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Welcome to MartSmart Travel — and a word on why this site exists.

Who We Are

For most of our lives together, my late wife and I were not travel bloggers in any conventional sense. We were not twenty-five years old, living out of a backpack, chasing the cheapest hostel on the continent. We were older — considerably older — and we had been doing this for a very long time. She passed away not long ago. This site is, in many ways, her memorial — a record of the places we discovered together, and a continuation of the conviction we shared: that travel, done with curiosity and patience, is one of the finest educations life has to offer.

For most of my working life, I was a business executive. I traveled frequently, but always on someone else’s schedule, to someone else’s destinations, for someone else’s purposes. When that chapter closed, my late wife and I made a decision: we would travel on our own terms, at our own pace, and with one overriding principle — we would not skim.

That meant we never arrived somewhere on a Tuesday and left on a Thursday. We stayed for weeks. We ate where the locals ate. We learned enough of the language to be polite — and occasionally to be funny. We read the history before we went and read it again while we were there.

We have stood on Omaha Beach and felt it in our bones. We have walked the Champs-Élysées at Christmas. We have watched horses race bareback around a medieval piazza in Siena and understood, finally, what the word spectacle actually means.

We started sharing these experiences through a small booklet — Eight Unlikely Destinations You’ll Remember for a Lifetime — and the response told us there was an audience for travel writing that treats the reader as an intelligent adult.

This site is the expansion of that idea.

Where Would You Like to Go?

We have organized our destination guides by region. Click the area that interests you and you will find everything we have published there — destination guides, practical tips, and a few opinions we did not bother to soften.

New here? Start with our most popular piece: “Palio di Siena — One Insane Horse Race” →

How We Prepare for a Trip

Over the years, we have watched fellow travelers wander past extraordinary things without the slightest idea of what they were looking at. A concrete bunker on a Normandy hillside is just a concrete bunker — unless you know what happened there on the morning of June 6, 1944. Then it stops you cold.

Preparation is not a chore. It is the first chapter of the trip.

Before we go anywhere, we ask ourselves four questions. We offer them to you as well:

1. Have you read enough to know what you’re looking at? History books, travel essays, even a well-researched novel set in your destination will transform what you see. A ruin becomes a story. A landscape becomes a battlefield, a trading route, a pilgrimage. We will always recommend reading in our destination guides.
2. Do you have a plan — but not too rigid a one? Book the lodging. Know the opening hours of the sites that matter most. But leave room. Some of our best experiences were entirely unplanned: a conversation with a local, a side street that turned out to be remarkable, a restaurant with no English menu that turned out to be the finest meal of the trip.
3. Can you manage a few phrases in the local language? You do not need to be fluent. You need to be able to say good morning, thank you, excuse me, do you speak English, and — critically — I would like the wine list. The effort is noticed and appreciated everywhere we have been. It opens doors.
4. Do you have local currency in your pocket when you land? One day I will tell you the story of why this question is on our list. For now, take it on faith: have some.

If you can answer yes to all four, you are ready. Let’s go.

Stay in Touch

We publish new destination guides, travel tips and the occasional strong opinion on a regular basis. If you would like to know when something new appears — and receive our original booklet, Eight Unlikely Destinations You’ll Remember for a Lifetime, as our way of saying thank you — leave us your email address below.

— The MartSmart Travel Team