WILLIAM & DEBORAH HILLYARDWILLIAM & DEBORAH HILLYARD

Travel


Firstly; do you really want to see our travel pictures?  If you do, please feel free. 

We take several vacations each year; some are just a few days and some are for several weeks.  We love to travel, particularly in the U.S. and Canada, as we can do "road trips" here which we both enjoy.  Generally, we stay in mid-priced hotels, often chains like Best Western, Holiday Inn and Comfort Suites.  As we tend to spend very little time in the rooms, and do not need much in the way of hotel facilities, these serve admirably.  They also tend to have refrigerators and microwaves in the room, and provide free internet access all of which are very useful.  The US vacations and day trips are recorded state-by-state under "Road Trips" on the left. 

While away, we make a point of trying to visit any local lighthouses.  Most are not open to visitors at all, or have separate visitor centers, and a few are in private ownership.  Still, it is fun trying to get the photographs.  We add only lighthouses we have seen and photographed ourselves, though we do occasionally add third party pictures, which are duly noted as such, for particularly hard to reach lighthouses or for a historical perspective. 

We took our very first cruise in 2007.  It was around the Mediterranean for 12 days with Deborah's parents.  We flew into Barcelona and joined the ship there, returning to New York from the same port after traveling through France, Italy, Corsica, Morocco and Gibraltar. 

In August, 2011, we fulfilled a long-term ambition to visit Alaska, and have repeated the experience on several occasions since
.  These were all 14 day cruises starting and finishing in Seattle, WA.  Every place was a wonderful experience, but our favorites were Sitka and Homer, though I am very partial to Anchorage.  Showing my city-boy heritage. 

We were all interested in visiting Greenland and Iceland, so in 2013, we managed a 17 day trip visiting Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Norway on a cruise across the North Atlantic.  They were all spectacular places in their own ways, as I hope the pictures show.  We were unfortunate in not being able to land in Greenland due to the weather.  So in 2014, we spent nearly a week in Copenhagen, Denmark, before embarking on an 18 days cruise to Norway, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, where we spent 3 days in Reykjavik, two different towns in Greenland, and various places in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in Canada before ending up in New York City.  It was quite a trip; nearly four weeks away from home, but we did finally get to visit Greenland.  In 2016, we embarked on a magnificent 35 day cruise from Boston across the North Atlantic to Rotterdam and back.  While we had already visited many of the places on our itinerary, there were a number of new places; for example, Alesund and Eidfjord in Norway, Belfast and the Isle of Man in the U.K., Dublin in Ireland and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.  In any event, we could never tire of places like Greenland and Iceland.  These three trips are amalgamated onto one set of "North Atlantic" images comprising all the places we visited on all three trips. 

In 2015, we took a two week cruise from Boston up the north-east cost of New England then onto Canada visiting the provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec then back to Boston.  It was fun, though we all agreed it lacked the impact of some other vacations. 

Over Christmas 2017 and New Year 2018, we decided to skip the cold and snowy New York winter, and took a cruise to the Caribbean.  As well as the usual suspects, Key West, Mexico, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, we visited Havana and Cienfuegos in Cuba.  Cuba was quite definitely the highlight of this cruise.

In 2019, we flew to San Diego, CA and took a 17 day cruise visiting  Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica before going through the Panama Canal.  After that, we visited Aruba, Curacao and Belaire before arriving in Fort Lauderdale and flying home.  This year, the "virus" restricted our travel to a couple of early trips to Rhode Island and Cape Cod.  Hope to get away in the Spring, if we can!

If you got this far, we hope you enjoy these pictures.  We had a great time taking them!

Travel Introduction

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