Perhaps you’ve found yourself, sitting in a cubicle pecking out reports for your boss, longing to be on a secluded beach in some far corner of the world. You go home from work and pull out your atlas and dream of Mai Thais and the sound of waves crashing on the shore. You turn the...

One of the most interesting aspects of traveling is meeting the fascinating array of people who manage to make their travel dreams a reality. We’ve met young people and retirees, couples, single parents and families of every sort you can imagine. One of the things that always strikes us is the resourcefulness of this community...

"Tourism is a sacred journey, the contemporary counterpart of medieval pilgrimage. It turns on a very contemporary distinction between work and play. It thereby ignores that hard work can be pleasurable and that pleasure can be hard work." --David Brown, "Genuine fakes" (1996)

Location Independence is a concept that has exploded over the past few years. With the rapid expansion of the internet, all of a sudden, there are possibilities that didn’t exist, even a decade and a half ago. Travel has long sung her siren song in the hearts of many arm chair gypsies and now many...

Last week, I wrote about Outside magazine’s Best Places to Work feature for those searching for a workplace that values the right work-life balance. Another option is breaking out of your own home territory. If you don’t love where you live, but you can’t cut the ties to an office paycheck just yet, you might...

In my post last week, I talked about whether it's safe to travel now . As a bit of a follow-up, I'll talk about when it's dangerous to sit still for too long: always . Have you ever been stuck in class or at the office and felt like you were dying inside? It might...

Right now I should be on top of Ryan Mountain in northern Vermont, but I'm home, working. The trip had been planned for a year and fell through 48 hours before departure. Open-ended work builds both the ability to travel (savings) and barriers to travel (commitments and responsibilities). When it comes to the lifetime ratio...

One of the most eye-opening moments when working abroad is finding about all the differences between your host culture and home culture. For example, a Japanese salaryman might accept unpaid overtime as business as usual. A French worker, on the other hand, might disagree with staying beyond normal business hours. Salon.com did a detailed comparison...

After all the time and attention we devote to travel, it seems that we travelers have a good foundation for joining the travel industry. I'm curious to ask today -- do you work in travel? What do you do? How did you get started? Even if your work isn't an obvious travel gig, let us...

When I was a child, my mother thought I'd join a nudist colony; I was always taking off my little toddler dresses and running around in the backyard with nothing on. As an adult, I've managed to parlay comfort with my body into an easily portable financial application: nude figure modeling. There are two genres...

Just got back from India. For some reason, I thought this homecoming would be like all the rest. What I didn't expect was to wind up in a stampede of my friends' forward momentum: A graduation party two hours after arrival, an NYU commencement in Radio City Music Hall, and Facebook pictures aplenty of caps...

Do you have friends and family who write off travel as impractical? Sometimes good strategies can work in both travel and business, as this blog post by tech company 37 signals illustrates: Getting Real with Travel . The post cites the experiences of Marcel Uekermann, who's a fan of 37 Signals' unconventional approach to business....

I'd never thought much about senior travel until a wrinkled yet muscled man sat down next to me on the Pokhara to Kathmandu bus. Preston had lived in Mexico, Hawaii, Nepal, Thailand and more -- he'd been on the road for most of his life. He'd relied on his wits and his skills to take...

A common headache many vagabonders face is criticism from people back home. They say things to make you feel that travel is irresponsible. If you return home to work, they think you validate that their lives are "the real world" and your adventures abroad aren't. Prolific travel blogger Nomadic Matt hit out at the haters...

What to do after that grand adventure abroad? Back to the land of work? Matador Life has an article about this topic called How to Get Back to Work After Traveling . I have to disagree with one tip in the article, "swear yourself off travel for a year." For me, planning my next trip...

I know I've been dwelling on my transition phase for the last few or more posts. But it's only really been over a month; yes, I'm allowing myself full grievance time. I'm still questioning my move back to Dubai, still wondering whether my career is as important as I thought it was. I was speaking...