Mountains!

When I was a 6 years old, my parents took me on a trip to Sofia by car. We lived in Varna, at the seaside, back then, which is 420 km away, so that we had to cross the entire country to get to the capital. In Bulgaria, this means traveling all along the mountain Stara Planina (meaning Old Mountain). I was not in school yet, but traveling through the beautiful, wild and lonely countryside made me feel older. I dreamt about visiting those places with my future schoolmates, on my own, without my parents. This is my first memory about the mountains. And this is how I fell in love with them.

Later on, when I joined school we used to travel to the mountains at least once a year, usually in wintertime. Those journeys definitely inspired me for the rest of the year. Even back then, as a child. I love the way I get lost in the mountains wildness, its shadow greenness, how little and unimportant I become among endless hills, how gratuitous language and speech get on the narrow paths. Since that time, I have dreamt to visit the Himalaya. To breath in its dry odour, and look out from the roof of the World.

The first time I had the chance to fulfil this wish of mine, was last November. In the last two weeks of my thirtiest year...

Why this blog?

Lately, I was appointed a listening ear to a long travel story of one of my friends, about how her honey moon turned into a disaster, leaving everyone involved permanently frustrated and with a negative impact on their willingness to travel abroad (again) in the next future. Somewhere between the crappy buffet food and the lazy hotel personnel, I asked myself a question: Why are there so many unhappy travelers around? Is it really missing luck or bad service, every time!?

Me and my husband travel quite a lot to many different destinations, and journey types as well. We are good to go on a sailing trip, a cultural excursion, or a mountain bike tour. We have stayed in self-service ski chalets, best luxury hotels, campings, all-inclusive resorts, cottages, tents, very old sailing yachts and many more. Of course, sometimes there have been terrible surprises, suspicious food, and people, but we have always traveled happily anyway.

To reveal the mystery of happy traveling, I invite you to discuss with me its principles. What are the small rules that can save families from divorce (indeed 50% of separations take place after a common travel trip), rescue the value for money, give meaning to the CO2 wastage, and simply turn us into happy travelers?