One of the coolest things about living here is the ease with which you can travel to other fun & exotic locations. For the same price and time commitment as a trip from Chicago to Denver, we can be in Hong Kong. A flight like one from Chicago to Los Angeles could land us in a tropical resort in Thailand. We're really trying to take full advantage of this amazing perk.

    Sydney, Australia

Since the long journey to Australia is a bit shorter from here (only 13 hours), we decided to hit Sydney for Chinese New Year. What an amazing city! We loved everything about it, from the beaches to the wineries. People were friendly and American-sized (meaning, I could actually buy clothing in my size there!) and we'd love to go back.

                                                   Bondi Beach

                              Kanga and little Roo in her pouch.

    Bintan, Indonesia

October holiday fell right after we'd moved from Shanghai to Nanjing, and we needed an easy, quick, relaxing break. We found the perfect answer in a little Indonesian island about an hour away from Singapore by ferry.

Our first Banyan Tree experience did not disappoint. This boutique resort offered two important things: quiet and privacy. After a few years of China, we were really looking for some elbow-room without traffic noise.

The bungalow next door, which looked just like ours but was a lot easier to photograph. If you look closely, you can see a pretty big lizard sleeping on one of the house's stilts. He looked a lot bigger before I shrank the photo ;)

    India

Darrell has always dreamed of visiting India. So, last year, when I came across a bicycling and camel-riding tour, I put on a brave face and signed us up. India wasn't nearly as scary as I'd always feared, but it was crazy. We saw unbelievable sites and did crazy things. It stretched us and our ideas quite a bit more than our typical vacations. Most of the photos we took don't shrink well, so I've just included a few (out of hundreds we took!) here.

Although camel-riding sounds fun and exotic, after a few hours, the novelty wears off and it's just plain uncomfortable! That's the look of pain on our faces.. 

At the Taj Mahal. Up close, the Taj Mahal is even more beautiful than it appears in pictures. Truly awe-inspring. However, because you have to take off your shoes before entering, and because millions of people have entered, the whole place smells like feet. Nasty.

                           A beautiful candid shot that Darrell snapped of a local woman.

This elephant, the slowest one in the fleet, took us and our friends, Tony and Solveig, up a long hill. We actually got passed by other elephants! And, as if this whole situation wasn't weird enough, our "driver" chatted away on his mobile phone en route.

We drew huge crowds every where we went. Every time we stopped for a break, huge crowds of men gathered. You'll notice there are no women in the crowd: they were always busy working. But the men didn't seem to have much to do anywhere we went.

This was our camel. He had long "eye brows," that, for some strange reason, reminded me of my grandfather. So, we called him "Pop."

On our first day out, I was the ultimate tourist, paying far too much to have a young girl paint my hand with henna. After it dried, it went from black to light orange. It lasted the entire trip.

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