ORD to Anywhere

Let's be dead honest for a minute folks - 2016 was a freaking rough year for most of the world. Whether it was the Syrian refugee crisis, the siege of Aleppo, the slew of celebrity deaths, the UK's Brexit vote, the insane US election cycle, or the poisoning of Flint's water supply, it's been difficult to limp into the last week of December without feeling like the whole world is nothing more than a series of raging dumpster fires. But it wasn't all bad news this year! The Ch

Unfortunately I lost about half of my stash of photos for this hotel stay, so it’s going to be pretty short and sweet. This was the last hotel on a fairly epic journey that started in New York City and took me through Tokyo, Frankfurt, Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. I needed a place to stay overnight between the Lufthansa economy class leg from Munich and my departure on AirBerlin back to the US of A. Since I was traveling on separate tickets I figured it was safest to give

After a few short days in lovely, overcast Munich hanging out with the Vice President of the United States, it was time for me to finally start the journey back to Chicago. At this point in my trip I had left Chicago and arrived in Munich through Tokyo, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Budapest. My flight back to the US of A was departing from Berlin though, so I needed to find a good way to get back to Tegel Airport (TXL). Being a oneworld devotee the obvious choice was AirBerlin (

While I feel I could do a much better job of getting off the beaten path and seeing some far-flung and exotic destinations, I’ve certainly been to my fair share of places that your average traveler might be a bit wary of traveling to and experiencing with an open mind. When I mention some of the places I’ve visited over the year, inevitably people feel the need to steer the conversation into a rather awkward place by asking one of my most hated travel questions – “Did you ge

My trip through Europe on this trip was hastily put together and had no structure for a long time. I simply had a routing that dropped me into Berlin for almost two weeks. Despite being a major city, I didn’t intend to spend the entire two weeks exploring Berlin, so I started looking to branch further out. I considered a few far away locations such as Malta or Lisbon for awhile, but ultimately I decided to keep my travel more localized and booked an overnight train sleep

As I hinted at in my recent review of my hotel in Berlin, the Best Western Spittelmarkt, I had a bit of an issue during my trip in Berlin. That story will be forthcoming in about two posts, but I need to mention it again because it unfortunately sidelined the majority of my trip to Berlin. I essentially had a single day of sightseeing, which means I have an extremely limited selection of photos from my time there. Berlin was an interesting city from what I was able to see.

If you take a quick look back at all the hotel reviews I’ve done, you’ll notice that I seem to have a bit of sweet spot for Best Western. It’s a bit odd in some respects I suppose. Most people who take the time to provide hotel reviews tend to focus on higher end properties – the Four Seasons, Park Hyatts, Aman resorts, etc. I’m not exactly a man of means though, so while I treat myself to the occasional luxury property, the Best Western is more often where I end up stayin

I was connecting to this AirBerlin (AB) flight from a long haul business class flight on Japan Airlines from Tokyo Narita. For European flights, most EU carriers offer a business class cabin where the seats are the same as the ones in economy class but the carrier has blocked the use of the middle seat to provide additional lateral space to premium cabin passengers. This is one of the few areas where European carriers actually offer an inferior product to most American carr

Background I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to the glamorous world of airline premium cabins, AirBerlin (AB) isn’t exactly the carrier that aviation geeks are smacking their lips over flying. Considered by many to be a glorified low cost carrier and toward the bottom of the quality barrel among its oneworld brethren, there are likely much better uses for my award miles than redeeming on this airline. Yet I’m a bit of a strange bird. As a oneworld loyalist I’ve