My friend and author, Francis Tapon, has been traveling around Africa for the past year. While I was sailing up the west coast of Africa this year, he had been traveling across similar territory by land. Given how different our trips were, I thought it would be interesting for Francis to compare his observations about …
Over 7,000 miles later I am now on the California leg of my road trip. The last week has been extremely busy. My days have consisted of long distance driving, meeting people and seeing things. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but I haven’t left a lot of time for writing blog posts. I have …
My three month North America road trip is over. This was by far the most driving I’ve ever done in a single period in my life. The final tally for what I saw and experienced was more than what I initially expected. It was a busy three months and in the end it was something …
If you’ve paid attention to the news in the last several days, you’ve probably heard about the brushfires in Australia. I’ve been paying closer attention to that story than I normally would have because I’ve been to many of the places which have been damaged by the fire. I’ve driven through country Victoria, I’ve seen …
In August of 2012 I attended the Book Passage Travel Writing Conference and had the pleasure to meet Jeff Greenwald. He was introduced to me as being the world’s first travel blogger. Needless to say I was intrigued by this claim. As it turns out, he does indeed have a pretty solid claim on being …
I’m guessing the moment you read the header for this post, certain images and thoughts popped into your head. In fact, for most people in the world, Hiroshima means one and only one thing. If you asked someone to name something else about Hiroshima, they probably couldn’t. The word Hiroshima has become so intertwined with …
Today marks the 9 month anniversary of me closing on my house and becoming homeless. It is also the day that my old college roommate Sean will be appearing on Jeopardy. Sean and I were the backbone of the Macalester College Bowl team. We were the first and only team to ever beat the faculty. …
Hong Kong is very densely populated. I knew that before I came here and I knew that my selection of affordable lodging wouldn’t be first class. I have no problem with that, and for the first several days I was in Hong Kong I had a nice, but small, place to stay. However, I wanted …
I don’t just like to write about what I see in certain places and then drop the country as I move on to the next. There are some subjects that deserve revisiting, and one that sort of jumps out at you in Hong Kong is the Philippines. Why the Philippines? You’ll notice it if you …