Travel Posts

One of the hardest parts of working remotely and traveling is the need to find reliable internet from time to time. In some countries free internet is almost as ubiquitous as beer, and often advertised as prominently. But in some countries (I’m looking directly at you Australia and New Zealand) almost all the internet you will find in the wild is either time limited or bandwidth limited. It’s not unusual to be in a coffee shop on only be given 10MB or so, which is hardly enough to check your email or Facebook feed. The Solution If you’re using a […]

It’s November 1st, which means that shortly we are going to start seeing Christmas lights, trees, and of course all the great sales leading up to Christmas. It’s only about 7 weeks away now, and I’m sure that time will go by quickly. After travelling the world for almost three years now, I thought I would share some of my best ideas for Christmas presents for people like me. If you have someone in your family that loves to travel, or is thinking about taking a big trip, then hopefully this list will help you. I’ve ordered it by price, […]

In the movie The Hunt For Red October the Russian submarine captains use a technique called a Crazy Ivan by the Americans. Basically every once and a while the Russian captains will make the submarine do a complete circle, startling any potential followers behind them. Unless the other submarine is extremely careful, the Crazy Ivan is meant to detect them since it will likely catch them by surprise. I have a similar technique I use for keeping safe while traveling, in that every so often, usually every few minutes, I do a full scan of everything and everyone around me. […]

A few months ago I started a small series to talk about my ongoing goal to make at least $500 a month from this website. You can read How To Make Money From A Travel Blog: Part 1 and Part 2 here. This Month’s Results In the month of October I made $709 from this website, which is a 100% improvement over the previous month’s revenue of $347. That means I not only hit my goal of making $500/month, but I passed it by over $200. In terms of revenue, here’s where it came from for the month of October. […]

If you’re a routine flyer around North America, you may have heard today that United Airlines dropped a bombshell on its loyalty program members. But chances are you didn’t, because it seems that they chose to release the information at night. You know, during Halloween, when everyone is reading the news. The long and short of it is that many people with accumulated mileage, myself included, are facing a pretty severe devaluation of our mileage. On some international routes on other Star Alliance airlines, it will now take almost twice as many miles for the same flight. Their domestic routes […]

I recently sent this out to my newsletter subscribers. For information like this on a periodic basis, sign-up here. I hate SPAM too, so don’t worry, I’ll only send you great travel tips, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I hope by now most of you have read my free eBook, “The Beginner’s Guide to Long-Term Travel and Lifestyle Design”. I plan to update it periodically and send a new version to all of you from time to time, so please contact me if you felt there was anything missing or if there is a particular topic you would […]

A few years ago I visited New Zealand and fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams. The highlight of the trip for me was undoubtedly my trip to Matamata, New Zealand to visit the actual, real-life set of Hobbiton from the Lord of the Rings movies. Due to time constraints, I only spent one month there and only saw the North Island. I had wanted to head down to the South Island at the time and possibly rent a campervan, but it didn’t really seem like something that would be that fun by myself. So I decided at the time to […]

One of the first orders of business I take card of whenever I land in a new country is to try and get a pre-paid data plan for my phone. Some people chose not to have a working phone when they travel, since it’s sometimes a bit of a pain to find the right provider. But I don’t see much point in owning a smartphone and not having access to data with it whenever I want. Here are some other reasons why I love having a prepaid data plan with my phone when I travel. I can message friends and […]

If you travel outside of North America you’ll quickly realize just how different we do things with regards to power. First, power in North America is typically around 110V, but can range from around 100V all the way up to around 125V. In Europe and many other parts of the world, a voltage of around 220V is normal. In the old days, prior to intelligent power adapters, if you plugged a device designed for 110V into a wall socket wired for 220V, you could pretty much kiss that device goodbye as it would likely fry with a puff of smoke. […]

One of the downsides to always having the latest and greatest iPhone is that most places outside of North America and Europe seriously lag behind in terms of adoption rates. For places like Brazil and Argentina, that’s even more true because the cost of picking up a new iPhone is nearly twice as much as we would pay in North America. When I went to Argentina in 2012, I couldn’t find a Micro SIM card anywhere, and was forced to buy a normal full-sized SIM card and perform surgery on it to make it fit into a Micro SIM holder. […]