The Top 10 Reasons to Travel Condensed Down Into 1

For a while I’ve wanted to write something explaining why people should travel. Having spent a half a decade exploring the world, more and more I find myself not just traveling for my own benefit but using my platform to encourage others to travel. The problem is, to me the “why” of travel is so …

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Travel Anxiety: That feeling in your stomach before you travel

I’m leaving for Europe in a few days where I’ll spend the better part of three months visiting a whole lot of places I’ve never been before. Believe it or not, despite four years of traveling and having visited almost 100 countries, I still get a bit of anxiety before I visit someplace new. It …

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Dealing With Loneliness While Traveling

It isn’t my most frequently asked question, but it is probably a firm second. When people meet me for the first time one of the questions I am inevitably asked is: Don’t you get lonely traveling by yourself? Before I directly address this question I should back up a bit and explain why I travel …

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Paris Syndrome and Setting Travel Expectations

Recently on This Week In Travel, we came across a story about Japanese tourists who visit France and come down with something called “Paris Syndrome“. Paris Syndrome is a condition that strikes tourists who visit a place and find that it doesn’t live up to how they imagined it. Some Japanese have a vision of …

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Operation Street Food – Day 2 (Tropical Fruits)

Another day of street food has come and gone. Here is what I had to eat on Thursday. Lunch Jackfruit – 20 baht (US$0.60) bag of chicken skin and 2 chicken wings 42 baht ($1.27) bag of longkong – 50 baht ($1.51) Dinner Skewer of chicken gizzards and grilled fish – 20 baht (US$0.60) I …

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Commentary: Of Things Which Are Different, Both Little and Large

The first time I ever visited Canada I was fascinated by all the things which were different. The road signs, the occasional sign in French, the metric system, and the different products in the stores. The reason why those things stuck out is because, as much as Canadians hate to admit it, America and Canada …

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Visiting The Most Serene Republic of San Marino

I wrote most of this on the train going from Rimini to Venice as I traveled through the Italian countryside. It has sat on my laptop for half a year since my fittingly short stay in one of the world’s smallest countries, San Marino. I love tiny countries so traveling to San Marino was a …

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Travel Blogging vs Travel Writing

I’m in Vegas for Blog World Expo this week, so I’ll be devoting some time to talking about blogging and the travel industry. Here is my first installment. The impetus for this post came from an off hand comment made by Jen Leo before one of our podcasts a few weeks ago. I mentioned that …

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Coming Home After 27 Months Around The World

I’ve been in Wisconsin now for several weeks. I had expected to have some sort of difficulty adjusting to live back in the US, but the truth is, I’ve managed to take everything in stride. When i got off the bus from Chicago my mom, my aunts, nieces, nephews and even my 88 year old …

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