July 4, 2026 marked the 30th anniversary of Stephanie and my wedding. As regular readers will know, Stephanie’s style of travel is a bit different than mine. She is not a high maintenance traveler, and she’s not necessarily a package tour gal. She does, however, prefer to take typical vacation length trips. She also prefers more typical tourist destinations. When we travel together, we do it on a more moderate budget than my relatively austere solo trips.

Italy and Greece have always been on the “Stephanie approved” list of destinations. You might even say there were bucket list items for her. I knew it might be a bit expensive, and it would definitely be crowded to visit either of these places anytime near our anniversary. I was able to find reasonable flight and hotel redemptions from my credit cards, and so got the rooms and flights all paid for. We still had to eat, get around Italy, and pay admission to the sites we visited. The credit card redemptions, though, made it so this anniversary part of our trip had a price tag in the very low four digit range. If paid for in cash, it would have certainly had a five digit price tag.

In a move almost no one would find romantic, I put Stephanie on a plane in Milan after two amazing weeks in Italy, and set out on about three more weeks of solo backpacking around the former Yugoslavia. I was able to squeeze in a quick visit to the micro state of San Marino before leaving the Italian peninsula. I was also able to come to my son Andrew’s aid when he had medical and interpersonal issues while on a mission trip in Romania. So the latter part of the trip turned out to be a bit more ad hoc than even I had intended.

Because of the less-planned nature of the latter parts of the trip as well as the odd shape and layout of the Balkan countries, some of the latter pages of this trip are arranged by geographic area rather than in chronological order. Usually, I just show countries in the order that I visited them because usually it is easy to arrange the trip in both geographical and chronological order. In this case, I left and reentered countries a couple of times. Some tiny countries like the Vatican and San Marino are completely surrounded by a larger neighboring state. In those cases, there was no choice but to reenter a country I had already been in. Then, I left Sarajevo to go help Andrew and returned later, after having been to Romania and Serbia. Croatia is such a strangely shaped country that I had to pass through it to get to Bosnia from Slovenia and enter it again later to fly out of Dubrovnik.

I will place a map here, and also lay out the flow of the trip, so you can follow along in case you are confused by the chronology. Stephanie and I arrived in Rome, and spent about a week there. We took a train to Naples, another train to Venice, and another to Milan, in that order. Stephanie went home from there, and I took buses and trains to Rimini, Italy from Milan. Rimini is close to the country of San Marino. I day tripped to San Marino sandwiched between two nights I spent in Rimini. From Rimini, I took trains and buses to Ljubljana, where I based while in Slovenia. Then I took a bus to Zagreb, Croatia, another to Jajce, Bosnia, then another to Sarajevo. While in Sarajevo, I learned that Andrew needed help. I flew to Bucharest, Romania from Sarajevo where I stayed for a few days helping Andrew. He joined me from that point as we flew to Belgrade, Serbia, took a bus back to Sarajevo, then a train to Mostar, Bosnia. From Mostar, we took a bus to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where I left Andrew to fly back to DFW via Helsinki. I had a 22 hour layover in Helsinki, Finland, and then a chaotic series of flights and cancellations on the way back to Texas.

The tiles you see below reflect the countries I visited. Sometimes – as in the cases of Italy, Croatia, and Bosnia – there is a batch of a few articles and pages for that country. In most other cases, there is a single article for a city and country in which I just spent a very few days.

I am aware that most people, wives in particular, would probably criticize my staying in Europe for three more weeks traveling solo after Stephanie returned. I am ever so grateful that my beautiful wife of 30 years shared an amazing two week tour of Italy with me. I am also grateful beyond words that she has the patience, understanding, and trust to tolerate my different travel wants and styles, so as to allow me to see other parts of the world she is not interested in while I have the life and health to do so. I don’t know if she always understands all of that, but she does understand that it’s important to me, and agrees to let me do it. That’s an amazing gift. I see it as such, and I appreciate it.