Welcome!  We are Mary and Lis and we love to travel.  A while back we decided to start a small travel agency. Turns out we don’t love trying to be travel agents as much as we thought, but the attempt left us with something we never would have done on our own – a travel blog. This started out as a travel agency service / marketing tool – before a major trip, we would send out a newsletter to our (tens of) subscribers, letting them know that we were travelling soon (usually sailing, as in the beginning we were specializing in cruises) and would be “live blogging” the trip. We thought people would like this, as we loved it when anyone reported live from their cruise in the forums on cruisecritic.com, and that it would keep us in their minds and drum up some business.

People did enjoy the vicarious travel , but it never drummed up anything other than conversation. However, we found that we loved doing it – because it was fun to know that people were “travelling” along with us, and because it was fun to have such a detailed record of our travels; it’s just not the same when you wait until you get home and then try to write up a post or a review. It’s the immediacy of “while you’re there” that makes it fun. This web site is the home of our “live blog” trips. Here is where we will post “live” when we are on a trip, and here is where you can find all of our older trips. We’ve also collected some of our “live blog” trips in an eBook series called Travel With Us. We’ve cleaned things up a little bit for publishing in this form, but not a lot – we didn’t want to lose the “right there on the boat” feeling of the live blog by being too prissy about fixing things. Because of our agreement with Amazon, we can’t include those books on the website, so in order to read those, you will need to go through Amazon. They are very reasonably priced, but if you are an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow them for free (and ironically we earn more money if you borrow the book than if you buy it.) We also occasionally offer the books for free and will do our best to post here when we do that. We’d love it if we could make some money off this – who doesn’t have that dream? But we’re not rich yet. In 2014 our Amazon “winnings” totalled $6.68.

One of the things I learned a long time ago is that if you want something, it’s actually a good idea to ask for it, and we would love you to review our books, if you are so inclined. The more reviews we get, the more people will be able to find our books. We are even quite enamored of the one-star review we recieved on our Queen Mary book. We love how thoroughly the reviewer read the book – and how much she disliked the two main characters… us!  So please, if you are at all inclined to write a review, we would be most grateful.

Thanks for visiting and travelling with us!

Lis (aka ES Jupan)