brought to our lives means everything to us!

I was going to try and select a favorite picture from each month of 2025, but some months didn't really have any noteworthy ones and other months had several, so I just chose my favorites from the year!

Here's to a happy and healthy 2026!

Happy Tails to you!

Summer Adventure 2025: The Wrap Up

I decided to compile some stats about our summer trip! I've done this for a few of our other trip as well and it's always fun to be able to look back on these details!

For those interested, previous posts like this can be found here:

2021 - our month-long cross country road trip

2023 - our trip to South America

2024 - our trip to Australia

Here are the Summer 2025 numbers!

• number of countries: 7 (USA, Canada, Germany, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Austria...and I could say the number is 8 because we went to the Kenya-Tanzania border, but I'm not counting it because we didn't really visit Tanzania!)

• number of continents: 4 (North America, Europe, Africa, Asia)

• number of commercial flights: 5

• number of commercial airlines: 3 (Air Canada, Lufthansa, Emirates)

• number of charter flights: 4

• number of commercial hotel nights: 15

• number of commercial hotel chains: 7 (Hilton Garden Inn, Best Western, J.W.Marriott, Four Points by Sheraton, Conrad, Anantara, Novotel)

• number of safari property nights: 7

• number of nights on red-eye flights: 2 (Toronto-Frankfurt, Nairobi-Dubai)

• furthest distance from Avalanche: 6,900 miles

• total commercial flying distance: approximately 16,500 miles (plus about 500 miles between the four safari properties)

• total walking distance: approximately 249,000 steps / 93 miles

and finally...

• I slept in four different countries on the last four nights of summer break (Hungary, Austria, Canada, America) before returning to work last Monday!

This trip was life-changing and I know when I get to the end of my life, the time we spent in Kenya will go down as one of the best adventures we ever experienced!

We're already well into booking next summer's travel, with three of our four major flights purchased and several hotel properties chosen. When I shared this with a colleague at work who also likes to travel, she was surprised to hear we were buying plane tickets for next summer while we were in Kenya because she hadn't yet decided on where to go! I told her C and I have our travel plans mapped out several years ahead of time (just the travel for school breaks, not weekend trips and such!) and thankfully, she did not think we were insane.

This tweet is hilarious because it is so painfully accurate! As someone who travels quite a bit, I always feel like I need an engineering degree to figure out how to operate hotel showers! I'd also extend this sentiment to hotel light switches; the first five minutes in any hotel room are always spent trying to figure out which switch operates which fixture or lamp! Surely it does not need to be so complicated! LOL!

Happy Tails to you!

Neuschwanstein Castle

When we were deciding how to get to Nairobi, we had a choice in terms of cities from which we could fly direct: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Frankfurt. Since we'd already been to the first four cities on the list over the course of our travels (although I wouldn't hesitate to return to any of them!), we chose Frankfurt, and not just because it would be a new city for us.

Back in December, we went to Germany and Austria over winter break with the intention to visit Neuschwanstein Castle, but we were unable to get tour tickets despite trying for months and then we arrived, the viewing bridge was closed! I was so disappointed! However, when we discovered that Frankfurt offers direct flights to Nairobi AND was only a four-hour drive to Neuschwanstein Castle, it was a no-brainer to fly from Toronto to Frankfurt!

Neuschwanstein Castle is said to be the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland (and perhaps Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World as well, and while I've not had a ton of luck in finding a reliable source on that, it certainly makes sense!), so being lovers of Disney history, a visit here was a must! Whenever we can work in something Disney-related to our travels, we do - like visiting Walt Disney's birthplace in Chicago and his hometown of Marceline, Missouri when we went on our month-long road trip as part of our quest to visit all 50 states in 2021!

On Friday, we rented a car at the airport, drove to Fussen, and spent one night at the Best Western Plus right in town. Our tour of the castle was on Saturday morning at 11:45, so we got up early in order to get over to the castle, take the shuttle up from the parking area, and walk up to the bridge to take pics. The timing worked out beautifully, because by the time out tour ended, it was pretty overcast, so I'm so glad we did the viewing bridge before our tour! Most people walk out onto the bridge, take pictures, and leave, but we decided to hike a little bit past the bridge to a higher viewing point and it was well worth it!

two happy Disney nerds

the town of Fussen
is right out of a fairy tale

the hotel had art of the castle everywhere,
including the floor of the lobby

the surrounding area is absolutely stunning

that's the viewing bridge (as seen from the castle)

a zoomed in pic of the viewing bridge

that's the viewing bridge from the
second viewing point that we hiked to

a zoomed in pic of the viewing bridge
from the higher spot we went to

The tour inside the castle was so great! While unfortunately, no photos are allowed inside, our guide was this amazing, witty gentleman and made the tour a complete delight!

Renting the car and driving four hours each way from Frankfurt allowed us to enjoy the beautiful countryside and check an important item off our Disney bucket list!

Here are some of my favorite pics of this gorgeous castle!

perfection!

This was the pic I took of it last December and it was equally beautiful in the snow!

Happy Tails to you!