Want a cool $10,000 to fund your craziest travel idea? Outside is seeking proposals for its first-ever adventure travel grant. From the website:

Examples of the kinds of audacious missions we’re looking for—taken from Outside stories—include sailing a homemade raft down the Hudson River, walking a perfectly straight line across Canada’s Prince Edward Island, and paddling a canoe from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. Fill out the submission form below by May 18.

Looking … Read more »

Let’s face it, finding time and discipline to write well on the road can be really, really tough. Traveling takes a lot of mental stamina. At the end of a long day, once you’ve found a dinner and settled into the hostel, the last thing you have the mental juice for is thoughtful writing about the day’s events. At that point, your brain doesn’t want to process or reflect. It wants to rest. It’s checked … Read more »

On the left, just inside the main door of the Lund Cathedral is a wooden astronomical clock built around 1424. Tangled within a euphoric stare five years earlier, I’d marveled at the intricate details, inhaled the aged wood, and relished the silence which filled the air. The experience rooted such a vivid impression that I’d vowed to return. But expectations were paused as my two friends and I walked in to find the … Read more »

Travel is sometimes considered a selfish act – when we travel, we are constantly taking in the beauty, the culture, the experiences that come from being in a new, different place. We inevitably learn, grow and change as a result.

Along the way, there are people guiding us in some way – and whether it’s by giving directions, translating, offering a room to sleep in, or just by giving a welcoming smile, these encounters are … Read more »

With a billion people traveling the world each year, travelers must simply search harder to find true authenticity. Natural splendor has been compromised by heavy tourist footprints, and these heavy footprints have steered some of the world’s most beautiful places to the overdeveloped “endangered world heritage sights” list. Spend a day at  Machu Picchu or Chichen Itza and you’ll see what I mean.

While the beauty of the world is something that should be shared, … Read more »

Travel has reached an all-time high on women’s priority lists. According to a poll by Bing, women listed traveling the world as their highest priority. Numbers 2 & 3 were having a family and living in another country respectively.

I propose that we don’t have to choose. Live in another country with your … Read more »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjY_hJL3nxY

Planning a trip can be a logistical tangle.  At any one time, I’ll have more than half-a-dozen tabs open in my web browser, each a different website.  For example:

Wikitravel – Get general info. Air Asia – Find cheap flights in Asia. Hostelworld – Book hostels. Urbanrail – Look at subway maps. Travelfish – Read hostel and guesthouse reviews in Southeast Asia. Facebook – Find friends who live there. Gmail – E-mail friends for … Read more »

“The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States. I do not know of a book that recounts the daily life in a ghetto in, say, Chicago; the secret life of a slum, or for that matter, the anthropology … Read more »

Cost:$37 a day

This isn’t a true reflection of expenses in Perth as I have been staying and eating with relatives. A large chunk of my costs are beer related and I am not a heavy drinker so expect to pay two to three times this much if you aren’t couch surfing and eating in.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately?

On a beautiful, sunny day at Cottesloe beach a friend of mine pointed out the aircraft carrier ship … Read more »

As someone who is now in the travel business, I often think back to those first few weeks of planning after my wife and I decided to take a RTW trip. We were clueless on where to begin, and everything seemed completely overwhelming. So when going over article ideas in our editorial meetings at BootsnAll, we came up … Read more »