There has been a recent debate about budget travel against cheap travel: the article draws some interesting comparisons between budgeting your trip, and actually being too much of a cheapo to make the best out of it. As much as I agree with many of the statements presented in the article, I had to stop...

Literally speaking a home is a place of residence, a domicile, yet that hardly does justice to the true meaning of the word. Is anyone in the habit of believing that the two-man ultra-light tent they set up in Banff National Park's back-country or the garish and gaudy walls of the Pink Palace in Corfu...

Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were , but he didn't know what it was called." --A.A. Milne...

Just a reminder that the deadline to apply to join the team here at Vagablogging is fast approaching. If you're been putting off submitting something, head to the nearest internet cafe and fire off an e-mail. We're looking for a few new contributors to post once or twice a week on vagabonding-related topics of their...

Looking for an opportunity to express your sage vagabonding advice? Are you on or about to leave for a long-term journey, excited to share tricks and tips learned on the road? Vagablogging is getting a fresh new look, and we're looking for some fresh new bloggers to join the team. These new writers will post...

Nigel Marsh, the author of Fat, Forty and Fired , gave a great talk at the TED Sydney conference that addresses something many long term travelers deal with -- how do you balance your life and the need to work and earn money? As Marsh notes, "I found it quite easy to balance work and...

I've only recently been introduced to Unbrave Girl, a snarky personal commentary on long-term world meandering, and this post actually rang a few bells for me. People keep asking me, "Where do you live?" and I'm not really sure why, since if I've been in a place for a year or so, doesn't that mean...

Like most travelers I have a complicated relationship with my native country. When you're traveling it's sometimes hard to escape the feeling that everything is somehow much better everywhere else. This in turn means that, of course, everything at home must suck. For many travelers this translates into a kind of national self-hatred or at...

The world outside my house is currently blanketed in snow, a monochrome world of white interrupted only by the dark, wet trunks of trees, the red brick of chimneys, the occasional green of shrubs poking through. The world outside my windows is the same as it was yesterday, and yet, it's totally different to my...

There's no such thing as independent travel. Travel depends on fuel supplies, seatmates, ticket collectors, farmers, traders, innkeepers, and governments. It depends on the weather, the landscape, employers, clients, the generosity of others, what your parents did or did not do, the person you're negotiating with, the capital-T Travel Industry, the authorities (and more generally,...

Rolf has teamed up with Matt Gross, Frugal Traveler for The New York Times, for a audio slideshow about homes -- and what it means to a long term traveler to purchase one. Head on over to World Hum and have a listen. Both authors recently purchased homes, something that, as travelers, many of us...

Independent travelers often have a love/hate relationship with the travel industry. The love: Transportation networks make things easy. Beds of all calibers are usually easy to find. Information about places we've never been to has been collected and bound into books. The hate: The industry's ability to funnel large numbers of people into a single...

We all have so many little gadgets that travel with us every day. We have mobile phones, which may or may not have internet enabled on them. Maybe we also have mp3 players to throw in our bags as well. Perhaps there's a personal organizer or diary of somekind too...if you haven't been able to...

It’s not often that you run into an industry that encourages sabbaticals. In my past employment with Internet portals, only one company’s HR department considered it, but only after you’d worked there 10 years or more. Does that mean you’re out of luck if you’re yearning for a travel break from work? Not according to...

Is the day and age when anyone with the means can set out into the world and explore to their heart's content coming to end? Perhaps the more better question is: does cheap long term travel have a future? Wade Shepard, the author of Vagabond Journey , who has been perpetually traveling for over 11...

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...

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...

Shortly after last week's column which highlighted how Burning Man is like vagabonding , we loaded up our hatchback and drove to the event, about two hours north of Reno, Nevada, down a small two lane road that runs past deep blue Pyramid Lake , majestic mountains, and salt flats. We arrived on Saturday afternoon,...

Prolific travel blogger Nomadic Matt made the case for permanent travel in this article for The Huffington Post : Why we travel . He captures that exhilarating sense of freedom that vagabonders love. Freeing ourselves from routine to see the world. Interestingly enough, Mike Barish wrote a reaction piece for Gadling.com titled, On long-term travel,...

Tonight I'm sitting at the dining room table in the home of some friends whom we are house-sitting for a week. Earlier today, we handed the keys to our home off to three folks from New Orleans who needed a place to stay in the Bay Area for a few months, found through our posting...