Hello, welcome back to Live Free Creative podcast. You’re listening to episode number two hundred and thirty-four ten days in Morocco. I did a poll on Instagram a couple weeks ago when I had returned from this epic adventure with my sisters and my mom. Trying to figure out the best way to share some of the ins and outs of our trip, and most respondents said that they preferred listening to a podcast episode about it.

Let Me Tell You About Morocco!

So, this is going to be fun because often people say, hey, I want to hear about your trip, or I can’t wait to hear all about your vacation. And then you don’t get around to sitting and telling them about it, at least not fully.

Today’s episode is going to be an overview of our vacation, and I’m going to share some of the details, how we planned, where we went, what we did. That means that the show notes of this episode are going to operate in some ways, like an itinerary that you could save it, pin it to your pin board, send it to a friend that’s planning on going to Morocco.

I’m going to link the locations that we stayed, the tour company that we used for our Sahara Adventure. Lots of different sort of ins and outs of things that we loved, restaurants and things like that. So, our itinerary linked, it will function as a travel blog post where you can, you know, either that or I’ll link directly to a specific other blog post that doesn’t have all the talking points and just has the links.

That way if you can sit back and listen to it and like hearing about it. And, if you have a hankering to travel to Morocco, or you’re interested in making some plans or sending them to a friend, that all of that is in one place for you.

Segment: Pause for a Poem

If once you have slept on an island 
You’ll never be quite the same; 
You may look as you looked the day before 
And go by the same old name, 
You may bustle about in street and shop 
You may sit at home and sew, 
But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls 
Wherever your feet may go. 
You may chat with the neighbors of this and that 
And close to your fire keep, 
But you’ll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell 
And tides beat through your sleep. 
Oh! you won’t know why and you can’t say how 
Such a change upon you came, 
But once you have slept on an island, 
You’ll never be quite the same.

If Once You Have Slept on an Island, by Rachel Field

Travel Changes Us

I’m sure you can guess what I loved about that poem, which is this feeling that once you have traveled and experienced something different, something new, it becomes a part of you in a way that is hard to explain. You see those colors; you have your mind and heart opened to those people. The cultures good and bad memories of travel and experiences all over the world, all over the country, in your own home state, in your own hometown.

Experiencing new things invites us to curiosity. It invites us to learn. It just changes our perspective. There’s some fun research around the wellbeing, benefits of travel for our brains, for our physical health, for our emotional wellbeing, as well as our relationships. Of course, there can be negatives to traveling as well, and so much of it depends on your perspective.

Big or Small, Seeing New Things Invites Perspective

One thing that I can say, from my own experience, having traveled as a part of my culture growing up, I grew up in a family that liked to travel. We did a lot of local travel camping and backpacking and hiking nearby, growing up in Utah, that, that was super accessible to us. I also started traveling abroad when I was in my elementary years going to Mexico.

We did a big road trip to Canada, started to experience cultures and languages and food and views, landscapes different from my own. And I think that so much of my interest in the world, so much of my hope to understand lots of different people and what I would consider an open-hearted nature that I have cultivated comes from the experience of seeing people in all different circumstances and knowing that one way doesn’t work for everyone.

That one livelihood isn’t right for everyone. That one pathway in life doesn’t necessarily mean life is better for one group of people than another. So, there are lots of benefits to travel, and it’s been fun to be able to see those perspective shifts that happen in my own life because of some of the trips that I’ve taken.

I’m going to divide this episode up into a couple different sections. One will be just general background on these girls’ trips that I do with my sisters and my mom. The next will be the planning stage, and then finally I will walk you through the itinerary of our 10 days in Morocco. That way you just have a little bit of an overview of the whole situation, a backstory.

The Origin of our Sisters’ Trip Tradition

I will begin with the true backstory. That is when my oldest sister, there are four girls in my family. There’s two boys and four girls, six siblings total. When my older sister, who is the oldest girl in the family was about to turn 30, I guess about six months before she turned 30, she called me and asked me if I would be willing to go on a trip to Paris with her to celebrate her 30th birthday.

To give you a quick frame of reference, when she turned 30, I was working part-time as a nurse. I had two young boys living in an 800 square foot apartment in Washington, DC while Dave finished law school. I had very little disposable income and very little disposable time. The idea of picking up and going to Paris just wasn’t realistic for me at that stage.

And I said I told her I feel bad, but I’m not going to be able to make that happen in six months. That’s just not feasible with my current situation in life. I’ll put a pin in that and say, could I have figured it out? Probably it would’ve been a lot of logistics and financial gymnastics to make it happen. And so ultimately, in that moment I decided it wasn’t worthwhile. I wasn’t going to do that.

However, knowing how much she wanted to mark the occasion of this big birthday with something fun, I called my other sisters and my mom and proposed a different plan. What I proposed was called Thirty in the City, a girl’s trip to San Francisco, which felt much more affordable and approachable for all of us, and it was a surprise.

On my sister’s 30th birthday, she got an invitation in the mail to a girl’s weekend for her birthday together with a full itinerary of what we were going to do during the four days that we were there. This Thirty in the City for my older sister kicked off what has now become a beloved tradition of girl’s trips for milestone birthdays and between the four sisters, my mom, and my sisters-in-law, we have milestone birthdays coming up about every two to three years.

For the last twelve and a half, thirteen years, every milestone birthday that one of us has, we plan and choose a location and do a girl’s trip. It’s just an excuse to travel. We love traveling together. It’s a fun way where we live, all over. It’s a fun way to have that special sisters’ time. We really have close relationships and so we enjoy spending that time together and it’s been a great way to see the world.

Sometimes one or more babes in arms has come along on the girls’ trips. We did one to Las Vegas for one of my mom’s milestone birthday, and both my younger sister and I had our little babies that we brought with us for that trip. Depending on our seasons of life where we’re able to go, the budget that we choose, all the logistics and the plans depend a little bit on what’s going on.

Choosing Morocco

This is how Morocco emerged. My 40th birthday was the next milestone birthday, and I was in discussing with my sisters, told them that Morocco was somewhere I’d always wanted to go. I’ve been a few places nearby. One of our girls’ trips in 2019 was to Spain and Portugal, which is right by Morocco, and a couple of my sisters had already been to Morocco on different vacations.

We talked about it, and I did a little bit of digging in and then it really became solidified to me that this is somewhere that I wanted to go. When I watched my friend Gabrielle Blair, who is also known as Design Mom take her daughter to Marrakesh for her daughter’s birthday. They live in France, so it was, a quick hop plane ride for them.

They just spent about four days in Marrakesh and documented the whole thing on Instagram, and I followed along just dazzled by the sites and the design aesthetic and the colors. And I said, yes, that’s for sure somewhere I want to go. I started to investigate it, and it just happened that my older sister and I were on the phone together talking about how the price of flights had gone up so much post-covid.

Everything was low during covid for obvious reasons. And then I feel like there’s been a bounce back where flights and travel are all feels quite expensive right now. So, we were wondering whether it was going to be realistic for us all to get abroad over to Morocco.

I was looking at my school schedule knowing that I have school every few weeks and that takes up a lot of time and energy. And so, we found a week in March that looked good and happened to go onto the airline website to look at prices and noticed that for whatever reason, the flights both from Salt Lake City, Utah, which is where she was traveling from and from Richmond, Virginia, which is where I was traveling from, were extremely low, like almost weirdly, so that we had a moment of saying, is this like a glitch?

And we decided, let’s just book them. We both had enough Sky Miles in our Delta accounts from using a SkyMiles credit card to book them with points. And so, we said, let’s just book them. You have 24 hours to cancel. We said, let’s book them. We’ll text everyone and said, “Hey, we found some flights. Grab them if you can!” and it just worked out that we booked them. We texted my mom and all the sisters and they all got on and were able to find the same deal. And so, it was set in stone.

I’ve always said, once you have your flights, you’re on your way. And so, we had our flights, and the rest was just figuring out the, the ins and outs of what we wanted to do.

Why Ten Days?

I’ll mention that we decided to go for ten days because traveling from the United States to Morocco is a long travel day. In fact, for most of us, it took more than one day to get there. I flew from Richmond to Paris and then I had a quite a long layover in Paris before flying to Marrakesh. So, for each of us, depending on where we were coming from, it was about a day and a half of travel on either end.

We wanted to have a solid week in country, which meant that we needed to add travel days on. From the time we left until the time we got home was ten days on the calendar. Our actual in-country time was about eight, and that seemed like a perfect amount of time. I don’t think that we would’ve needed, unless we were really staying for like a long time, like a month or more, to do sort of an in-country home stay. Ten days felt perfect.

How I Planned The Trip

Next, I’m going to share how we created our itinerary before we left and how we chose what we were going to do and where we were going to stay. One fun benefit that I had this time that I mentioned earlier, is that my friend Gabby had been to Morocco and shared her whole trip on Instagram, saved it into Instagram highlights.

My first stop, and I’ve done this for a couple other trips, when I see that someone has traveled and shared their trip to a highlight or to like a blog post, I usually save that either on a pin board or I save on the Instagram app directly, and then I can go in and the way that I like to do it is to go through and I have a spreadsheet open, like a Google Sheet or Google Doc.

I Love a Travel Spreadsheet!

I like using a spreadsheet and as they mention things, I will put them into the spreadsheet. Maybe I’ll make a column for stays like hotels or Airbnb’s, and then I’ll make a column for restaurants, and then I’ll make a column for sites.

And as they mention things, I’ll click through to the home base on Instagram of whatever they’re talking about. Grab the URL so that I have the actual reference for the link of the mentioned. Highlight and then at the end I can put down my phone and I have a working document that has a baseline itinerary already on it.

I thought you would appreciate that. I named the Morocco spreadsheet Miranda’s Morockin’ 40th. That’s what we titled the trip. Most of the time, these girls’ trips have a little bit of a funny, fun name that we add just to, just for fun, for whimsy, a theme that we build around.

I initially started with a baseline of a couple day itinerary built by my friend Gabby, straight from her Instagram highlights. I really like Gabrielle. I have interacted and worked with her for a decade, and so I’m familiar with some of her style of travel and just her personality. She was someone that I knew I could trust following in the footsteps of her vacation, to some extent.

There are influencers who don’t travel the way that I do or that I would like to, that I can enjoy watching their trip without feeling like I want to replicate it. Where Gabrielle is someone that I was like, oh yeah, I could totally do this whole trip the same way that she did it’s just a nice thing to have in mind when you’re thinking about trying to slurp a vacation from someone’s blog post or from their Instagram.

How well do you align in terms of travel values, in terms of budget restrictions as someone else? And just be aware of that because it doesn’t always work to directly say, I’m just going to do everything that they did, where in this case, a lot of the things did align fully.

I started with a spreadsheet that had just a repeat of the trip from Design Mom, where I had her the days that they were there, like four days I think, and where they stayed, some of the restaurants they went to, places they visited.

I had a few days there, but we stayed in the country for much longer, and so I had pulled some of my sisters about other things that they were interested in doing, and we had a couple ideas floating around out there. One was that my sister-in-law had been following this boutique hotel on Instagram for years because of a certain type of plaster method that they do on the walls. She is doing a similar thing in her own renovation at home in Portland, Oregon and had just, seen this place in Marrakesh and just thought that would be so beautiful to stay.

When she found out that this was the location destination of my birthday trip, she sent it along and said, Hey, what do you think about staying here for a couple nights? So, we added that to the list of possibilities and then also we looked at day trips to Casablanca Day trips to the Blue City.

There’s so much information out there on the worldwide web about things to do in Morocco, just open-ended. We wanted to refine it a little bit. One decision that we made right up front was that we wanted to spend most of the time in Marrakesh, rather than trying to see three different cities over the week or travel around.

We wanted to spend most of our time in Marrakesh. And then the big exception to this was that I, in doing just a little bit of lightweight internet research, realized that the Sahara Desert is nearby Marrakesh. By nearby, I mean like a day’s drive.

I love the desert. If you’ve been listening to the podcast or following on Instagram for any amount of time, I talk about it sometimes. I really feel at home in the desert. I love the idea of a desert camp spot and seeing the dunes and the sunrise and the sunset. I saw that this is something that was offered in Morocco by several different tour companies. You can leave from Marrakesh, they’ll pick you up and drive you out to the Sahara Desert.

You stop at different spots along the way. Then you do a camel ride and stay at a glamping tent resort right near the desert before coming back. I put that on the top of my list and did a little bit of research around companies. Found one that had super reviews. I send them an email. They said that they would be totally willing and excited to take our group, and so we went from there.

I pieced together the itinerary for this Morocco trip using Design Mom’s Baseline Marrakesh tour, the three-day Sahara Desert Camel camping tour, and then finishing up the last couple days of our trip by staying in the beautiful boutique hotel recommended by my sister-in.

A Spreadsheet Itinerary is Your Friend

Again, in terms of logistics, all this information is going into a spreadsheet of places to go, things to see, places to eat, and when I have a pretty good set of ideas, the next thing I do is change the spreadsheet format to include the days of travel.

So right now, I’m looking at my spreadsheet and I start with travel days, March 6th and seventh. And then day one is March 8th, and it begins with arrive and settle in breakfast, what we’re doing, where we go and goes through the day of what we’re doing when. And I have one column for each of the days of the trip, including in there what the main activities of the day are, where we’re going to be if we’re traveling somewhere, restaurants that we have reservations at, or places that we have been recommended to go, what’s nearby where.

And it’s just a working itinerary. That includes things like wander around in the market. Like it’s not that every single minute is scheduled necessarily, but that we have an idea of where we’re going, when generally we can include reservations as needed. And then we can take an overview of the whole thing and see if there’s something missing, see if there’s something that we’d like to do that isn’t on there, see if it looks like too much, like maybe we need some more pool time and then we can take some things off.

It does help for me to be able to see it all visually and compare and list it all in so that we can have some sort of baseline of what we’re doing and where we’re going. And like I said, for this trip, having design mom’s schedule that was, so generously shared online, gave us a very good starting place.

I also should mention here that not everything works out. Sometimes you let you arrive somewhere and it’s too full, or you get there, and you realize you don’t like it as much as you thought you would, and so then you leave. We didn’t build a schedule to chain ourselves to it, rather to give us some guidelines of where to go and what to do, and then acknowledging the flexibility and adaptability are always going to be important components of a travel experience, and we were able to do that and flex things well on this trip.

That is the planning component once we have some baseline plans for this trip. My mom took the responsibility of booking all the things in advance, so she booked our riad, which is Moroccan word for a hotel or guest house. She booked our Sahara Desert tour, and she booked the nights at the boutique hotel on the end.

Everything else that could be done, we booked while we were there. So, our reservations for dinner, we only think I, I think we only had ‘me one day, but we got those while we were there and then getting tickets for different events. Those are all things we walked up to do. You can get them in advance in some places. However, we found that it was easy to plan like a day or two ahead to just make sure, rather than having the whole trip scheduled exactly ahead of time.

Day-By-Day Itinerary for 10 Days in Morocco

(And a shorter one with photos)

Day 1: Travel Day

I’m now to the third part of the episode where I’m going to walk you through and tell you about our trip, about the actual things that we did and the places we stayed, and my overall impression of the whole thing. I mentioned that I flew from Richmond to Paris. I had a long layover, which worked out well for me because I did a whole section worth of homework in about six hours, and then I took a hopper flight from Paris to Marrakesh.

When I landed in Marrakesh at about midnight, I, gathered my things and went out and our riad or hotel had provided a driver and it just had my name on the board that he was holding. I liked having the travel arrangements to the Riyad. Planned of time. My mom had arrived a little bit earlier.

Days 2-5 Stay: Riad Atlas Acacia

She had been with my sister, and they’d taken this driver together. It was provided by the hotel and felt very safe. So rather than going out and just finding a taxi, I was able to just hop right in. Through a hotel sponsored transport and be dropped off directly at the hotel. We stayed in a Riad called Atlas Acacia.

This is a beautiful little older riad. I think most of the riads were originally houses of royalty or upper-class people, and they’re gorgeous. They have multiple rooms, but not dozens, maybe six or seven rooms. I think at Atlas Acacia had about that many. The main level has a beautiful atrium and a little pool inside. There’s incredible tile and plaster work everywhere throughout the city and in the riads.

The craftsmanship is just intricate and beautiful. Something that I loved right off in Morocco was the colors. All the city buildings are. Desert colors. They’re dusty pinks and tans. That combined with all the desert flora, just incredible cactus and palms, date, palms and succulents and things springing up out of everywhere despite it.

Being the desert was fun, and I loved it. The riad had a beautiful rooftop garden with some big potted plants and an herb garden. It was lovely, and we had a great stay. My favorite thing probably about the Riad was the employees. The men who run the front desk and the driver and all the employees were so incredibly helpful.

This was not the riad Design Mom had recommended. We tried to get into the one that she had recommended, and they didn’t have space and we didn’t want to break up into, different hotels. So, we ended up finding this one and it was great. It wasn’t luxury, it wasn’t super high end.

Breakfast Included

It was affordable, and it was a great location right off the main bustling market area, maybe a five-to-seven-minute walk down into the market area. We really liked it. Most of the riads include breakfast, so I got there at midnight, found my family, went to sleep, woke up and went downstairs, and there’s this huge breakfast spread.

Sweet Mint Tea Everywhere

Hilariously, most of the breakfast is different types of bread and cake and crepes and biscuits. There’s honey and jam and butter for all of it, and then everywhere you go you’re offered mint tea, green tea with mint as just part of the customary meal. Hot tea in these beautiful little tea kettles and they lift it up high as they pour it.

One of the servers mentioned that the less bubbles the tea has as they pour it so high, the higher quality it is. You want to make sure that your tea is good quality because it doesn’t have very many bubbles. Sweet tea everywhere. Some of my family members asked for tea with just mint leaves and no green tea. Others of us drank it with the green tea and the mint, everyone was accommodating.

Pretty much everywhere we went you were able to get plain mint tea if you didn’t want the green tea component. And there is tea everywhere, at every single meal. So, if you go to Morocco, you can plan on that.

Day 2: Wander the Market Streets

That first day as we were waiting for our other sisters and sister-in-law to arrive, we wandered down through the streets from the riad into the market.

Everything is very narrow streets where a car couldn’t get by. It’s walkable. Sometimes there is like a donkey pulling a wagon. Rugs or with fruit and vegetables on it. There are a lot of motorcycles and motor scooters that buzz through these alleyways, and the alleys are lined with shops from meat shops to vegetable stands to rug stores and souvenirs.

There’s a little bit of everything all along these main alleyways that surround the city. Marrakesh itself is a walled city and everything within the walls is considered the old city, and then everything without is more like the more modern side of the city. Inside the city, we didn’t spend a lot of time outside of the walls, so inside the walls of the city there are.

Really super narrow, more local markets that are called the souk. And then there are bigger, more touristy alleyways and streets that you can tell by the wars and by the prices that they’re more catered for tourists. Once you wind your way down through any of these alleys, most of them will dump you out into the main market square, which is a huge flat expanse with buildings and these little capillaries of walkways heading out in all directions.

And daily in that big medina or market square, vendors and tents and food trucks come line up and buy food trucks. I don’t mean like burritos; I mean like fruit. Crepes and things that they’re making, local type of food. Along with that, we saw quite a few what felt to us a little bit disturbing animal situation.

There were lots of monkeys on leashes for entertainment. There were several different areas where there were men with snakes like snake charmers, and it’s a totally real thing where I don’t think I realized that there were like king cobras that were, that rising to the sound of a flute. This is happening in the market in Morocco.

We didn’t feel super comfortable with the animal interactions, and so we tried to steer clear of those and focus our attention on some of the more local feeling boutiques and shops and restaurants and having some experiences that we felt we wanted to support rather than things that felt a little bit uncomfortable, like some of those maybe not totally humanely treated animal situations.

Everywhere we went, people were friendly. The shops are beautiful and there are so many colors and everywhere you go you see rugs and pillows and earth and wear ceramics. Lots of slippers like leather slides, lots of clothing, traditional clothing like big baggy camel pants and tunics. There’s some incredible indigo dyed things and dyes.

Lots of different dyes colors of pigments. Henna tattoos happening all over. You can get them almost anywhere if you want them. There are also some things called traditional hammams, which is like a professional shower where you get scrubbed and you get soaked and you get clayed and this is all while you’re at, stripped down to your level of comfort and you’re getting like interaction with these women who give you these showers and you can go on and get a massage as well.

All interesting. And we had heard that the hammams and the massages were awesome, and our experience was fun.

Shopkeeper Interactions

Along with the shops themselves being open, A lot of salespeople are interested in you coming into their shop, and so there’s a lot of conversation happening, a lot of negotiation, inviting you into their shop.

If stop to look at something, it’s likely that the shop owner will tell you how much it costs or ask you how much you’re willing to pay for it. Lots of bartering, and that’s standard practice. In fact, the couple times that I didn’t barter, I could tell how surprised the shop owner was if they proposed a price that felt.

Fair to me than I just said. Great. And in some ways, it felt easier to just not worry about it if I felt like the price was fair versus sometimes, I felt like things were intentionally inflated because they expected the negotiation. So going in with an idea of how much you want to spend on goods, if you’re planning on doing shopping is helpful.

Trying to practice a little bit of negotiation before you go may be helpful. And I, like I said, I don’t think that you always must barter. They were surprised if you didn’t. But in some cases, it’s nice to just buy the thing and move on if you want. Also, we got good at ignoring people and saying no, and those are skills that I think are helpful as a female traveler anyway, and in an environment of lots of tourism and lots of shopping.

The markets and shops and shop owners are, they’re kind and intentionally interactive. And so, if you’re not interested you can say thank you know, or just move on past. And we got pretty good at not feeling too bad about not giving everyone your whole attention because you could spend your whole day like stopping at every single shop and just never see what you want to see.

Know Where You’re Going

We also were given a warning slash recommendation from one of the men who worked at the Riad to not take directions from a local, because they’ll direct you to a shop that they. A relationship with, and they want you to buy something, so always know where you’re going. Google Maps works, okay, and so we would try to look up where we were going and get a direction headed on the phone when we had good WIFI at the hotel before we left, because sometimes right in the middle of the market, you may not be able to access that.

So, we liked knowing where we were going in advance, being able to head straight there and not be asking people for directions all along the way. We never felt unsafe in our whole time in the country. We, I think having some guidelines and some understanding and being in a pack of, like we, we went everywhere with at least two people and often we’re all together as a group of six.

That is helpful when it comes to needing to save each other from a particularly aggressive shopkeeper or something, you can say, no, we’ve got to go now. We’re headed out. So, we employed some of those tactics. I will say that not all the resources that are being offered by the shopkeepers are wrong.

One of the afternoons, I think the first day we were headed down, just exploring and we saw a sign for a hammam, and we thought maybe we’ll go see if we can make a reservation for our hammams for tomorrow. So, we went down that lane and the one that we headed intended to go to didn’t end up having openings.

But out in the alley there was a man. And again, most of its, most of the shopkeepers are men and most of the people who you interact with are going to be men across the board. I’m trying to think because it’s an Islamic country and the women tend to be. Staying at home, most of the time it’s usually men that you’re interacting with.

So, there was a man in the alley who said we have a hammam here. And indicated that there was another little shop, a little riad right here. And rather than breezing past and saying, oh no thank you, because we were looking for another hammam, we said, oh, okay. And so, we stepped inside. This was somewhere we hadn’t planned to go, and we walked down this hallway and this riad is beautiful, totally renovated in a classic style.

It was gorgeous in woods and whites. And the atrium was well lit and the whole thing was just beautiful. It was called Riad Wazani. We were able to make our reservations for hammam and massage, and they also gave us a tour of the rooms and the rooftop that had this gorgeous pool and restaurant. And again, this is a small place.

The Riad probably had eight rooms total. It was gorgeous, and I thought when I come back to Marrakesh with my family, with my own children, with my husband, that’s where I will stay because I thought it was lovely. Even just the rooftop pool, which we did get to take advantage of. When I get to that in a couple days, I’ll tell you more about it, but it was a beautiful spot that we found because of the guy in the alley saying, hey, come check out this.

Modern Mani/Pedi’s to Begin the Trip

A little bit funny and unexpected thing we did the first day was to go out into the new part of the city to get our nails done. My mom and my younger sister and I who were first to arrive all needed manicures and pedicures. It’s something that we do at home and just hadn’t had a chance before we left.

We went and found a nail salon that did gel nails at ­­­­­­bollynails, and we had a great manicure pedicure, stopped at a fun cafe called Zeitoun Cafe and then went back to the hotel and rested. We stopped by, there’s a big mosque right in the middle of town called Mosque. And one thing that I didn’t know before going was that in Marrakesh, you can only enter the mosque if you are Muslim.

We were able to see it from the outside. It’s beautiful. Take pictures of it. However, we couldn’t enter, so I don’t know what it looks like inside. It was nice to just walk by and see. I found a great vendor selling cotton candy, which was fun. Got some cotton candy, walked back, and our sisters, the rest of the sisters arrived later that day.

Day 2 Shop: Apothecary

We had just a brief introduction to the city on day one. The final interesting thing that we did on day one was to visit a traditional apothecary for argon oil. This. It’s called the Herboristerie Firdaous. Again, it will be linked. My younger sister had seen in Vogue Magazine a few years ago as one of the last remaining authentic argon oil apothecaries in Marrakesh.

It was a little tricky to find, but we had it on location. She had a picture of the woman, and so when we went in, we knew that we were in the right place. It’s inside of a little mall, which is odd. You go off the main street into the mall, up the stairs, and then it’s just this little shop inside the mall.

She was fantastic and we got to try a bunch of the products. Buy a little bit of argon oil. I chose both, some. Raw argon oil for skin and cooked– like roasted argon oil that’s used as a salad dressing. It was cool. She also had a bunch of essential oils and just a traditional apothecary, very fun.

Day 3 Morning: Bahia Palace

The next morning, we woke up and had breakfast at the Riyad Atlas Acacia, and then we went to the Bahia Palace, which happened to be just around the corner from the Riad.

The Bahia Palace is a beautiful, colorful tiled palace, an actual palace that historically housed a king, his wives and his many concubines in its rooms and courtyards and outdoor gardens. It’s gorgeous. We went first thing in the morning, which was great because it’s a real high tourist attraction, so it got busy quickly.

Day 3: Lunch at Nomad

We were able to get some great pictures and enjoy exploring for a long time before we headed out, and by the time we left, there was like a line down the street, so it was great to get in early. After the palace, we went to lunch at a restaurant called Nomad. This is a cool modern take on traditional Moroccan food.

It’s right kind of nestled in the heart of the spice market alleyways. You need reservations. We had gotten reservations for lunch. We sat on the rooftop overlooking a part of the market, had a fantastic experience, and then we went straight from nomad over to the Riad Wazani to have our hammam massage and to enjoy the rooftop pool.

Day 3: Hammam + Massage: Riad Wazani

One of the beautiful things about having these reservations for the Hammam and massage was that while two of us were being scrubbed and massaged, the other four could sit on the rooftop, order a drink at the restaurant, enjoy the pool. It was a beautiful sunny day, which, for march in the United States for in most areas, it’s been a dark long march.

It was a beautiful experience to be able to be up on the rooftop pool, the hammam, and massage. Great. Very interesting. We did them together, so there were like two or three of us in the steam room. The hammam is like a big steam room in the Wazani. It is slabs of stone. So, these cool, almost like marble like slabs that you sit on.

We were comfortable being nude because this is a shower situation, I’m sure that you can do it in a bathing suit as well. I know this sounds odd, but it is wonderful to be bathed almost like you’re a little baby. You get some warm water through the shower head that is like an extension shower head.

Next, they use what’s called black soap that has some of the, I think it’s like the shell of the ar. Seeds that they crumble up and they mix that with the black soap. You get scrubbed with black soap and scrubbed with this other sort of exfoliator, and then you get your argon oil and your rinse stall off and it’s just, and meanwhile it’s like a steam room.

Some of your probably thinking, I would never ever do that because it sounds terrible. I happen to love a steam room. I love the heat of a sauna. I love warm water. I’m so happy to be bathed. So yes, it was like so fun. And then we went straight into massage, and it was a deep massage.

Also, culturally a little bit different because they had no qualms about your exposure. So, when I get massages here in the United. People take, the massage therapist takes care to make sure that the areas that are not being currently massaged are very tightly covered with your sheet. This was not exactly like that.

There were moments where, you’re fully exposed and just lots of massage happening. It was all females doing the massages. We were all females on the tables and just a very cultural experience. After this and having some conversations with some friends, we have realized that massage seems to be a universal health and wellness practice globally and culturally.

The way that it’s implemented is very different at around the world. So, I have one friend who said, I really would like to get a massage in every country that I go to, just to compare because it’s all a little bit different. Hammam & Massage, I highly recommend, and if you are a little bit shyer or a little bit more, care a lot about being covered in a specific way I would make mention of that upfront. I’m sure they could accommodate and just know that like the going cultural rate is we’re just going to clean you and rub you. That’s what I’m going to say about that.

Day 3 Dinner: Mandala Society

We had dinner at a restaurant called Mandala, and the food was okay. We didn’t love the food, but we loved the desserts. It was all vegan, I think, and which I normally love vegan food. It just, everything needed a lot of salt. It was good. It just wasn’t great. However, the desserts were phenomenal, so much so that we went back again the next night.

Day 4: Jardin Majorelle + YSL Museum

We began the next day at having breakfast at the Riad, of course, and then we took a taxi out to the Yves Saint Lauren Museum and Majorelle Garden. These are next to each other, and you can buy a combination ticket, however, know that you must have a ticket in advance, and that they will allow you to get in line at the time of your ticket.

If you care deeply about what time you go, make sure you’re able to get your timed ticket in advance. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting, and you can’t go into one you can only enter both. We started with the garden, but our time ticket was for noon, and so we couldn’t enter the garden until noon.

Just make sure that you have that clear. Buy a combination ticket. Go to the garden first but get there around the time of your ticket so that you don’t spend too much time waiting. Something that we loved while we were waiting was a local boutique that design mom had shared that’s called 33 Majorelle.

Day 4 Shop: 33 Majorelle

The street that you’re on, I believe is Majorelle. This is a very cool, upscale boutique that had a lot of similar things that they were selling in the markets. Just well curated. So, I found a cool T-shirt that was like Taxi, it says Marrakesh Taxi 1969 or something on, it’s just cool Marrakesh taxi shirt that didn’t feel, it felt like a shirt that I would buy here in the United States and wear it like not just a tourist T-shirt and just lots of other cool things.

It was fun to see some of these goods displayed in a very thoughtful, very aesthetic way, and you could imagine them a little better in your home than when they’re in piles in the market stalls. It’s hard sometimes to picture what you would do with that or how you would style it or where we’d u where you would use it.

The 33 Majorelle was great for getting an idea of what things we may want to find out in the market that we could take home and really.

The Majorelle Garden is fantastic. It felt like a desert botanical garden. Plus, there’s these cool water features and a beautiful Berber Museum. Berber is the name of the indigenous people.

For the area that were nomadic. There’s still a lot of Berber tribes that live in the Atlas Mountains and out in the Sahara. And the whole thing is just phenomenally done. Super thoughtful and incredibly gorgeous. I love desert botanical gardens with different varieties of cactus and succulents and palms, and this was so fun to wander through.

Day 4 Lunch: Majorelle Garden Cafe

We also had lunch in the Garden Cafe, which I highly recommend. The food is fantastic, and it’s just an incredible environment to sit in this beautiful cafe with the gardens out surrounding you and be able to linger a little bit longer in the environment. After a wonderful lunch and wandering in the garden, we went over right next door to the YSL Museum, which is cool, architecturally, and small.

If you like YSL Saint Laurent, it’s fun to go and see some of the history of his designs. There’s room that has. Through the decades different designs on mannequins and you can see them. I love fashion, I love design, I love sewing. It felt fun for me to wander through, even though it was very quick.

There’s also a little movie at the end that you can watch highlighting some of the Saint Laurent career, and it’s one of the big things to do in Marrakesh as far as a tourist attraction that also feels current and interesting. We loved it. I would recommend it for sure. The garden and the museum are a cool walkthrough.

Day 4 Dinner: Zeitoun Café in the Medina

We finished the evening wandering through the market once again. Starting to pick up some of the things that we had thought about the, in the days earlier and had dinner on. The main square. There is a restaurant that is also called Zeitoun Cafe. We were up on the second level. Many of the menus look very similar, so maybe you find something that you like you can order at lots of different places.

We were trying to venture into a few different types of food, and that was trickier because there’s a limited menu. At most of the places that we went, the food was okay. It was good. It was a beautiful night to be out overlooking the square, and then we circled back around to the Mandala Cafe for dessert on our way home that night.

Day 5: Local Cooking Class 

On our next day, we spent most of the day doing a cooking class, which was cool. We did a little bit of wandering the market in the morning, having breakfast, of course, and then we took a taxi out to about 30 minutes away into a very residential part of the outskirts of Marrakesh where my mom had arranged.

A full day cooking class with a local family that she found through Airbnb experiences. They had incredible reviews. This ended up being a fun cultural exchange. We were welcomed into the family’s home. We met the husband who organizes the whole thing, and then his mother and his wife, who ended up doing most of the work as the women in the household who do the cooking.

We first sat down and had a sort of mid-morning breakfast. We had already eaten a little bit, but we had another mid-morning breakfast with tea and different types of breads. And then were offered a menu of options. What types of things would we like to learn to make? And we chose. Three. We chose a beef with fruits, dried fruits.

We chose a chicken pastille they called it. That was like a kind of like a pop pie. And then we also chose a lamb tagine. So, these were the three things that we were going to make. They also taught us how to make a traditional Moroccan salad and an eggplant dish. Once we had chosen what we wanted to make, we went to the market.

And so, we accompanied the father. This, the tour guide into his local market, which was much calmer and much more local feeling than the Marrakesh main market here. No one were tourists. We were the only white people. We were the only women with our heads uncovered which wasn’t, it didn’t feel disrespectful.

It, no one seemed defended by that, but they also just knew that we were outsiders. We chose fruit and vegetables and meat for the meals. We also stopped in a spice shop and chose a few different spices. And my sisters, who hadn’t been there on the first stage got some freshly ground argon oil right on the spot at this little shop, which was cool.

And then we went back and spent the whole afternoon cooking. We learned different techniques of, roasting the peppers and the eggplant right over a gas flame. How to prepare all these spices combined with onions and lemon juice to make the base of what became the tajine. And then, cooked tajines on open fire, on open coals out in the patio of the household.

They said they didn’t eat like this. Normally making a big meal like this is something they would do on a holiday, they would do on Ramadan, or they would do if they had, visitors. We were the visitors who were learning to make these different dishes, and it was several hours of cooking and chatting.

They spoke a little bit of English and then combined with our hand gestures and storytelling; we had a great time getting to know the women who we were working with. They put us right to work, using the different kitchen accoutrements. And we each took part when people got a little tired, they’d go sit in the other room and have a glass of tea and then come back into the kitchen and it was a cool experience.

I took good notes. When I got home, I, soon after I made it home from Morocco, within a week or so, I had bought ingredients and replicated a couple of the recipes just to make sure they were in there and everything turned out great. I was able to share with my kids and my husband some of the food that we had eaten in Morocco. That also felt a great application of some of the cultural exchange that had taken place during our cooking class.

Day 6: Sahara Desert Tour With Atlas Tours

The day after the cooking class, we woke up early, packed up our bags, and got into our van, which would become our travel van for the next three days of our Sahara Desert Expedition with Atlas Tours.

The first day was several hours in the car winding out of the city and up and over the Atlas Mountains. And at several points along the way, we stopped either for drinks or bathroom breaks or at these beautiful viewpoints to see the landscapes as we headed through the mountains, we visited an old town called Ksar Air-Ben-Hadd0u.

This is this gorgeous historic site. It’s a UNESCO historical site. It only has five families who live there full-time, and it was an important stop along the caravan route between Marrakesh and the Sahara historically. It has also been used as a set for a lot of international films like Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator, if you’re familiar with those.

After we wandered through, up to the top and took some fun pictures and got a feel for it, we had lunch at a local restaurant and then journeyed on to something which is also called Hollywood of Africa. There is an Atlas film studio there where you can see it’s one of the largest film studios in the world with this huge desert scenery.

This is again, part of where some of these movies were filmed that take place in like the Sahara. We continued the road of the thousand Kabbahs and through the Valley of Roses, which has a rose festival every year in May. And of course, it wasn’t May, we were visiting in March, so the roses weren’t blooming, but we were able to stop and see a distillery and where they make rose water and rose essence, and then had the most beautiful hotel stay.

Day 6 Stay: Dar Jean Tiouira Dades

That was so unexpected because it was just part of the tour. We pulled off. It was hard to find the little driveway and we were thinking, oh, we’d been in the car all day. We’d seen all these beautiful sites and, we’re ready for bed and we enter this riad that is just spectacularly designed.

It feels at one with the desert. It’s like the actual, the walls. Of course we sit down and are offered this tea and these beautiful little bowl of nuts and snacks. As our rooms are being prepared, our luggage gets taken up to the room and we meet the owner of this hotel, Mostapha,  who has been building it himself for the last 12 years, and he shows us around this super thoughtfully designed and gorgeously executed riad in the middle of this kind of nowhere.

We were just passing through as part of this Atlas tour, and it was one of our favorite nights of the whole trip. We had what I think was everyone’s favorite meal that night. Just a thoughtful, almost deconstructed traditional Moroccan meal.

That was a beautiful night’s sleep in these thoughtfully designed, comfortable guest rooms, and then woke up to just the light pouring into this incredible hotel that we all agreed the next time we’re in Morocco, we will go and maybe spend a few days there. The owner said he’s working on a pool.

He doesn’t have that ready yet, so maybe in a couple years it will be fully ready and just like such a beautiful little gift in the middle of this desert tour.

Day 7: Sunset Over the Desert

We packed up, headed back on the road, and continued to the Sahara Desert. We stopped in another couple towns and overlooks on the way and arrived at the edge of the dunes right around sunset, which was designed because it’s too hot in the middle of the day to be wandering around in the desert.

We arrived there right at sunset, climbed up onto our camels for a camel ride off into the pink dunes and the sunset of over the Sahara. This is such an odd thing because it’s like regular desert and then the dunes of the Sahara just rise out of the middle of the landscape. It feels a little bit out of place and truly just begins.

You’re just in regular desert, and then the next step you are in these dunes of the Sahara. We were in an area of the Sahara called the Erg Chebbi dunes and rode our camels up through the dunes. Our camel guide parked them, and we were able to walk up to the very tippy top and edge of the dune to watch the sunset.

It was gorgeous. We took a second, some of us, to run down the dunes. A steep hill, you feel like you want to roll down a rundown. And we did that with bare feet and just sailed through with sand flying everywhere. Climbed ourselves back up, rode our camels down, and when we finished our camel ride, they brought us right in to the safari tent.

Day 7 Stay: Safari Tents in the Desert

Overnight camp, this desert camp that’s right on the edge where we were able to have dinner and then, rinse off and get our pajamas on, headed back out to listen to some traditional music under the stars.

My sister-in-law had a birthday on the trip, celebrated her birthday while we were there, and our driver, our tour driver was so thoughtful and we had mentioned in passing that her birthday was coming up and he had gone to a local bakery and had a cake, bought a cake, and had her name put on it.

The tour guides sang Happy Birthday. They were doing like a traditional song, and then it transformed into Happy Birthday. They brought out this cake with candles on. It was so thoughtful. We listened to music and laid under the stars before curling up in bed in the Safari camp at the edge of the Sahara, and it just felt like magic.

Day 8: Long Drive Back to Marrakech

The next day we had a lovely breakfast outside of the desert tour and then packed up into the car and in that one day we needed to travel the distance all the way back to Marrakesh. That had taken us two days on the way out. So, this was a long day in the car. Normally this tour is a destination-to-destination tour.

You start am Marrakesh and you end in Fes, which you’re traveling through the Sahara on your way to Fes. That last day would just be getting you to Fes, but we wanted to go back to Marrakesh to finish our trip where we had begun. So, it changed the itinerary a little bit. We took a different road home than we had taken, so some of the views were different, but truly that last day of the Desert Tour was just like put your head down in a book or listen to some music. We passed around the auxiliary chord to each of our different phones so that we could play our different playlists, and I ended up reading an entire book and a half on the nine-hour drive.

We did stop at a couple viewpoints, and we stopped for a great lunch, and for the most part we were ready to just head back. We had a fantastic couple days traveling out and meandering into the desert and doing the Sahara Desert Tour, which I 100% believe was worth the drive, and this one day was a long haul of driving, so we just had to mentally prepare for that.

Day 8-9 Stay: The Berber Lodge

When we pulled in into Marrakesh, we didn’t go back into the main part of the city because we were going to finish our trip at this gorgeous boutique hotel that my sister-in-law, Megan discovered for us, it’s called the Berber Lodge, and it’s about 40 minutes outside of Marrakesh.

It was the perfect way to end our trip, and I mentioned this in a different episode about the peak and end. After having such a vibrant and exciting trip in the city, in the desert, we just spent the last 24 hours relaxing in a luxury accommodation.

Very thoughtfully designed, holistic experience with beautiful rooms and comfortable bedding and well-lit places, living room, and couple different patios and a beautiful pool and a huge garden to walk through. It was an incredible final couple days of our trip and we didn’t leave.

We checked in and we just enjoyed being there. We had all our meals there. We sat by the pool, we read books, we took pictures, we relaxed, and we finished out our trip in this thoughtful, slow unwinding, which made the whole trip feel like it had been relaxing and luxurious.

Even though at parts we were running around, or we were in the car for a long time, or the market was really bustling, finishing it with this luxurious, day and a half was perfect, and the Berber Lodge was a phenomenal stay.

Day 10: Travel Day Home

We woke up in the morning and had a taxi ride directly from the Berber Lodge to the airport. Hopped in our separate airplanes going wherever we were going. One of my sisters lives in Spain, so she went straight back to Spain.

One of my sisters went to Portland. My mom and my other sisters went back to Salt Lake City, and I flew back through Paris to Richmond where I have been downloading and processing the experience for, a couple weeks. And I made myself a goal of wrapping up the experience into a photo book by the end of May, which I know I have a little bit of time.

I tend to go on these cool vacations and take a bunch of pictures and enjoy the experience so much. And then just tuck it away. And I want to highlight this one, along with some other ones. But I’m going to start with this one because it’s so fresh on the brain and I took so many pictures.

Marrakesh is nothing, if not photogenic. I have, between me and my sisters, we have, over a thousand cool pictures of the trip. So, I’m going to put it together in a photo book and be able to show my family, be able to have those memories in a place that I can experience them repeatedly.

That will also be another way where I can have easy access to some of the memories that otherwise would get washed away. So that’s just a good reminder for me and for you as you’re experiencing some of these vacations, to make space at the end, to process it, to think about it, and to capture those memories in a meaningful way.

So, there it is, friends, there are the sort of highlights of our 10 days in Morocco.

Three Favorite Moments

I’ll tell you quickly my three favorite moments of the whole trip.

1: First Walk Through The Market

The first one was my very first walk through the narrow streets down to the market. After a few days, I felt like I was a little bit familiar with some of the shops and the shop owners and the wares and that very first time everything was new, and everything was vibrant and exciting and interesting.

And I loved just seeing the thoughtful ways that the rugs were displayed and that the dye, that indigo and other pigments were piled up for people to look at everything in Marrakesh feels a little bit technical or in a beautiful way, and I loved having all of my senses heightened and the experience feel very embodied because I was so in the moment as I was experiencing so many new things at once. It was fun.

2: Sahara Desert Sunrise

My second favorite moment of the trip was the morning that I woke up in the Sahara Desert. I woke up a little bit early. No one else was awake yet that I had seen, and I put on my slippers and pulled on my robe, still my pajamas, and I headed up the hill a little bit away from the camp.

There was a little table in chairs, I don’t know why, sitting right out on the first bend of the dune, and it was still dark, but the sky was lightning. And I sat there and watched the sunrise in silence, and it was probably 30 or 40 minutes of slow lightning, slow colors streaking across the sky.

Finally, the sun broke over the dune, and the beams were so bright. I, had to close my eyes for a minute. Again, another moment that just felt fully present and fully unique, something that I had never imagined experiencing. And there I was.

3: Last Candlelit Dinner at Berber Lodge

My final favorite moment was the very last night of our trip sitting around a table with my mom, my three sisters, one of my two sisters-in-law laughing and chatting and enjoying a meal under these beautiful bistro lights in this, botanical awning in this gorgeous hotel outside of Marrakesh. I was feeling the connection that happens when you experience new things together and the belonging to a family. We’re all very different and live lives in our own way, and yet can find such commonalities in the way we like to travel, the way we like to experience different things in the world and spend that special time together that we only get every couple year.

It all became hallmark moment for me for a minute, just looking around the table and almost hearing a soundtrack in the background of, this is my life. These are my people. This is a, such a unique place to be and really an intense gratitude for the work and investment that goes into making those types of experiences possible and how worth it always is.

Conclusion

I hope that you have enjoyed coming along with me on a recap of 10 days in Morocco that you have gotten a sense of what it might have been like to be there and. That you have the resources Now, if you’re planning a trip or know someone who is that you can refer to the show notes to get all the links in itinerary for the trip that we experienced and how it was so wonderful.

Come to Novios Couples Retreat!

Along with that, I just want to let you know that there are still a couple spots available for my upcoming couples retreat hosted in partnership with Kristen Hodson of the Healing Group. This is going to be a fully inclusive experience in Costa Rica for a couple. Dave and I together with Kristen and her husband Jake, all have long histories with Costa Rica, and a lot of expertise both in working with couples.

That’s Kristen, and in planning vacations and retreats, that’s me.

Novios Couples Retreat is a connection retreat for adventurous couples, and it’s happening this coming November 5th through 10th in Costa Rica on the Nicoya Peninsula. If you and your spouse could use some additional connection, if you want to go on an all-inclusive vacation with like-minded outdoor oriented couples, and have the whole thing planned for you from the time you land until the time you take off, have the details, the transportation, the food accommodations, and all of the fun adventures, like a surf lesson and jungle waterfalls, a sunset snorkel cruise, and incredible dinners on the sand, then consider applying today!