• Princess Ruby

    A Slovak-Philippine Wedding: Part 1

    This is the first of a 3-part series on our wedding on May 28th, 2016, in Sarasota, FL. I met Ruby in October 2013, at our workplace in Jacksonville, FL. Ruby impressed me with her knowledge and love of travel, and I impressed Ruby by giving her free food for two weeks! So it was a win-win right from the start. I proposed in April 2015, in a real Slovakian castle (full story of the proposal here), and we decided to hold our wedding on Memorial Day weekend the following year, to give people an extra day off so they wouldn’t have to rush back home to work. So without…

  • How To Choose Travel Destinations

    How to choose your travel destination

    If you guys don’t know by now, traveling is one key component in our relationship (one of our tenets is that we need to travel to learn and experience more, and life is a journey that we all should make use of). In this article (a few in a series), we try to take you in to our decision making process on traveling. One of the most recent questions we got was: How do you choose your travel destinations? Good question. There’s a few answers: Cheap airfare/mistake fares Mistake and cheap fares are our main driver for traveling somewhere. When we see something that is within our comfortable price range…

  • English Gardens, Munich, Germany

    A Philippine Slovak Wedding in America

    If you are a returning reader to our blog, you will know that the partnership behind this blog is getting married Saturday, May 28, in Sarasota, FL. If you’re a new reader and you didn’t know this, well, now you know as well! I proposed to Ruby in April 2014 in a historic Slovak castle, and it has taken 13 months to get to this point. I’m going to lay out just what type of planning went into this event, and the level of detail for weddings that I wasn’t aware even existed. We dubbed this a Philippine Slovak Wedding in America: a union of three (unlikely) countries and continents…

  • Waiting for Alaska

    Two Weddings and an Alaska Honeymoon

    This is a story of how we decided to have two weddings and an Alaska honeymoon. Two weeks ago, we received some bad news. Ruby’s mom in the Philippines was denied a visa to attend Ruby’s wedding in the United States. The embassy officer didn’t even check her documents, which included confirmations from the priest and the church, just asked her 3 brief questions and denied her visa. We were all shocked and disappointed, because when Ruby’s aunt was denied a visa just a few days after that, it meant that Ruby wouldn’t have anybody from her family at her own wedding, boohoo. We discussed our options and thought about…

  • Is Graceland Worth visiting?

    Elvis Presley was born in 1935 and died in 1977 at the age of 42.  In between, he became the biggest selling artist of all-time with the biggest television broadcast in history (1.5 billion people; yes, billion), and basically the biggest pop culture icon there ever was. After his death, his private mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, the beautifully named Graceland, was shrewdly turned by his ex-wife Priscilla Presley into one of the biggest tourist attractions in the United States. It’s an impressive operation, and since we saw it first-hand today, my memories of it are pretty fresh. Is Graceland Worth Visiting? When you arrive, you have to pay a $10…