Since moving to New York in 2018 I’ve tried to go visit my family in California three to four times a year. I was planning to come visit in August but at some point I was talking to Jake and we decided to change my trip to California to a brothers trip. We looked at a few ideas but the one that we quickly landed on was Iceland a place Jake has talked about wanting to go to for a long, long time. So even with the pandemic we booked it and on August 11th we began our journey to Reykjavik, Iceland.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post about a trip. You’d have to all the way back to either February of 2020 when we did a weekend trip to Philadelphia or even further back to July of 2019 when we went to Egypt, UAE, Mumbai, and Singapore. It’s been a long road to travel again and even now after a three-night trip to Washington DC we are still battling a new “delta” outbreak of COVID-19 so the travel of 2019 still feels somewhat far away.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time that Jenn and I went away for a weekend. It’s just never been our style. We have always preferred to do the big 2-3 week trips. But now that we’ve lived in New York for a little under two-years it felt almost criminal not to explore outside the confines of the island. So this past weekend we left our 700 sq ft apartment and went out in search of our first mini getaway to Philadelphia.

It took me a while but it finally hit me this morning. After Jake and I grabbed coffee again this morning a little after 8 AM at % Arabica, Jake finished up packing up his things and an hour later i was walking him down to the lobby to see him jump into a cab and take off for the airport to catch his flight home that takes him through Taipei to LAX. We said our goodbyes and he was off and thus started our last day of the trip.

I’ve been dreading writing this post. I knew when it came to today it would be tough to start thinking about the end so instead of doing that we had a full day ahead of us in Singapore and that’s exactly what we focused on. After a late wake-up Jake and I went back to the same area as last nights late dessert to go to a coffee shop we saw along the way % Arrabica which we later found out just opened this month and is quite popular. There Jake got an Americano and I had a Latte, both of which were out of this world. It’s one of the better latte’s I’ve ever had and I’ve my fair share of coffee since moving to New York.

One of the things Jenn was adamant about when we booked this trip was that if we were in Singapore she wanted to take a day trip to Kuala Lampur. It’s not a place either of us have had a strong desire to stay at, but since we were so close by we wanted to at least visit. So this morning after the amazing but late night last night at Odette we made our way to the Singapore Airport at 6 AM. We grabbed some coffee and bagels at Coffee Bean and then were off to Malaysia.