Your cell phone may not be helpful for making a call in flight, but it's about to come in handy at the airport beforehand. Cell phones and other mobile devices are on their way to replacing paper boarding passes. The International Air Transport Association just announced a global standard for the bar code system, moving...

By the end of this year, my husband and I, who left the UK in February and are both location independent (we both earn an income from things that we can do anywhere in the world), will have traveled to and lived in the following places: Panama for 2 months Buenos Aires for 1 month...

I'll often look at expat websites (like Expats.com , AlloExpat , and ExpatExchange ) to get a sense of what the day-to-day life is like in a particular country. They come in handy not only if one intends to move to a country indefinitely, but also for helping to plan short trips. In addition to...

Are you ever too old to take a RTW trip? One BootsnAll member asked this very question recently, saying he's a 38-year-old single guy with "fairly limited travel experience." Not satisfied any longer with the 2-week trips he's been taking, he's been contemplating a RTW adventure lately. But he's got some concerns, and he wanted...

When I conduct research about living and working abroad, I come across scores of thoughtless generalizations about expatriates. When they are not being called imperialists and colonialists, they are described as aimless drifters, or snobbish embassy-types, or drunken English teachers. Disagree as we might about politics, religion, and the relative merits of Crocs footwear ,...

Abha wrote last week about how to explain yourself to friends and family when you've decided to embark on some long term travel. I thought I'd share my experiences too. Announcing to friends and family that you intend to pack up your stuff and set off for destinations unknown, can bring a variety of responses....

However and where ever you travel, the photos that come back with you act like an extension of the trip. I've known travelers who've chosen to forgo photographs in favor of living the moment and savoring their memories. I can definitely appreciate their sentiment, but I'd rather take an extra minute to have those special...

I came across Compulsive Travel TV today as I was looking for some good travel videos and didn't want to visit YouTube. I've been hooked to the site for the last hour - the videos are great! You will find a series of short travel clips and documentaries from all over the world, sorted in...

On the subject of making local friends on the road; I think it's absolutely essential that you go out of your way to make it happen. When traveling long-term, the easy thing to do is look for other travelers, and stick with them. You speak the same language and share a common bond of being...

When you want to know what the capital of Tajikistan is (Dushanbe), or why the Saved by the Bell gang had two senior proms (blame Tori), you check Wikipedia. Following that same belief in the "wisdom of crowds," four-year-old site Wikitravel is a "project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide."...

I was recently perusing back issues of the UK-based literary magazine Granta -- yes, I lead a very busy life-- and came across Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina's wonderful essay "How to write about Africa" . In his satirical piece, Wainaina skewers clichéd travel tales about Africa, by offering advice for anyone looking to compose the...

There are some great tips out there for all of us solo female travelers on how to stay safe, blend in, and navigate the different social customs and protocols we encounter on the road. But even once I’m wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and feeling secure wherever I find myself, I still...

I wrote yesterday about our experiences of making friends with locals while we're on the road. This week has brought another example and another new friendship. The first time the local Grenadian lady, Esther, came to clean our rented apartment, my husband offered her a drink. She seemed stunned: "Oh, how very kind of you,...

Those following the best in travel writing will want to see who won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards , announced on Monday. The Society of American Travel Writers' 23rd annual competition was judged by the Missouri School of Journalism faculty, who whittled down an unprecedented 1,490 entries—choosing three winners in each of the 27...

In the quest for an 'authentic' travel experience, befriending a local is one way to really get under the skin of a place. Many experienced travelers will advise you to "just ask a local" or "make friends and you'll see a different side to x, y or z". Yet you can't force anyone to be...

The October 15 deadline for the Solas Awards is just a few days away. The competition, sponsored by Travelers' Tales, awards excellence in travel writing—from the humorous to poignant, from memoir to destination. Winners receive cash prizes: $1,000 (first), $750 (second), and $500 (third). Among the 21 categories to enter are: • Cruise Story •...

Long-term solo travel, it goes without saying, can be an incredibly rewarding and enriching experience. But it's not always sunshine and rainbows. There can also be times of depression and loneliness, when the siren song of home comes calling, and you think to yourself, "What the hell am I doing here?" And nothing on the...

Maybe you've just sent your last kid off to college and your life is finally yours again. Maybe you've started your first job and you're realizing this whole "working" thing isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe you're just tired of dreaming of taking a long journey and never doing anything about it. Whatever...

Guidebooks and internet forums are great resources for finding out more about your next destination, but they almost never make you feel like you've been momentarily transported to your destination. That's where GeoBeats.com comes in. Described as "Youtube meets The Travel Channel," Geobeats is a wonderfully useful site filled with two-minute videos about topics as...

If only I'd listened to my intuition and not believed everything I'd read about English being widely spoken in Panama...then we wouldn't have arrived in a Spanish-speaking country for 2 months, speaking about 3 words of Spanish between us and had to enroll in intensive one-on-one lessons after 2 days of being misunderstood when asking...