Next Stop Albania
Hello all! Welcome to my first blog post! My name is Ariel. I’m a nurse by day and a health and wellness enthusiast in all aspects of my life! I subscribe to the religion of food, working out, and traveling the world with my incredible husband all while focusing on making the best choices to increase our longevity, healthspan, and sustainability of our planet! Call it a lifestyle, if you will. My husband, Andrew, is a builder, entrepreneur, and gym class hero. He’s my own personal food-tester, guinea pig for all health experiments, and travel partner. We are adventuring through life together and want to share with you all of our passions! What better than to start with love? Perhaps, a romantic getaway to the Balkans? It’s a Mann’s World, and we’re traveling it!
What is the most important thing to do after you get engaged? Most women would say it’s choosing a date, choosing a venue, or choosing a dress. Not for us. We opted to have the most epic surprise wedding, and I can’t wait to share that with you in a future post! So, far superior to any of those choices was where we would go on a honeymoon! We aren’t your typical travellers looking to go to the hottest tourist hubs or most popular destinations. We like to travel to places off the beaten path with far less tourists! I started doing some research and set my sights on the Balkans. Although millions of people are traveling to Croatia, there are so many other gorgeous countries there to see! After seeing pictures of Albania, that was it, that is where our honeymoon would be! I will outline our trip for you and give some suggestions so you can plan a perfect getaway to Albania as well!
Albania is a small country located on the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe. It is sandwiched between Montenegro and Greece, across from Italy. What really caught my eye here were the sprawling coastlines and the Albanian Alps. Albania is a fairly small country but to really enjoy it and see everything it has to offer, I would suggest spending about two weeks for the entire country. We were only able to get away for 8 days so we had to choose what parts of the country were most important to us. We decided to focus on the northern part of Albania and were not disappointed!
A few trip notes. We traveled in September and the weather was perfect, between 60-80℉ (16-27℃) the whole trip. In the larger cities, many people do speak English. The main languages spoken are Albanian and German so it is important to bear that in mind when traveling to smaller villages. This is especially important when setting up lodging and transportation. I did a lot of research and was able to secure all of our accommodations in advance with Booking.com. I made sure that our housing options had someone that spoke English to help us during our stay. This is critical if you do not speak another language. Make sure you are carrying enough cash to exchange as many places will not take credit cards as we are so accustomed to. Lastly, our most important tool was a map! We bought a fold up map of Albania but truly the best thing at our fingertips was a phone app called Map.me. This was a lifesaver and now my most used travel accessory. It’s basically an offline map that you download prior to your trip and can ping important locations such as the airport, your hotel, hiking trails, etc. From there, you can set routes between your pings for easy step by step directions while offline. It’s free and made our trip that much easier!
Final note: even if you are traveling to a country where you do not speak the language, “thank you” goes a long way. In Albania, the word for thank you is, faleminderit. It phonetically sounds like “falaminder.” Now that that’s out of the way, off to Tirana we go!