Posted before departure — check back after the trip for what actually happened! In just a few days, my boyfriend and I are picking up a camper van and setting off to circle Iceland’s Ring Road counter-clockwise over 9 days. This post is our full itinerary as it stands right now — the routes, the stops, and the four big-ticket experiences we built the whole trip around. Kuku Campervan in Iceland If you’re planning your own Iceland road trip, consider this your starting templat

Sunset in Marigot St. Martin opened with a catamaran day, which might be the best possible way to start a beach trip — sailing out along the coast, stopping to swim and snorkel off small offshore islands, with rum drinks doing the rounds the whole way. It set the tone for the rest of the week: slow mornings, beach hopping, and dinners that ran late. Our home base days settled into a rhythm fast — pool mornings, then the beach, then sunset drinks with the classic island move:

Back in Paris after Belgium, the second half of the trip turned out to be even more packed than the first. Palace of Versailles Chapel Versailles got a full day on its own, and it needs one. The Hall of Mirrors is the room everyone comes for, and it does not disappoint — seventeen mirrored arches reflecting the gardens outside, gold from floor to ceiling. But the King’s and Queen’s apartments were just as striking, and the Hall of Battles, lined with massive history paintings

Partway through the Paris leg of the trip, we broke off for a few days in Belgium — and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of the whole itinerary. Bruges Main Street Bruges is the kind of town that looks staged, except it isn’t. Canals thread through the entire city center, lined with stepped Gothic rooflines that look almost too perfect to be real. We took a boat tour along the canals, which ended up being the best way to see the city — low to the water, slipping

Paris does not ease you in. Within the first couple of days we’d walked the Seine, wandered the Tuileries Garden, and stood at the obelisk in Place de la Concorde — and somehow it still felt like we’d barely started. Eiffel Tower in evening The real welcome, though, was an evening picnic at the Eiffel Tower. We staked out a spot on the grass at Champ de Mars with pastries and a bottle of champagne and just watched the tower shift through every version of itself — flat in the

I spent 10 months living in Kihei, so this isn’t quite a typical vacation recap — it’s the island the way I actually got to know it, mixed in with the classic must-dos that are famous for a reason. Home Base: Kihei Kihei is sunny almost year-round (it sits in Maui’s rain shadow, so while the north side is getting soaked, Kihei is usually clear), and it’s central enough to reach almost anywhere on the island within an hour. My go-to beach here isn’t one of the big resort strip

From Rome, we took the train down to Pompeii — the ancient Roman city buried, and remarkably preserved, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Walking the original stone streets, past frozen plaster casts of the residents caught in the eruption, is one of those experiences that’s hard to describe until you’re standing in it. Bring shade and water — the site is enormous and almost entirely exposed, and it gets brutally hot with very little shelter. Pompeii Ruins We finish

A quick 45-minute flight took us from Nice to Rome, and from there, a 2-mile walk with full backpacks to our hostel — not glamorous, but a good way to see the city start to unfold around you. Day one was for the essentials: the Trevi Fountain, packed shoulder to shoulder in the afternoon heat, and dinner at Piazza Santi Apostoli with complimentary prosecco and pasta that, honestly, wasn’t the best we’ve had in Italy. One thing worth knowing before you sit down anywhere in Rom

Nice hooks you immediately. The charming streets, the markets, the cafés, the pasta places tucked into every corner, and that impossibly blue water along the Promenade — it’s easy to see why people fall in love with this city in a day. Boardwalk of Nice Villefranche-sur-Mer was our first day trip, reached by train in under 20 minutes. It’s a tiny town, but every street feels like a postcard — we spent the morning wandering the narrow lanes before landing at a café overlooking