MacsTravel Blog

Where to start? We started talking about a university friends reunion in Italy to celebrate over 40 years of friendship and the 60th birthdays for most of our group a few years back. Serious planning got underway last summer. The consensus was that we wanted to rent a villa in Tuscany for a week, and…

At one point or another on this trip, all ten of us squeezed in a visit to Firenze (Florence). Whereas most of the group fit this in before our villa week (more on that week in the next blog post), Sarah, Ian, Robin and I went to Florence immediately after, which I must say produced…

One of the wonderful features of Tuscany are the numerous, impossibly picturesque small towns which pepper the countryside. This short post covers some of the ones explored by various members of our group during our villa week, in addition to the larger towns of San Gigmanano and Siena. Greve in Chianti One of the larger…

On our last two trips to Tuscany we had a chance to visit the wonderful city of Siena. In August. In high 30 temps. With 10,000 other tourists. So it was a joy to have a chance to return on a beautiful sunny day in May with our friends, shepherded once again by Fernanda. Parking…

Over the course of our week long stay at our villa in Tuscany we had plans to visit a few hill towns as a group. First up on the list was the hill town of San Gimignano. For Robin and me, this was our first visit to this spot even though we had seen the…

Lucca feels like a bit of an oasis after the overtly touristy vibe of visiting Pisa. Not to say that there aren’t tourists here (after all, we were in Lucca for four nights!) but it just seems to have a more relaxed and settled feel than we experienced in Pisa. Lucca is best known for…

We woke up Tuesday morning to threats of torrential rain in the forecast which put our plans to visit Pisa on our way to Lucca (where we had plans to stay for a few days) in some doubt. However the rain held off, which made our drive out of Monterosso a little less harrowing and…

We had a lovely few days in The Cinque Terre with friends Lisa, Pete, Scot and Anne. The weather cooperated and staying in one of the villages (Monterosso) gave us a sense of the place in the early mornings and evenings that you miss if you are day-tripping in on trains. We saw the five…

We zipped to Florence from Bologna and picked up our friends Lisa and Pete. This involved a considerable amount of packing and repacking the “mid”-sized MG hatchback, but once we managed to fit everyone and everything in, we headed west to the Ligurian coast and Monterosso al Mare. We were using Monterosso as a base…

“La Dotta, la Grassa, la Rossa” -motto of the city of Bologna In English, “the learned, the fat, and the red”, this motto sums up this quirky and charming city, the capital of Emilia Romagna. It also fits as a motto for our reunion with our university friends in Tuscany, but that’s a tale for…

Before we get to “fair Verona” you have to get into “fair Verona”, which involves an inordinate number of multi laned roundabouts. We were staying in the historic Castelvecchio Apartments in the Palazzo Canosso, which is a building dating from the 1500’s, and which sit right next to the Castelvecchio (old castle) complex on the…

We had to be out of our accommodations fairly early on our last day in Riva del Garda, so we decided to take advantage of the lovely weather and find a bench along the waterfront where we could people watch, smell the blossoms, take in the lake view and pretend to read on our e-readers.…

We have always been interested in exploring the Italian Lake District, and decided on Lake Garda for this trip. Lake Garda sits just to the west of Verona and runs into the solid and imposing mass of the Dolomite mountains to the north. We chose the slower route north from Modena, and were thankful for…

We arrived at our B&B in Modena wrung out from a long day of travel: a flight from Toronto to Zurich followed by a delayed connection to Florence where we picked up our rental car and drove the hour and a half north on the toll highway (a bargain at 10€) into Emilia Romagna, the…

We spent the bulk of our time on this trip to Spain staying in a one bedroom apartment at the Las Mimosas Beach Club in Mijas Costa, located between Malaga and Marbella along the Costa del Sol. This section of the coast is a favourite vacation haunt for Brits (the majority of visitors) and other…

Our four weeks in Spain overlapped a little with our friends Mary Lynn and Garth’s stay here, so we decided to take a couple of days to do a little touring with them. Our first day saw us visit the white hill towns of Setinel de Bodegas and Ronda. We decided to stop in Setinel…

The wonderful Robin MacPherson turned 60 (!) on this vacation, and we wanted to find a special spot to celebrate. Our original thought was to stay somewhere near the seaside town of Nerja, a place that friends Darren and Truus had recommended and which is often featured in guidebooks for this area of Spain. Nerja…

While much of this trip to Spain was to be dedicated to relaxing on the Costa del Sol, we did want to explore a few places that we had missed during last year’s visit to Andalucia. High on that list was the city of Cordoba. Cordoba’s roots in Roman and Moorish history are as deep…

Our four week winter trip to Spain was a relatively late decision. We have planned a big trip to Italy in May 2025 with friends we’ve known since university days, but a series of stressful events led us to book four weeks on the Costa del Sol in Spain. This trip was for relaxing, we…

We woke up to beautiful sunshine on our last full day in Portugal. After breakfast we checked out and drove down to the trailhead for the Percurso dos Sete Vales Suspensos, the so-called Seven Hanging Valleys Trail. If you google “Hiking in the Algarve” this trail typically comes up at or near the top of…

When we woke up it was pouring rain. It rained solidly until noon, let up for a bit, and then, as we pulled into the town of Lagos, it came down in buckets. Just as we thought we might head back to Ferragudo, the rain stopped. Over the next five hours the skies alternated between…

Booking a spot in the off-season in Portugal’s famous Algarve was trickier than one might think. Our visit here was in the final stretch of a six week trip, and we really wanted something that would allow for some downtime and some coastal hiking. I had read a number of blogs about hiking in the…

Lisbon (Lisboa) is a city that feels lived in and authentically local. Despite the influx of visitors and its growing popularity with cruise boats, it has a gritty beauty rather than a glossy sheen of tourist polish. We had four nights and three full days in Lisbon and used one for a day trip to…

We took one day while in Lisbon for a trip to Sintra, the nearby hill town that was the traditional escape for Portugal’s aristocracy and which is the location of the famous, fabulously weird Pena Palace. We jumped in on a small eight person tour which gave us access to a stop at the most…

We began our trip to Spain with an overnight in Malaga in early February. As many visitors to Andalusia do, we were using Malaga as a launch point to other places, in our case Sevilla. We went down to Malaga’s famous shopping and walking street, the Calle Marques de Larios that evening to take in…

Although we had decided to set up a base in each place we stayed in Spain (Sevilla, Granada, Ronda, Cadiz and Malaga for a minimum of four day at a time we worked in some side trips and day trips along the way. I already wrote about our hill town detours on our way from…

We are big fans of guidebooks when trip planning, and the Rick Steves series of travel books are typically some of the best. They are heavy on information and logistics and light on images and pictures, so they tend to be more comprehensive than many others. So it was a little odd to leaf through…

Jerez de La Fontera is a town of a couple of hundred thousand people which lies 30 minutes to the north of Cadiz. It’s primarily famous for sherry and horses. We decided to make a day trip up the road for the horses. La Fundación Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre (The Royal Andalusian School…

Based on the title, some of you might be under the impression that this entry is about Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters. You are wrong. First off, in the Disney version of the story, Anastasia and Drizella are the stepsisters. They didn’t even have names in the 1812 Grimm version. Secondly, the names in the title are…

Earlier in the week I stopped by the local tourist information office in Ronda to see if they had any suggestions as to some day hikes that we might explore on our stay here. The tourist agent smiled, pulled out a map and began energetically drawing loops and lines on the margins of the map,…

The trip from Granada to Ronda was surprisingly seamless: a two hour bus ride to Malaga, a painless pick up of our rental car, a decent lunch (!) in the Malaga train station where the car rental place is, followed by an hour and a half drive into the mountains. We arrived in Ronda around…

Our four day visit to Granada finished in sunshine as we had two glorious days of blue skies and temperatures in the mid to high teens. It was great weather for walking and exploring the city. Winters in Granada can be notoriously fickle with temperatures plunging below zero on occasion. We are only 30 minutes…

Th Alhambra is the greatest remaining Moorish palace and was the last stronghold of Moorish civilization in Spain. It is the primary attraction in Granada, with more than 8000 visitors a day. Reservations are required well in advance and if you are ever going to splurge for a small group tour, this is the place…

We took the bus from Sevilla to Granada, 25€ for the two of us. The ride involved a few detours due to construction but the highways were blissfully free of farm equipment. Our apartment was downtown in the historic centre, and we decided on taking the #33 bus from the main station into the core,…

We had two days with some rain, a rarity in this city. It was certainly welcomed by the farmers who have been facing historic drought in Spain. One rainy afternoon I took a solo trip to the Museo de Belles Artes, a former home for the friars of the Order of Mercy which is now…

Sevilla is blessed by access to incredible food: fresh fruit and vegetables as well as high quality meat and fish are readily available. The supermarkets are well organized and well stocked, and the neighborhood stores and daily markets provide access to accessible, fresh food as well. If you live in the city centre it is…

One of the charming aspects of Sevilla are the distinctive barios (neighbourhoods) that are within a short walk of the historic centre. Over the course of a few days we had the great pleasure of exploring a variety of areas with Darren and Truus, pausing in plazas (squares) big and small, wandering through markets, churches…

Truus and Darren’s apartment is located on Calle Torneo alongside the canal, which features a lovely, long multipurpose pathway filled with walkers, cyclists and runners, and a waterway full of rowers and paddlers from the nearby rowing club as well as teams from across Europe that come here to train. The apartment backs onto the…

The morning went smoothly. We woke up in our tiny Ibis Budget hotel room, squeezed our way into the hallway and made our way downstairs where we lingered over a shockingly good breakfast before collecting our luggage and making our way to the bus station (“Estacion de autobuses!”). Feeling somewhat restored by a decent sleep…

It has been an unseasonably mild winter so far in Ontario. With the exception of the bitter cold snap over the weekend of our daughter Taylor’s wedding to Mike, it’s been mostly above zero temperatures with little in the way of snowfall. And it feels like we haven’t seen the sun in months. We were…

We took almost three weeks to wind our way out to British Columbia. We took four days to come home. Initially we had thought we might explore a few of the northern states, perhaps linger in Chicago for a few days. However we had been travelling for 7 weeks, and that length of time, combined…

We returned to a very different Kelowna than the one we had left. The fires were under control in the Okanagan, evacuation orders had been lifted. While there were still a few smoky moments the skies were mainly clear. We had a relaxing couple of days while the girls got ready to head back to…

The Sea to Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler is breathtakingly beautiful with dramatic sea views to the left and the towering Coastal Mountains to the right. Allegedly. We drove it through rain, mist and clouds, arriving at our hotel in Whistler in need of showers and the comforts of sleeping off the ground. The…

Highway 4, which bisects the Big Island and links the East Coast to the West Coast, has been a construction nightmare for years. The current focus is on the stretch near Cathedral Grove, and while this is an alternating one lane section on weekends, which might lead to a 40 minute wait, during the week…

Tofino is one of those rare tourism touchstones that meets expectations. And that is no small feat. We turned north from our overnight stop near Nanaimo and headed for Highway 4, a road which has been alternately closed, partially closed, or down to single lane traffic for most of the summer due to wildfires (surprise),…

It was a while until we saw blue sky. The drive from Kelowna was a hazy one, even as we climbed high into the the Cascades on our way to Vancouver. These mountains are deceptively high: many reach over 10,000 feet but they don’t overpower the way the Rockies do in places. The descent from…

We arrived to gathering plumes from the hills over West Kelowna. We were preparing to meet up with Robin’s brother and family before heading off to explore Vancouver Island together. We had driven through haze since our time in Golden, and had heard that the Okanagan Valley was particularly smoky due to some new wildfire…

As we left Jasper the wildfire smoke from the previous day had cleared, and we were treated to a beautiful day for driving back down the Icefields Parkway towards Lake Louise and a scheduled visit to Morraine Lake. Robin took over the driving so I could have a turn on the parkway as a passenger…

Wow. Banff and Jasper National Parks are linked by the incredible Icefields Parkway, which runs for over 230km through the parks from Lake Louise. It is an absolutely spectacular drive, with lots of spots to pull over and explore, ranging from roadside lookouts to multi-hour hikes. We were heading to Jasper for three nights of…

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. Ralph Waldo Emerson We had Calgary circled on our calendar. Glenn and Jo Larson had very generously invited us to stay with them at their places in Calgary and Canmore and we were really looking forward to…