Living a Dream

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

My brother just went to Yosemite and he is about to experience a feeling that people who go on great trips get. It's the same feeling we got when we returned from living in Italy, or got back from our anniversary trip to Iceland. Everyone wants to know - and lots of them genuinely  want to know it, too - what was it like? What were your favorite parts? Was it over/under/properly rated? Tell me everything. This, unfortunately, is a brutal set of questions to answer. He sent me a text several days ago about having hiked up Nevada Falls. He said, "you would never believe some of the things we saw today," and "I'll tell you about it later, but nothing I say will equal the experience." That's the feeling. While I obviously think that travel is an essential part of the human existence due to how it makes you feel about situations you're unfamiliar with (among about a million other reasons), travel is also a personal, intimate experience to have wit...

In December, Jenna was between jobs so we decided to go to Costa Rica. Not surprisingly, this was awesome. We got photos of howler monkeys mid-howl, capuchin monkeys trying to get into my backpack, sloths that were awake, and frogs galore. We also saw a few of these guys. First of all, they're giant. This guy was probably six feet long, nose to tail, and I would guess it was a solid 30 pounds (weirdly I was not able to leap out of the boat, swim to shore, climb the tree stump, and hold it to confirm its weight). Second of all, we saw several and noticed that some had back stripes on their tails while others didn't. We learned that this is essentially a sign of age. Young ones are green, older ones start to turn colors. It's not unlike getting colored spots on your skin as you get older...except those are basically just your skin dying. Anyway, going to Costa Rica was awesome and we saw all kinds of cool wildlife which I will talk at-length about in later posts. ...

I've written before that we host people on AirBnB as a way to help us feel connected to the travel community. We still go places but not nearly as often as we did in Europe, so it's fun to have people come and go from all different walks of life. As you might expect, we meet some interesting people. We also meet some strange ones. An experience last week, however, was an entirely new thing for us. We had a guest who had booked a stay with us for Monday night. We'll call him Dave. Dave was a pilot and was coming to town for an interview. Dave booked our room and sent us messages about what time he expected to come and go during his stay. He was to arrive in the afternoon on Monday and I was off work, so I had him call when his flight landed in case I wasn't home. As luck would have it I was leaving home right as he called so I offered to pick him up (our house is about three miles from the airport) because I'm a superhost/was incredibly bored. Dave told me that...

Bardonecchia was not on our "must go here" list in Italy. It was a matter of circumstance, however, as we'd heard it was a very beautiful area in the mountains and we could go quickly and inexpensively. As an added bonus, the tourism website for Bardonecchia showed snow-tubing at the ski resort as an activity. Sign us up. Neither of us really knew what to expect from this small town, but we knew it had hosted a few Olympic events in the 2006 Torino games (photographic proof at bottom). Our hotel was inexpensive and overlooked a small parking lot which turned out to host a market during our snowy stay. This was perfect, because I needed boots and got them for cheap...after I wore them walking around the wet, snowy pavement, effectively buying them without realizing it because you're not supposed to wear shoes outside when you're testing them. The "city" has a bus system that stops in 2-3 places in the town and then goes to the bases of the main ski...

People who don't fly much want to know what it's like to fly on budget airlines. Currently, the biggest budget airline in the States is Spirit, which operates largely how you'd expect: Everything costs extra. You pay to choose seats, pay to check a bag, pay to take a full-size carry-on, pay to have a glass of water, etc. Some other ways that they pinch pennies is by making you print your own boarding pass ($10 or something if they have to do it for you at the airport), baggage fees are way extra if you don't order them online beforehand, and they seemingly shrink the plane - itty bitty leg-room, seats that don't lean back, and more. So let's dig in. Wife and I decided to save $150 per person by taking the redeye from LAX to Cleveland on a Saturday night after a Friday wedding (which was a delight, for the record). The savings, we reasoned, would be worth the flight that we knew would be a nightmare. Our Sunday would be a waste of a day as we'd be too e...

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hosting people on AirBnB and how it's been really cool to trust people and meet strangers who are moving around in the world. To revisit the topic, it's a pretty eye-opening thing. One of our first guests was a family of four. They had spent the past several weeks at the woman's parents' house in Parma (that's about 15 minutes from our house, for those who don't know) and just needed to get out and be a little closer to the city for a couple of days before they moved to the Congo. To provide a little more insight, this was a girl from Parma and her husband who she met in Madagascar while she was teaching English. They now have two unbelievably well-behaved (and adorable) children who were about to stomach a 24+ hour trip from Cleveland to Newark to Brussels to Kinshasa, which is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The husband was from Guinea (that's in west Africa) and before they departed, he ga...

A man named Parker Fernandez was one of my college roommates during my senior year at Ohio University. We then lived in different areas for a few years, but he would occasionally show up in Chicago and we'd have a hell of a time wandering the city. Not long after I came to Italy, Parker moved to Madrid to teach English through a much-more-official-than-mine program. In mid-November, Jenna and I visited him. This is our story. We had a 6:40 a.m. flight from an airport almost an hour outside of Milan, so we got up at 3, waited outside for an overnight bus to take us nearish the train station, then walked 2/3 of a mile to the train station, got on a shuttle bus, and arrived at the airport around 5:30. That's not a fun start. I stayed optimistic and upbeat, my bride to be was...less enthused. We were both also getting sick. Madrid is big. Like, really big. Just the airport took ages to get through, and eventually we got the train to the appointed meeting location for Parker and...