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You are here: Home / Archives for Featured

How We Travel For Free

September 30, 2013 By Danny

Some call it a game yet others call it an obsession.  We apply for the credit cards that offer the largest amount of points and miles and aren’t afraid to use those points and miles.

Over the past three years, since returning from our RTW trip around the world, we haven’t been afraid to put our good credit to use.  We pay our bills on time and in full each and every month and have very high credit scores as a result.  This means that when we apply for credit cards, cards that offer large and lucrative sign-up bonuses, we usually get accepted.  We’re smart about what cards we use for what purchase and take the time to make a plan.  In the end, we’re rewarded.

We’ve flown thousands of miles on thousands of dollars in airfares and only paid a few hundred dollars for the occasional airfare or credit card fee.  We still have gobs of miles to spend and are generally accruing points and miles faster than we can spend them.

Over the coming months we’re going to talk more and more about the strategies we employ.  We’re careful with our credit, consider it our most valuable asset, and watch it closely.  Many of our close friends and family have watched this over the past few years and a few people have joined us in this ‘hobby’ while others still want more information as to how…so we’re going to tell you!

Stay tunes for now but watch for more over the coming weeks and months.

Filed Under: Deals, Featured, Guides, Headline, Travel & Planning Tagged With: banking, credit cards, finances

4 Bachelor Party ideas for Las Vegas and Beyond

August 7, 2013 By Danny

Typically, most bachelor parties here in the USA involve a lot of booze and often a trip to Las Vegas or Atlantic City.  In a few weeks, I’ll be heading out on a bachelor party myself and although some of the other guys wanted to take a traditional Vegas trip and stay at a place like the www.arialasvegas.com, the bride to be was dead set against that option.  Several still took the time to research Vegas flights and things to do in Sin City but it was to no avail.  Las Vegas can be a great place, but it is only one of the options we have here today.

Kayaking in Mexico Rio Micos

A Backwoods Adventure.

Nothing quite says manliness and male bonding like a camping trip.  Somehow the challenge us urban and suburbanites face when lighting a campfire always makes stories for the ages.  Add to that a few rounds of brew and no real stressors and you can have yourself a nice relaxing trip…but that’s not what bachelor parties are all about.  Instead, try to take a mountain biking or a white water rafting trip.  The nice thing about rafting is that by choosing a rafting company, such as the one we used on my bachelor party, no one needs to have any real skills or gear.

The GateKeeper at Cedar Point

Be A Kid.

With this upcoming bachelor party we chose instead to do something that would be simple and fun.  We’re visiting Cedar Point in Ohio where we will ride roller coasters until we’re blue in the face.  To add a little bit of manliness to the weekend we’ll also be hitting a baseball game and grilling out for dinner.  The really exciting thing is that none of the crew has been to this park before; most have never been to Ohio for that matter.

Bachelor Party in PragueTravel Abroad

In sticking with the theme of doing something new, why not take that same airplane and turn it in another direction.  Recently I went to a Bachelor Party that took place in Puerto Rico, no passport needed and relatively inexpensive airfare still left us in a new country with plenty of options for things to do.  Although if you have more money at your disposal, you could follow the British Stag Party tradition and visit Prague instead!

 

 

adventure travel

Filed Under: Featured, Headline, Travel & Planning, Travel Reflections, USA Tagged With: bachelor party, drinks, fiesta, hiking, prague, Travel & Planning, vegas, whitewater kayaking

A Really Really Really Really Long Walk

April 12, 2013 By Danny

I once walked 100 kilometers in one day. We started at 3am, the four of us. It was an organized event so we weren’t alone but when I walked up to the finish line at midnight I had been alone for hours.

Somehow, I thought it would be a good idea to do that long walk again….in winter!

What started out as a simple dare quickly grew into a quest for myself and three other friends. (This was a different group from my first foray in long distance walking.) I had been hoping to rejoin the 100km walk again later this month but scheduling kept that from happening. In the process I heard about a 50 mile trek to commemorate the first time this walk was done, by Robert F. Kennedy, mentioned to my friends, and there was no turning back.

The group who started the 50mi Kennedy Walk
At the start there were 34 walkers. Only 12 would walk the entire distance.

Because this was was shorter, the start time was a leisurely 4am. In preparing for the walk, all I could think about was the immense pain and suffering I felt toward the end of the 62mi when I’d done it the first time. Yes, this was was shorter, but it was winter time so really no real benefit from the decreased distance. I’d walk a little less but have to deal with temperature control, freezing water and maybe even snow on the trail.

We got to the trailhead a bit late but still managed to start with the group. It was dark. It was cold. I wanted to walk faster than the rest of my group. We all wanted to sleep. The sun came up. We ate food. My water froze. I unfroze my Camelback’s hose so I could drink. It froze again. Fun, right?

The Towpath connects Washington, DC to Cumberland, MD
A lot of the path looked just like this. It was a beautiful day….in February!

The walk itself took place along the C&O Canal. The Canal was built alongside the Potomac River to ferry goods up and down river between Washington, DC and Cumberland, MD; a distance of about 185mi. The walk I did before, the 100km, started in DC itself and went all the way to Harper’s Ferry, WV. The “shorter” walk I did the second time started further upstream in Great Falls, following the same canal and towpath all the way to Harper’s Ferry.

Chester and Lionel on the trail, with a bow tie!
You can see Chester’s bow tie…I tied it!

Eventually we all hit our stride and began to enjoy our day despite the cold. This is probably a good point to introduce the rest of my cohorts. There was Chester and his lovely bride Catherine. Chester and I knew each other from GWU where we played Rugby with the fourth member of our trip, Lionel. Lionel and Catherine, who for various reasons didn’t want to walk the whole way, each took turns shuttling the car while Chester and I walked the full distance. We were all dared to start the day wearing oxford shirts and bow ties (my bowtie fell off before our first pit stop) to help us commemorate RFK but Chester was the only one stupid strong enough to make the whole trip in a pair of Cole Haan dress shoes.

The walk itself is easy.  Technically, it is uphill, but 600 feet in elevation spread over 50 miles doesn’t really count for much elevation.  It’s that very flatness that causes the pain in the hip flexors and ankles, from doing the same thing over and over again for hours.  With the sun up, we warmed up quite a bit and I didn’t have any more problems with water freezing.  We walked some more and some more.  We talked politics and business and philosophy, as friends do, and then we talked about how much we hurt and what we wanted to eat.  A friend visited us a few hours before sunset and brought us hot chocolate and magic bars.  Amazing.  We kept walking.  Walking some more.  Did I mention this was a very long walk?  We saw some kind of strange albino deer. The sun set.  The temperature dropped a lot.  We still had miles to go. We kept walking.

In the end we didn’t finish too long after sunset, arriving at Harper’s Ferry right about 7pm.  Although 7pm sounds like a nice time to finish something, we’d been walking for 15 hours straight and were simply exhausted.  For me though, I was shocked at how much easier a 50 mile walk was compared to a 62 mile walk, and thankful that we’d not encountered any snow. When I’d finished this walk the first time, doing the full 100km, I could barely move.  Although I was plenty sore this time around things like stairs and hills didn’t look quite so scary.  We even went out for dinner and each enjoyed a nice pint of beer.

2013-02-09_20-42-24_427

Then we got to the B&B we’d booked for the night, and Chester removed those Cole Haans…  The shoes survived surprisingly well but the feet were another story.

   2013-02-09_20-43-41_307

Filed Under: Featured, Headline, Hike, photos, USA, Weekend Warrior Tagged With: harper's ferry, hiking, rfk, rivers, sore feet, walk, washington

Our Bucket List

January 28, 2011 By Danny

To those who think we’ve done it all….we haven’t, not even close. Here is our stab at making a bucket list. I’m sure we’ve missed things but here it is for your enjoyment. Feel free to add your own suggestions or share some of yours with us.

  1. 70.3 Triathlon (a.k.a. A half iron-man triathlon. Or as Danny calls it…an Aluminum Man)
  2. Be in a movie.

    IMGP1339
    Cakes of Mexico’s Semana Santa
  3. Become a gourmet chef…or at least know how to cook things better 🙂
  4. Bike across the USA.
  5. Bike Italy…. A wine and food tour.
  6. Camp Alaska.
  7. Catch and prepare my own dinner.
  8. Coach or Teach.
  9. Compete in a multi-day adventure race.
  10. Dance good salsa.
  11. Discover Bhutan.

    IMGP2490
    Hanging out over Bolivia’s Death Road
  12. Dive with whale sharks.
  13. Drive in the Mongol Rally.
  14. Experience Mongolia with a group of friends from home.
  15. Get paid to take pictures.
  16. Get really good at rock climbing.
  17. Grand Canyon. Hike Rim to Rim, 1 Day. (We already did down and up, rim to rim sounds better)
  18. Grow our own fruit trees and a vegetable garden.
  19. Have a wood-shop…and use it.
  20. Have kids.
  21. Hike the Appalachian Trail.

    IMGP1765
    Chocolate in Ecuador
  22. Learn Arabic.
  23. Learn how to make stain glass.
  24. Learn to play harmonica and play on the street until I’ve earned enough money for dinner.
  25. Live it up in the Balkans.
  26. Make our own chocolate…and have it taste good.
  27. Make our own wine, or maybe just work a vineyard.
  28. Make stationary.
  29. Open a travel bookstore with a Bariloche styled chocolate shop.
  30. Own our own home.

    IMGP0305
    Zebras!
  31. Restore an old house…then move in.
  32. Ride a zebra! (I’d settle for a wildebeest!)
  33. Road trip Australia
  34. Russia….St. Petersburg to Vladivostok (or backwards). The Trans-Siberian we almost took.
  35. RV New Zealand
  36. Sail the ocean….or at least a small part of it.
  37. SCUBA the Red Sea from a live-aboard boat.
  38. See a grizzly bear catch salmon in its mouth.
  39. See a humpback whale breech.

    IMGP1836
    A Little Whirling Dirvish in Sudan
  40. See the Northern or Southern Lights…preferably while sitting in a hot spring in a glacier.
  41. Ski
  42. Skydive.
  43. Spend more time in the Middle East – Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, etc.
  44. Travel Indonesia.
  45. Walk past a sidewalk cafe and take a free roll out of the basket on someone else’s table. 😉
  46. Win a race. Just one.
  47. Win the lottery.
  48. Work a potter’s wheel.
  49. Write a Book
  50. Travel the World (I guess we did this one already…)  🙂

Filed Under: Bucket List, Featured, Headline, Re-Entry, Travel & Planning Tagged With: dreams, lists, travel

Review: Jammin’ to a new language

January 19, 2011 By Jillian

When we were approached about reviewing this smart phone application, I was excited. There are tons of applications out there to help travelers learn European languages, or even a few words of Cyrillic or eastern languages, but I find most of them lacking. The idea with Earworms Musical Brain Trainer is that listening to the language downloads will put words and phrases into your long-term memory, so you can actually recall it when you need it.  The lessons are put to music or rhythms which improves the brain’s recall function. Given that epic stories from thousands of years ago, like the Odyssey, were put to music so a poet could remember the whole thing, I think the creators on to something here…

I love languages and to be completely honest I speak three of them, but as I learned on the road, that wasn’t enough. To try out this app, I wanted to put it through the ringer so I chose two languages that are considered difficult to learn: Russian and Arabic.

Getting Started: It was easy to download the different languages on my iTouch. You have to buy each language individually and most languages come in a few volumes- beginners should start with volume 1 with introduces a traveler to the key phrases for getting around: hotels, restaurants, etc… Along with the audio, you can read the phrases on your smartphone with the lesson.

How it Works:

For volume 1 downloads, each language come with 10 modules: 1) I would like, 2) To order, 3) Have you got?, 4) To the airport, 5) Numbers, days and time, 6) Where is there..?, 7) Directions, 8) Where, when and what time?, 9) Problems, problems and 10) Do you speak English? Unlike other language applications, there isn’t a cutesy little travel story along with the lesson. It’s a simple repetition of the phrases, by a native speaker and an English speaker. They chat a bit, but it’s clear that the focus is on getting the rhythm in your head. The whole volume was a little over an hour.

The directions suggests you to listen to the whole download on the first day and then regularly listen to the modules over the next few weeks.

My Thoughts:

I listened to the Russian and Arabic modules on and off for a few weeks, usually while running. I actually enjoyed the melodious repetition. Certain phrases, even with just my casual use of the modules, have really stuck in my head. I would definitely recommend these modules to traveler’s looking for an easy, relatively fun way to learn the basics. Plus listening to a native speaker is going to give you a much better accent.

Will it get you speaking fluently? No, but it does give you enough of a basis to be able to formulate phrases on your own. Although it doesn’t teach you to conjugate verbs, it does give you some verbs that you can use to make your own sentences. I also really appreciated the written text which gives a literal translation of some phrases and some grammatical tips, especially for Arabic, this gave me a real sense of place and culture.

Pros: Listen and read at the same time. Hear a native speaker and an English speaker in quick succession. Upbeat and easy to listen.

Cons: The price is overall a little steep, so use the free demo downloads on their website to try it before you buy it.  I think it’s worth it!

Price: $9.99 But check their website for coupons and offers!

Disclosure: We were provided free downloads in exchange for reviewing this product.

Filed Under: Electronics, Featured, Headline, Reviews, Travel & Planning, Travel Gear Tagged With: learning, tools

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