Category: Travel

Balkans, Foreign Service, Peace Corps, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VIII: Skopje & Demir Kapija, 20 Years Later

by pennypostcard • January 24, 2023 • 0 Comments

After returning from our 10-day, whirlwind 2,000 kilometer road trip around the former Yugoslavia last summer, we only had one full day remaining in Macedonia before our flight home to Virginia. My husband V and I decided it made no sense to return the rental car to the airport, only to turn around and take a taxi back to the airport for our early morning flight less than 36 hours later. Instead we skipped going to the airport twice and paying for taxis in favor of just keeping the car and leveraging it for a short visit to my former Peace Corps homestay family.

They lived a couple of hours south of the capital city, Skopje, in the town of Demir Kapija. We knew paying them a weekday morning visit was probably not ideal; we were on vacation but that didn’t mean anyone else was. Fortunately, (a) it’s Macedonia and (b) we had already been in touch with them to align schedules. We certainly couldn’t visit everyone we wanted on this trip because of time constraints; for the first time, I never made it to the far east, back to the site where I had served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. But as they had once opened their home to me, I did not want to leave without seeing them. It seemed apropos that 20 years after first coming to Macedonia I was returning to where it all began.

Balkans, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VII: Sarajevo to Skopje via Kruševac

by pennypostcard • January 10, 2023 • 2 Comments

The sunny August morning we left Sarajevo, it was harder than I thought it would be to find our way out of town. I don’t remember exactly why; some combination of narrow streets and Google Maps trying to lead me onto a pedestrian footpath might have had something to do with the smell of burning clutch and frayed nerves in the morning.

V, A and I worked together and managed to make a series of navigational decisions that – while not winning any efficiency awards – also didn’t result in any fender benders. Thankfully at least, when hearing how early we wanted to get on the road, our AirBnB host decided he didn’t need to do our checkout in-person after all and allowed us to lock the apartment and hide the key in an agreed-upon location. We eventually hit the highway east and later, due south for the last few hundred miles of our road trip.

Balkans, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part VI: Dubrovnik to Sarajevo via Mostar

by pennypostcard • January 7, 2023 • 1 Comment

The morning we departed Croatia, we said thank you to the beach house for the wonderful memories. We were sad to leave the coast, and drove alongside it until we began to ascend into the mountains. We had taken the road to Dubrovnik’s north rather than to the south, in order to stop for lunch in Mostar – a city none of us had visited – on our way to Sarajevo. The total distance would be around 165 miles; however, drive time minus stops would be close to 4.5 hours given the mountain roads.

Not long into our journey, before we had even crossed the Croatia-Bosnia border, we saw smoke off in the distance. Initially we didn’t think much of it. But as we continued, it became darker and more ominous, and soon after we ran into a forest-fire related roadblock and detour. The detour wasn’t well-explained by the gruff policeman, and took us a fair distance off the Google Maps path we had launched before leaving beach house wifi – slightly alarming since we were navigating without live internet. However, A saved the day with an offline Snapchat map, something I hadn’t even known existed since I haven’t opened my Snapchat app for eight years. (I know.)

After we jumped that hurdle, we then had a slightly not-so-hilarious situation with one of us, who shall remain unnamed, needing a bathroom where none existed within binocular range of the Bosnian border. After idling in the weeds and hoping inquisitive soldiers wouldn’t appear at any moment and ask us what the hell we were up to, we made it across afterwards without further incident.

Balkans, Peace Corps, Travel

Balkan Summer Trip 2022, Part V: Dubrovnik Old Town

by pennypostcard • January 5, 2023 • 0 Comments

On our second full day at the beach house, we woke up early, took a quick swim, and ate breakfast on the patio in preparation to go to old town. Initially the plan was for me to drive us the 12 minutes to the old quarter and find a place to park, but as I was dealing with some extreme vertigo out of the blue while getting ready, V and A – after lingering a while in the hopes I wouldn’t be delayed – were eventually convinced to take an Uber there without me. I had been unsuccessful in averting my head-spinning situation, and ended up vomiting several times, taking a Dramamine, and lying down. My head felt like a yo-yo on the end of a string, and as I lay still and miserable I had to keep one foot on the floor and a hand on the wall to avoid zero gravity sensations. But as is typical and hard to explain, my stomach did not hurt at all. After about a 90-minute nap, I reawoke in the silence of the empty house to the waves crashing outside. I sat up cautiously and ate some fake Pringles. The dizziness had subsided and it was as if it had never happened. I was going to old town.

Balkans, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part IV: Višegrad to Dubrovnik

by pennypostcard • January 4, 2023 • 0 Comments

It took us nearly five hours to drive the last 150 miles of winding mountain roads between Višegrad, Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Croatian coast. I rarely drove faster than 45 mph simply because the speed limit and conditions didn’t allow it, and I likely would have made even myself carsick. V and A were excellent passengers. V only complained once, and he was probably right; it really can be alarming to be a passenger and have no control as you roll through narrow tunnels black as night, uphill past slow trucks that drift into your lane, and around blind corners, every once in a while a bit too fast even with a driver as pokey as myself. We crossed the Croatian border without incident and the vast jewel of the Adriatic lay before us.

Balkans, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part III: Kragujevac to Višegrad

by pennypostcard • January 3, 2023 • 2 Comments

The town where V’s brother V2 lives, Kragujevac, is Serbia’s fourth-largest city with just under 175,000 inhabitants. Situated about an hour and a half south of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, the region is proud of the more affordable living and rural beauty it offers while still boasting plenty of nearby shopping and amenities commensurate with the big city. V2 and his wife D – whose family hails at least three generations back from Kragujevac – made it a point to show us around, welcoming us to town with a dinner out that included a large group of their extended friends and family.

Balkans, Peace Corps, Travel

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part II: Skopje to Kragujevac

by pennypostcard • January 2, 2023 • 0 Comments

For the first five days of my trip to the Balkans, my husband V, my stepdaughter A, and I stayed in Macedonia’s capital city, Skopje, at his childhood home. We enjoyed quality time with his mom, and took over the upstairs portion of her home. V’s niece, the eldest of his brother’s six children, usually lived upstairs alone, but was away on extended holiday in Greece with a boyfriend.

We went shopping, hung out in cafes, visited with old friends, and spent time in the city center and the Turkish part of town known as Stara Čaršija, or the Old Bazaar. Sometimes A hung out with us, and sometimes she hung out with friends she’d made on her many prior family visits, including five years before while doing a summer internship at the Peace Corps Skopje office. During those days we also finalized the tentative plans we’d been discussing to rent a car for a 10-day road trip around Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Croatia. Our itinerary was still a little flexible, but the purpose of the trip was twofold: to visit V’s brother who had settled in Kragujevac, Serbia with his wife and younger children, and to treat A to a couple of countries she hadn’t yet seen, albeit not for as long a duration as we would have liked.

Balkans, Travel, U.S.

Balkan Summer 2022 Trip, Part I: Heading to Macedonia

by pennypostcard • January 1, 2023 • 2 Comments

At the end of July, I went to an Incubus show a couple of hours south of DC by myself. V and his daughters had already left a couple of weeks prior for the Balkans, and had been enjoying traveling together in Macedonia and Greece while I stayed home alone in Virginia, worked, and held down the fort. I would travel to Macedonia myself for a few weeks the day after the show. I was going to miss my 19-year old stepdaughter D, who had to return to the States before my arrival in Europe to prepare for her sophomore year in college in Tennessee. But V and my 23-year old stepdaughter A, who is in graduate school in North Carolina, would be awaiting my arrival to spend some family time with V’s relatives in Macedonia and Serbia, and the three of us were planning a road trip to cities across the former Yugoslavia, including Sarajevo and the Croatian coast.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Road Trips 2022

by pennypostcard • December 31, 2022 • 0 Comments

I’m not yet ready to publish a reflection on 2022 as a whole, but as we get ready to welcome 2023, I added up my 2022 solo/sole driver road trip stats and was amazed.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Go West, Part II

by pennypostcard • July 2, 2022 • 4 Comments

Last August, I left Ciudad Juárez on vacation and drove across the deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada to visit my family in California for the first time in about two years, logging 1,279 solo miles in just under 36 total hours. Five weeks ago in late May, I also set off west; the same destination in mind, but this time from Virginia. It was the biggest solo road trip I’d ever embarked upon, and I’d done so with less than 12 hours’ planning, deciding around 8pm on the Friday evening preceding Memorial Day weekend to leave Saturday morning and leverage three days off in a row to get out to California where I could continue remote working as I do here at home.

I was in a state of acute grief at having learned I’d lost an old friend and ex-boyfriend, T, to suicide and that – unbeknownst to me until late April – his family had buried him privately in our hometown in January. I was distracted, upset, unproductive. I needed answers, I needed to say goodbye, I needed to see my family.

I let my mom know I was coming. In the Foreign Service lifestyle, this would not always be possible. Fortunately, we are still in a pandemic and remote working up to 80% of the time, we are on a domestic tour, my car had recently been serviced, and I was on top of my laundry and bills. A few thousand miles could not faze me. I made a packing list and executed it. Barely four days later, I rolled up in front of my mom’s house with an extra 2,723 miles on the Volkswagen’s odometer and dirt from 13 different states on the undercarriage.

Foreign Service, Health, Travel, U.S.

No Nepenthe

by pennypostcard • June 22, 2022 • 1 Comment

I technically started my job in the Office of Children’s Issues (CI) – part of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Office of Overseas Citizen Services at the State Department – back in early March after my home leave ended. The position is as a country officer working on international parental child abduction (IPCA) cases; CI functions as the U.S. Central Authority for the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

In a nutshell, the convention is a treaty whereby the U.S. and other countries agree that matters of custody and visitation of minor children between parents should be decided in countries where children are habitually resident, without one parent removing the child to a different country in order to prevent or limit access by the other. In other words, we want to avoid or remedy situations where one parent abducts their child to (incoming) or from (outgoing) the United States.

More on that work at a future date, but for the time being, suffice it to say between training and onboarding, the time it took to receive a regional portfolio assignment, and various technical difficulties with getting up and running with the database access I needed to begin actually doing my job, the first several weeks weren’t as productive on my part as I’d expected. I felt guilty my colleagues were so busy while I largely spent March and April waiting to start working. I felt like I burned up a lot of time doing online webinars and bugging IT folks, and walking around my neighborhood at lunchtime only to return to an empty inbox.

Foreign Service, Travel, U.S.

Not So Far Away: Last Hurrah to the Sunshine State

by pennypostcard • April 22, 2022 • 2 Comments

The first week of March, I drove from our new home in Virginia down to Florida for my dear friend T’s baby shower. I’d made my plans in January upon receiving her invitation, and they hadn’t included flying; the freedom of road tripping in my trusty Volkswagen felt safer and more socially distant as the Omicron variant bled across the country. I also wanted to do some IKEA shopping, and perhaps stop in NC to see my matron of honor J and my stepdaughter A. It would be my last week of home leave, and thus my last immediate chance to get away and clear my mind before starting a new period of professional focus.

Foreign Service, Health, Leadership & Work Culture, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Year in Review: 2021 Blog Stats and Recap + Eight Years in Blogging

by pennypostcard • April 13, 2022 • 1 Comment

The post with a year-in-review and blog stats is usually the post I publish in January of a new calendar year. However, that didn’t happen this year for a few reasons. First and foremost, we packed out our house and departed our third diplomatic assignment before mid-January, so I was crazy busy with work and life transitions. Second, there were a lot of things in 2021 I hadn’t processed adequately by New Year’s or in a superficial way felt I didn’t want to reflect on or remember. And third, 2021 marked the first year the blog did not receive more page views than the year before. Every year since I started writing in 2014, the number of views and visitors have each steadily risen, making it something fun to announce the following year.

In January writing this post out of a sense of forced obligation – particularly at a time when I was honestly pretty down on a lot of aspects of this career as well as struggling with health and moving – didn’t seem like fun. So I decided to write about whatever was on my mind as it came to me, and shunt a blog stats post from last year off until a future date when I actually felt like doing it. And as the blog celebrates eight years today since its very first post, today seemed apropos.

Foreign Service, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Virginia or Bust: Tennessee, Snow, and Home at Last

by pennypostcard • January 22, 2022 • 1 Comment

The day we rolled into Tennessee was day three of our road trip from Ciudad Juárez to northern Virginia. As we checked into our Knoxville hotel and unloaded the cars for a third night in a row, we’d crossed nearly 1,500 miles (or three-quarters) of the trip and expected to make it to northern Virginia the following day.

I’d been living in the mostly dry warmth of the desert sufficiently long to use my weather app infrequently, although our last week in Juárez had been marked by infrequent sprinkles. But because Knoxville’s temps were dropping below freezing, we glanced at the forecast and realized we might need to slow our roll.

Foreign Service, Mexico, Travel, U.S.

Virginia or Bust: Ciudad Juárez Across Texas to Arkansas

by pennypostcard • January 17, 2022 • 3 Comments

We departed Post Ciudad Juárez this past Thursday and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border for the last time into El Paso, Texas, officially ending my third Foreign Service tour.

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