It’s a fact that travel dreams begin to intensify when summer is around the corner. For me and most other inveterate travelers I know, every fiber is starting to vibrate with an anxious need to hatch a plan pack a bag, and head off to far-flung places. The passport sings to us, asking to be...

The first and only time I’ve had to shit in a cup was at the CIWEC clinic in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was nearly ten years ago and, as a newbie traveler, I didn’t yet have experience with dysentery—the awfulness of things exploding, simultaneously, out of nearly every orifice. When the friendly doctor asked me to...

Booking three weeks of European travel (on a budget) is a daunting task. One could spend an eternity burning the midnight oil on hostel aggregators, in a desperate search for half decent dorm bedrooms that (according to my recent searches) can run you 50-60 euro a night. 60 euro for a dorm bed? Not on...

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,...

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...

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...

Cost/day: $10 The Caribbean isn’t really that cheap. However, if you’re creative and have some skills, anything is possible. Most of my money went on beer and bus tickets. What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately? Three men waving a live lobster, barracuda pizza and and an Ugly Man competition. A recent day typical of...

A fellow traveler recently asked me for some advice, and it sparked a thought I wanted to share. She’s in her twenties, interested in Croatia, and likes to have fun in the sun. So, I suggested Pag and Havar, two lovely islands off the Dalmatian coast. I recall describing them as “Ibiza in the Balkans”....

What do us travel aficionados love more than free travel? That’s right: nothing. Money is the one thing that often prevents us from going off and seeing the world. Flights are the main expense, running from hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on how far-flung you’re trying to get. Free travel—and specifically, free flights—are the...

Light filtered through oak leaves as the sun sank over Beaver Lake in the Ozarks . I’d pulled my car over at the closed Country Store displaying a Padi diving sign in the window. In bold letters pressed onto the tinted glass of the white SUV was the information to the local dive school. Upon...

As much as we want to say we’re not afraid, the truth is that we are. We might tell ourselves our fears are silly or that we shouldn’t be afraid, but we’re still paralyzed by those fears. It happens – whether we want it to or not. In many ways fear is a good thing....

Tourism, like any other industry, is evolving in many directions in order to survive. While most of us are familiar with “anti-tourism,” eco-tourism, voluntourism, and medical tourism, a growing market is emerging for wedding tourism. With people marrying older than they did 10 and 20 years ago, destination wedding tourism is the newest wave of...

Cost/day: $35/day This includes $27/day for rusbank.net living and exploring, plus an additional $8/day to maintain full connectivity with my business remotely. What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately? Dozens of giant statues and chapels made completely out of salt. Yes, I licked one. And yes, it was salty. The Wieliczka (pronounced Viel-eech-ka) Salt Mine,...

Cost: £20 per day. It's not cheap here and a bad case of inflation means that prices can change weekly, but it's defiitely possible to live on a budget. I'm renting a room in an apartment shared with an Argentinian girl in Palermo for £250 a month. You can find cheaper options further out of...

There is nothing particularly unusual about Cabo Da Roca, no specific feature that sets it apart from the other 800+ kilometers of stunningly beautiful, cliffs-crashing-into-the-ocean Portugese coastline. But from a geographic perspective, the cliffs of Cabo Da Roca are significant: they mark the westernmost point of continental Europe. When I was there last month, I...

How? In the end, I think the answer comes down to priorities. We will make time and money for the things that are highest on our priority list. I love to read and can curl up in bed and read until the wee hours of the night, but I haven’t hardly read at all lately....

Like many life changing experiences, we often realize just how lucky we are as the chapter begins to close. With one month left to my Asian adventure of "work" and play, I being to realize just how much I love this part of the world. I've become addicted to zipping through gritty city streets on...

Cost/day: $40 What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately? Still a bit jet lagged from the flight into Sydney, I awoke to the sounds of a giant dragon fly bouncing off the window as it sought freedom from my sparsely furnished single room cottage house that I was couch surfing. I opened the door and...

Several years ago, the relationship I was in ended abruptly when the guy in question dumped me over the phone. Even though we’d only been dating for several months, the breakup was unexpected—and it hurt. I felt the overwhelming urge to escape from everything. I called a travel agency specializing in last-minute tickets (here in...

Sunday, April 22 nd :from Grassroots to Global The first Earth Day was celebrated by 20 million people across the United States on a Wednesday in 1970. The tradition has now grown to over a billion people in 180 countries thanks to an idea from Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Everywhere people inhabit the earth;...