Adam Akaaboune

Why this site exists

This site began as a project for MGIS 3310, a web development course at Sam Houston State University. I could have built something disposable that ticked the boxes and then deleted it at the end of the semester. Instead I decided to build the thing I actually wanted to exist: a single place holding the practical information I keep re-searching for every time I start planning a trip, written plainly, with the photographs that made me want to go in the first place.

Everything here is hand-built. The pages are plain HTML, the styling is CSS I wrote rather than a template I downloaded, and the interactive pieces — the photo gallery, the map, the budget estimator, the contact form — are plain JavaScript. There is no framework underneath it and no page builder. That was a deliberate choice: I wanted to understand every part of it rather than assemble something I could not explain.

The three countries were not chosen at random. Morocco, France and Spain are close enough geographically to combine into a single trip, and different enough from each other that doing so feels like three holidays rather than one. They also share far more history than most people expect, which is a large part of what makes visiting all three in sequence so much more interesting than visiting any one of them alone.

I am not a travel professional and this is not a commercial guide. It is a personal notebook that happens to be public. Where I state a fact — an opening season, a booking requirement, a rough cost — I have tried to keep it accurate and general rather than precise and quickly wrong. Prices move, museums change their hours, and the only genuinely current source is the official one, which is why I link out to the national tourism boards rather than pretending to replace them.