Self-Guided Tour

During my one-week visit to the archipelago of Malta in February 2020, I realized that because there is so much to see and do there, it’s important for independent travelers to plan ahead and be efficient with their time. Despite its small size, this country has much to offer.

As a result of its strategic location, Malta has been controlled by or fought over by most Mediterranean powers during the past 3,000 years, among them the Carthaginians, Romans, Normans, Castilians and Abbasids.

Years ago, a colleague in an Italian-language class highly recommended travel in the south of Italy. I finally made the trip, Jan. 1-8, 2020, because I’d found a $2,700 round-trip business-class flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt to Bari in Puglia (Apulia), in Italy’s southeast.

The flight was pleasant, especially the leg from Frankfurt, Germany, when the skies cleared and we had gorgeous views of the snow-covered Alps and numerous Croatian islands surrounded by a bright blue Adriatic. Even crew members were snapping photos like mad.

My wife, Marina, and I took a 2-week vacation to Tuscany in April 2018 and did the whole trip without a car. We wanted to avoid Italian roads and drivers and parking hassles in medieval towns, so we decided to "go green" with public transportation, using Italy's excellent train and bus system supplemented by the occasional taxi.

We started to prepare a year in advance, planning to use airline rewards for our round-trip flights to Rome. We wanted to stay in monasteries or convents for a more authentically Italian experience.

For our spring 2016 travels, we set aside five weeks in March and April. In light of increasing reports of security problems in Europe, we looked south to Argentina and Chile. 

We’re independent travelers, so before leaving home we booked only our flights to Buenos Aires and our return flights from Santiago back to Florida, together with a 3-night hotel stay in Buenos Aires. Along the way, we waited until the last minute to make travel decisions in order to give ourselves maximum flexibility, booking flights and accommodations on the Internet according to our whims. 

My month-long trip to Greece, June 6-July 6, 2015, began with a short visit to Sparta, located in the southeast of the Peloponnese peninsula. The bus ride there from Athens took less than 3½ hours and cost less than $20 (in euros).

My wife, Mary, and I traveled to Germany in September 2015, as we had been invited — as family — to attend the wedding of our former exchange student. The bride lived in Vechta, about an hour’s drive southwest of Bremen, so we booked a flight to Amsterdam, Netherlands, with the idea of (after a short adventure) renting a car and driving to Germany.

I deliberately scheduled seven days of unplanned time before we were expected at the bride’s home, with the idea that, once in Europe, we would go to a “last-minute-flight window” and fly to wherever. 

After losing my sister Ellen in 2014, I began to feel an urgency to find my Romanian family roots. 

When my father was alive, I (like most kids) was never motivated to question our family’s origins. Now that I was the last remaining member of my family, I wanted to find a genetic link, especially in Romania.