Welcome to The Introduction to our blog about our traveling lifestyle

   For February and March 2024, we flew to in Hokkaido, Japan to ski and eat. We hoped to experience the legendary Japow. We didn't get to. We got an ice skating experience on Hokkaido Hard Pack or Sapporo-Style Sierra Cement. We can't think of a sojourn that was worse, ever. As for eating: the food in the ski resorts was unremarkable and nothing that we like particularly: lots of ramen, sushi, breaded pork, shabu shabu, hot pot and Mongolian barbeque. There was good sashimi though. In Sapporo and Fukuoka we made up for the ski resort food by eating fabulous uni, crab, amberjack and all kinds of other fish. 
    In November 2023, after skiing Vail on the opening day of the 2023-24 season, when Dimitri happily tested his new knee, we flew to Malaysia for two months, until the middle of January 2024. We stayed at two different Four Seasons Hotels. Start reading here and, at the end, click Older Post to continue. 
     Wow, we've come a long way since we started traveling on a budget in 1995--both in travel expenses and in our ages! When we are traveling these days, people offer to help us. We start chatting and invariably we are asked our ages. We tell them 82 and 77. They say "you mean you are still skiing?!" They can't imagine their grandparents or even their parents traveling or skiing as we do.
    We have always aspired to inspire.
      
Audre + Dimitri biking (and looking young) at the iconic rock-Uluru or Ayers Rock, Australia

It all started in 1993 when Audre got a contract for a World Bank project in Indonesia - that was the beginning of our Odyssey or worldwide traveling or vagabond globetrotting... call it what you will (Dimitri likes "global meandering" the best). A year and a half later, Dimitri planned a
9-month trip from Jakarta to Istanbul. It was supposed to be just an interlude between contracts. However, six months into that trip, while meditating on top of Mount Sinai, Audre saw the light! A couple of weeks earlier, Dimitri had calculated that we could most probably live on just the appreciation on our mutual funds (without our touching our capital) and had proposed retirement to Audre's initial shock and dismay. So, on Mount Sinai, Audre got the message from above that it is perfectly okay to retire and go traveling throughout the world at 49 (Audre) and 54 (Dimitri). We retired in 1995 and global meandered from1995 (somehow surviving the financial meltdowns) until 2014 when we settled down in Vail, CO and bought a condo. See our tab above "About our traveling lifestyle" to read more about how we do/did what we do/did.


This blog site was started in 2006 during our 2 and one-half years of South American Explorations (to begin reading at the beginning of our blogging in Santiago click here) and continue by clicking on Older Post at the end of each one. Consequently, the travelogues about our first 9-month trip from Jakarta to Istanbul, our nine months in Turkey, our six years in the rest of Europe, our three months in India, our nine months in Singapore, our three months in Phuket, our one year in Australia (although the picture above is of us at Uluru and you can click here to see the summary of our 26,000 km Australia Road Trip in 2004-05), our one year in New Zealand and our three months in Tahiti, will be posted when Audre writes them.

On the right margin is a Table of Contents that lists each place we have lived since 1995. The descriptions of our travels begin with our posts in South America in 2006 (when we started this blog). Before that, you will notice most are still "to come." To start reading at the beginning of our travelogues, click here and click on Older Post at the end of each post.

If you are foodies, like we are, then have a look at the list of "Restaurants Reviewed by ALEDM Organized by Country and City" in the banner at the top if this page. If you click on a city, you will be linked to the blog posting of our restaurant reviews for that city. It's been so long since we've been to some of those places, we fear that the restaurants we reviewed may no longer be in business (send us an e-mail about your experiences)!

And, if you want to do a search for a specific place, topic, or for a person, use the Search Blog feature that is a box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen (from here click "Control - Home" on your keyboard to get to the top of your screen).


While we were in Beijing in the fall of 2010, the China Daily (the largest newspaper in English in China) published an article about our Global Meandering Lifestyle. Our picture is on the front page of the newspaper in the upper right-hand corner and click here for the article itself.