All About

Hi!  I’m Billy of Billy’s Cities.  That’s me at the Great Wall of China on the outskirts of Beijing.  As you can guess, I love to travel.  When I travel, I usually like to go to the great cities of the world.  Beach resorts and camping expeditions aren’t really my thing.  I’m all about urban adventure.  For years, friends and family have been telling me that I should do something with my travel pictures and stories.  People often tell me that seeing my pictures and reading my stories makes them feel like they’re traveling
right along with me.  So I started this blog to share my pictures and adventures with you.  I plan to fill it up with all of the travel adventures I’ve been having for over a decade, plus other travel I’ve done, going back to my first trip overseas, to France in 1980.  Of course, I’m hoping for plenty more travel in the future, and I’ll share all of that with you.  I’ll also throw in some of my tenets of travel and my dreams for future travel.  I love to give travel tips, so please get in touch if you are trying to decide where to go, how to get there, and what to do once you’ve gotten there.  You can reach me here.  I’m constantly researching and dreaming about travel, so I am happy to share my thoughts about places I haven’t even been to yet.  As I go along, I’ll be working on the visuals for the blog so it’s easy on the eyes as well as, I hope, warm to the heart and stimulating to the brain.

 
My Fabulous International Sightseeing Trips, as I call my adventures, began in 2004, when I was awarded a free ticket anywhere American Airlines flew.  I really wanted to go to Amsterdam, but American didn’t fly there.  The closest they got was Brussels.  I figured I could fly to Brussels and take the train to Amsterdam.  But why not tour around Brussels as well as long as I’m going to be there?  And if I’m going to be visiting Belgium and the Netherlands, well I really ought to see Luxembourg too.  That way I get all three Benelux nations.  The trip was a success, and I hated that it had to end.  Two years later, I crossed the Atlantic again, this time for Munich, Bavaria, and southern Germany.  This time, I wasn’t quite as upset when the trip ended because I knew it was just the beginning.  From there, it’s been on to Milan and northwest Italy, Berlin and eastern Germany, western and northern Germany, Singapore and Malaysia, Dubai and the Persian Gulf states, and most recently to China.  Other countries I’ve been to prior to 2004 include Australia, Japan, the UK, Canada, and more.  I’ve also brought my road show home, exploring all over Boston, where I used to live, and now San Francisco, where I moved to in 2014.  I’ve learned that I don’t always need to get my passport out or even venture too far from my front door to discover what some of the world’s greatest cities have to offer.

If you like my blog, please subscribe so you can receive automatic updates on my posts and whatever else I jot down in the newsletters that I’ll send out.  If you really like it, please send it along to your friends and family.  I ultimately hope to make the blog self-sustaining.  The more readers I have, the more likely that can happen.  You can subscribe over on the right, if you’re using a computer, or down below, if you’re on a mobile device.

Happy trails!

Billy O