Taking off Travel blog

What are your favourite travel food memories? You know the ones I mean. Sometimes you have a gastronomic experience that is so great that you can still almost taste it 10 or 20 years later. Sometimes it’s not about the food but about the context while at other times it is very much about the food. Here are some of my best loved food travel experiences.

Iced Tea, Venezuela

It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia. Read more »

According to a recent study vacation planning makes us happier than taking a vacation. I found this little titbit through a post on by Christine Garvin on the Matador network, titled The Truth About Happiness and Travel. In it, the author examines this study and finds that there might be some truth in those results but I began to think about how this applies to my own situation, and concluded that I didn’t entirely agree.

Planning A Trip

For me, while there is some anticipation in the planning stage  of a trip (mainly because I’ll be thinking about a really great place) this part of the process can also be stressful. That could be because I’m a control freak — or to be a little kinder to myself, like to get every detail right. When making decisions about how to travel and where to stay, I have no idea how it will turn out. Depending on how good my research is, that might be a cause of stress.

Where’s The Fun?

I agree with Christine Garvin that some parts of travel aren’t as much fun as they could be. As I said before, when ranting about the things that annoyed me about travel, spending hours in queues even when you are using the fast bag drop, the interminable security process, cramped seats and poor airplane food (when you get any) make the journey to your destination not that much fun. Some people relax the minute they decide to go on holiday; I only relax when I’ve reached to where I’m staying. (I’m not saying that’s the way to do it; that’s just the way I am.)

Vacation Travel — Still A Thrill

Where I disagree, however, is in finding that the actual vacation experience is less thrilling than I anticipated. Generally speaking I really enjoy vacations. They represent a good chance to see, do and eat something different. They are a change of scene. It doesn’t much matter whether I am traveling for a short while longer period — I still enjoy the experience of being in a new place. Keeping some perspective also helps make vacation travel an enjoyable experience. If you don’t expect everything to be the same as it is at home then you will find difference exciting rather than exasperating.

For me, this was the best point Christine made in her post:

The point of travel is not only to achieve a high return on happiness – it’s also to learn about ourselves, other cultures, and even to be challenged to grow via those pesky annoyances.

I definitely agree with that.

If you’re a travel blogger on Twitter, then you probably already know about Travel Tuesday. It’s when travel bloggers highlight their favorite travel tweeple and things with the hashtag #traveltuesday. It’s been a long time coming, but Park Ride Fly USA now has its very own Travel Tuesday Twitter list. As I write this post, it’s got 31 members, but I’ll be updating it every time I find someone I would recommend to other travel people. Here’s the list.

I met the following people through my involvement with the location independent/digital nomad community.

• ManVsDebt
• codymckibb
• BrooklynNomad
• gotpassport
• ozlemercan
• PluginID
• BizBackpacker
• Technomadia
• almostfearless

Read more »

Sometimes as travelers we can get stuck in a rut. We find ourselves going to the same places and doing the same things — or doing nothing at all. Sometimes we don’t even realise that we have lost the thrill of exploring the new which is an essential part of a great travel experience. Let me give you an example, borrowed from the lives of two friends of mine.

Stuck In A Rut

My two friends had been visiting the same Caribbean island for more than 10 years. They had found a hotel they liked and had explored the island on their early visits and it pretty much got into a routine. Then they discovered that their usual all-inclusive hotel was closed for renovations and would not reopen in time for their annual visit. They were offered an alternative but because it had a different atmosphere from the homey ambience of their usual hotel, they decided to forego that and book their own accommodation. Read more »

Christopher Elliot recently published a list of 7 trips you should never book online. His list online booking scenarios to avoid included:

• Cruises
• Round the world trips
• International travel
• Exotic holidays
• Special events

An Online Booking Nightmare

He cites the case of a honeymoon couple’s online booking nightmare as a reason and suggests the use of travel agents instead.

I disagree, because I don’t think it’s an all or nothing scenario. I’ve been booking online for years to destinations including Europe, the Caribbean and of course, the US. Read more »