Tag: Travel

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Best Gifts Under $50 for Your Favorite Globetrotter

Being that it is Black Friday, some of us (i.e. those who don’t wait until December 24) are well on our way to making our Christmas shopping lists now that Thanksgiving has cleared and we are starting to be able to button our pants again. We would never forget that bottle of wine for Grandpa, that baking set for Mom, and that fancy watch for our boyfriend(s)… but what about the traveler in our lives?

Buying gifts for travelers isn’t very easy, mostly because those who are travel-happy tend to operate on the same t-shirt and jeans for multiple days at a time and are grateful to have a bar of soap for the next destination. However, get them something they don’t know yet that they want this here. Here are some of the coolest travel gadgets to score before December 25.

1. Scratch Map, $20 is a poster map for the wall in which you scratch off each country you have visited to reveal a rainbow beneath. Also hidden under the scratched off countries is geography trivia.

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2. Water Bobble, $10 is a reusable, self-filtering stylish water bobble that is great for avoiding those pesky tap water table charges in Europe if you’re good at sneaking off to the bathroom unnoticed. These bottles come in many colors, sizes, and styles, although I recommend the Bobble Sport because they still comes in the standard medium size but they are more colorful, dishwasher safe, and the cap is attached so you can’t lose it (unlike the normal bobble). Every month (or two, which is the recommended swap time), you purchase a new filter for about $5. Oh and you get to save the environment too.

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3. Apple World Travel Adaptor Kit, $39 includes a set of six AC plugs with prongs to fit outlets in North America, Japan, China, United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong and works with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple MagSafe Power Adapters (for MacBook and MacBook Pro), Portable Power Adapters (for iBook and PowerBook), and AirPort Express. Trust me – you just dumped big bucks into your Apple iPhone and Macbook. Don’t mess it up by using some poorly converting cheap plug in another country and then blowing the whole thing to pieces. Invest in a quality converter.

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4. Bentgo Bento Boxes, $15 are like handy little make-your-own TV dinners, just without all of the fake food. These cute, streamlined compartmentalized boxes make creating meals for the road a lot less messy than your standard cafeteria-style lunchbox.

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5. SearchAlert Locks, $20 are the kind of thing that you think you don’t really need until you’re in a hostel in Scotland sharing a room with a convicted felon. These handy resettable combination locks also change color from green to red if the locks have been opened outside of your presence.

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My Life Aboard The Traveling Circus

As anyone who has ever read one thing written by me ever, you probably know that the most settled I have ever been is the few years where I lived in the boondocks at the edge of the woods with my mother, a yappy beagle, and an orange cat.  Not very exciting… or so it seems. 

Now that I’m back, (poorly) adjusting to post grad life, it seems all the more depressing. I have no one to hang out with, the only thing to do on a Friday night is go bowling (except there’s no one to go with…), and the only bar within a reasonable distance is Applebee’s, which doesn’t really work for me because I’m not ready to pick up soccer moms quite yet.

However, back in the day, this town was the place to be! Well, not really, but we made the best of it. Because there was nothing easy to do (…the closest mall is still 30 minutes away…) we had to make our own fun. Every single day. Mostly because we didn’t have a choice, but even still, it made us able to have fun in a cardboard box. I used to be good friends with a girl who moved to London, and her friends there in the city wouldn’t even believe her when she told them the trouble we got into on the weekends, no mind-altering substances necessary. We didn’t have a bar or a movie theater or a mall to keep us company, so we certainly never gave up being creative trying.

We would take our friends’ cars and hide them around town and make scavenger hunts for them to find them again. We would play golf in the middle of the night, setting up our own courses in abandoned playgrounds. We made our own boardgames, tie-dyed sheets in the backyard and then made them into tents and camped out under them, ran through high school hallways by nightfall, and otherwise caused innocent mischief like only kids can do.

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To do these things, I didn’t have to get on a plane or pay an astronomical museum “donation” fee. I didn’t have to try to find a dirty hostel to stay at or figure out why I had to pay for tap water at an overpriced tourist restaurant and I didn’t have to listen to a tour guide with a heavy accent tell me the history of anything. Instead, all I had to do was walk outside and call one of my dopey friends to come over.

In many ways, I think that it was these boondocks adventures that prepared me for a nomad life, one spent living out of a suitcase and scavenging for free meals and trying to solve little crises that only happen when you’re 18, dumb, and broke. Irony is, as much as we all complained about living in the edge of nowhere back in the day (and then, trying to make the best of it by having more fun than anyone who lived in civilization), it was those quirky adventures that made us yearn for it for every year onward, always keeping us upon the life aboard the traveling circus.

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How To Choose a Guidebook

As we all are well aware, I’m totally down for saving dollars whenever I can… and I fully trust technology to help me do so. I use GasBuddy to find the cheapest gas stations near me, TripAdvisor and AroundMe to find the best  restaurants in my area, and I love FourSquare for snagging discounts at places I check into. However, technology isn’t always the answer, and this is the case for one classic traveling staple… The Guidebook. Nothing beats buying a ripped up guidebook off the Internet for $2, carrying it around and holding up a map over your face, and when it’s all said and done, stuffing it in the hostel drawer for the next lucky traveler. Adversely, no one wants to put their trust in a guidebook that turns out to not be reader-friendly, outdated, and only directs you to boring places. So, to help you out on your journey through the library, Amazon.com, or the nearest book kiosk at the airport, here are some of my top guidebook picks.

I’m a huge sucker for that cheesy dad-type Rick Steves. Even though he sometimes has lame jokes and the hand drawn maps can confusingly be not-t0-scale, one of my favorite perks of these guidebooks is that attractions are nicely organized in a meaningful manner of those you can’t miss and those that can be forgotten when you’ve only got a few days in a new city. These guidebooks also feature easy-to-follow walking directions and descriptions of attractions that stick to the cool parts and don’t expect you to read paragraph after paragraph about one painting. At the same time, these books choose enough detail in that when attending a fairly well-known museum, I can often use the book itself as my own “tour guide.” The book itself reads a lot like a well-traveled friend showing you around a new place.

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When I can’t get a hold of a Rick Steves, I go for Frommer’s, an American classic for travelers. These books read a little more classroom, but they are still jam-packed full of essential information like the easiest public-transportation ways to access your favorite destinations, tips about countries you wouldn’t know otherwise, and top events and festivals in the area. However, I sometimes feel like there is too much information and it needs to be scaled down a bit or organized better so that one can quickly sift through to find the desired text.

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I like Lonely Planet guides – I appreciate their user-friendly and modernistic designs and clever and colorful photos, however, they too, try to pack too much information into too-few pages, missing a lot of stopping points and glazing over some that they do mention. When buying a guidebook, I want to be carrying something that I feel like I would die if I left it at some trattoria, not something I’m constantly wasting time sifting through the pages and wondering if I missed out on a cool sight.

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When purchasing a guidebook before a trip (which I definitely recommend because you’ll have your pick of any brand and you can buy it used and save money, plus you can read it on the plane and get a headstart) make sure you check out the “Look Inside” feature usually available on Amazon.com because all guidebooks are not the same. Obviously, you want it to cover all or most of the destinations you are going to and you want it to have the focus you prefer, either one focused on history, important museums, and educational opportunities or the most well-known attractions, coolest sights, and best restaurants. If you’re buying a used guidebook, know that you will most likely have to purchase a map as well.

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On My Way Home

Living on the Jersey Shore, surrounded by 24 hour diners, dark-haired greaseballs, and leopard print yoga pants, I couldn’t really be much further from Italy, where well-dressed people enjoy shots of expresso and kiss on street corners. I think nostalgically about my time in Italy daily, often wondering how I ended up back here surrounded by the congested parkway and the smog of the nearby city. Often, it feels like that was another world, another lifetime, and it becomes more and more difficult to remind myself that was me there and not a body double. However, during every afternoon run on the boardwalk, gazing out over the pink sky and quietly whispering winds, I sometimes forget that I’m here at all and instead, I’m taken back to being that carefree, kind-of-dirty kid one year ago.

The Jersey Shore beach doesn’t really look like any of the beaches I ever saw in Italy did. It doesn’t look like the spotted mountainside beach towns of Cinque Terre, nor does it possess the sunny winding roads of Sorrento or the wilderness-ridden cliffs of Capri. The air isn’t as light and clean here and the people aren’t as happy and slow-moving. Hell, even the water here doesn’t have the turquoise dreamy tides of the Mediterranean. However, seaside smells and salty air are the same no matter what town you’re in, and the little towns on the Shore are no different. Sometimes when running on the boardwalk, I almost want to close my eyes and, just for a second, remember my first weekend trip to Cinque Terre.

The more places that you go, the more that you realize how remarkably similar many of them are. Don’t get me wrong here – the world is a quirky place, reminiscent of a family of black sheep where each cousin is a little different from the next. There is no place in the world with the tres chic of Paris, the art splendor of Florence, or the loom of Budapest. However, they all have sister qualities within them nevertheless. New Orleans is the dirty, rogue sister of Savannah, San Francisco, the big-city hipster brother of Seattle. And when you happen to run into one of these unexpected family members, even in a place as unsexy as the Jersey Shore, it’s always a welcome reminder of the home that once was.

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Become The Lazy Tourist

Back in the day, you would never catch me dead staring blankly at a television screen, sitting at my kitchen table eating a meal, or quietly listening to music. Being away on a trip to a faraway land made this even more out of the question – time is of the essence; so why sleep, relax, or eat when you could be exploring?

Even during my too-short semester in Florence, Italy, when I went away for the weekends, I packed every moment full of museums, activities, attractions, and bars. I rationalized this insanity by arguing to myself that during the week I was spending my time enjoying every bite of gelato and every walk down Via Roma. Although I’m glad, in some ways, that I used my time wisely every weekend when visiting other countries and cities throughout Europe, by the end of the semester, my weekly plane trips to these faraway lands left me feeling pretty burnt out.

During one of the last few weeks I spent as a semester-abroad student, my best friend from back in the States came to visit me and we went to Budapest, Hungary with her mother and aunt. For the first time all semester, I didn’t bust my ass trying to find the best prices for every tour and every meal. I didn’t have my guidebook held up over my face, trying to read the map and making sure we had hit every museum on the block. And I didn’t worry.

Instead, I spent a weekend wandering open-air markets, eating at probably-overpriced restaurants, and laying in an awesome bed in – gasp – a chain hotel. I took long showers and read books when I felt like it and I ate a ton of these weird Hungarian pastries. I was a tourist. A lazy tourist, one of the biggest travel blasphemies known to travelers everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure real Budapest is great, just like all the other international cities were great (for the most part). I’m sure Castle Hill and the Great Synogogue are mind-blowing and very much worth venturing outside instead of just driving by in some lame red tour bus. But I will most likely never know what the inside of the House of Terror looks like or what real Hungarian food tastes like, because I was too busy shoveling strawberry yogurt in my mouth for $15 a pop at the Four Seasons. And that is perfectly okay.

I ate breakfast at the hotel dessert bar and I took idiotic pictures posing next to stern guards and funny statues. I had enough food to go into a coma and I went to bed early. I wandered around a beautiful, historic city with my best friend and I didn’t appreciate one bit of it. Just because you’re a traveler doesn’t mean you can’t be a tourist once in a while.

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The Best Place I’ve Ever Been

Being that I spend a lot of free time scourging travel blogs on the Internet, there is one phrase that I often come across that really gets under my skin…

It was the best place I’ve ever been. 

Oh yeah, really? The best place you’ve ever been, huh? The most beautiful, fraught with culture and life, brimming with excitement hiding underneath the budding underbelly? Somehow, I doubt that.

Not that I don’t believe a place can be like that, because they are. And that may be the exact issue… that there are many places like this. There cannot be one best place you’ve ever been, because that’s like throwing every destination into prepackaged, nicely organized ribboned boxes, when let’s get real here, Seattle doesn’t have a whole lot in common with Sydney. More accurate phrases would be New Orleans is the craziest city I’ve ever been to. Paris is the most lovely and lacy city I can imagine. I’ve never had so much barbecue as I did in Kansas City. 

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I can’t really blame people though when they ask me what’s the best place you’ve ever been? because as a journalist, it is exactly these questions that must be asked, this searching for extremes, simply because we want to hear what the hell you can possibly say. On the contrary, being trained as a journalist, you learn to never yourself state these extremes, because you lose your credibility with these dramatic and overused phrases when you’re supposed to stay without a side at all times possible.

However, the way a person responds to these questions says a lot. But a quiet wonder, a shrug of the shoulders, a damnnn I really have no idea… Now it’s those responses I listen awfully closely too. Because those are the ones who have seen the world and live to tell it enough that you have to ask first.

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Heart

I haven’t slept in days.

Night after night, I lie awake in the various beds that I call my stopping points in my never-ending pilgrimage across New Jersey, and although I wake up before the sun can be seen and I lie down long after I ever wanted to, I can’t get my heart to stop beating so ferociously although my eyes are begging it to just be quiet so that maybe, we can get to work on time tomorrow.

No matter where I was or what I was doing, the most fruitful sleeps that I remember are the ones where I worked alongside the world by day, exploring and smiling, whether it be in the sunshine or beneath a faded blue poncho. I think of running into the various places I called home after breathlessly working to open the locks, my friends and I stumbling through doorways and collapsing on unclaimed beds, so tired we could barely bear to put up our hair or take off our boots. These rests were the ones that only came after a day climbing up mountains, battling the rain, running from misfits, and doggy-paddling the Atlantic and dingy ponds alike.

They didn’t really have much to do with waking up to a blaring alarm, strapping on a pair of heels in the parking lot, or packing a lunch. It was those days, back in the day, where I don’t really remember feeling my own heart beating out of my chest, but instead I felt it blaring in my brain, saying, Wow, isn’t this place magnificent or How did we ever end up here?

Never in my life have I been so tired as I am these days, never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve a dutiful eight hours rest. Ironically, never in my life have I moved so slowly, either, and for the first time, I find myself trying to pull free the heart in it all.

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Facing The Morning Pilgrimage

When I die and go to Hell, I will spend an eternity sitting on route 80 in bumper-to-bumper traffic, making bets to myself on how long it will take me to get to work as I slump behind an 18-wheeler and a beer-bellied plumber.

As rogue travelers, we spend a lot of time on the road, usually going somewhere cool (or cool in theory). However, I don’t think “a lot of time on the road” should translate to 30 miles and an hour and a half to work each way.

Am I the only one that sits in an obscene amount of traffic twice a day, everyday? No, I’m not – because if I did, route 80 would be empty for at least some of that strip of 30 miles. And honestly, that’s the part that really irks me. According to a 2011 Texas A&M University study, traffic congestion caused Americans to travel 5.5 billion hours more and to purchase an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, which adds up to 56 billion unnecessary pounds of carbon dioxide released during that year.

Hard to grasp? Yeah that’s probably because it is. Also, just so you know, this adds up to an average of 38 hours per commuter per year, according to Adam Werback in The Atlantic. Personally, I spend about 480 hours in my car each year just commuting to and from work, so this figure sounds pretty awesome to me, as well as my 100,000 mile ’02 Ford Focus.

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This picture actually gives me anxiety

In America, we go on about how we have to save the environment, about how we should recycle, drive hybrid cars, and use reusable products, which is all good advice since Americans make up for five percent of the population yet use 20 percent of the world’s energy, according to the World Population Balance. However, also in America, train station stops aren’t necessarily accessible, nor are they necessarily fairly priced, or necesssarily reliable.

Conversely, we are also constantly told we need to put more time and effort towards our personal lives; that we need to spend more time with the kids, take the retriever for a walk, have dinner with the wife. According to the International Labour Organization, Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. Somehow, I highly doubt that every single one of those Americans chooses to work an extra ten hours each week.

What great advice! Too bad it’s totally unrealistic, especially considering there are three unemployed people competing for every position, says Fox News, which makes for slim pickings for jobs.

To top the whole thing off, many of us come home angry, frustrated, and anxiety (and back pain) ridden – just from coming home from work. Exhibit A: Today at about 8:00 pm, a 60-or-so-year-old man in a small yellow convertible car actually followed me back to my apartment complex, parked behind my car, proceeded to walk up and then bang on my windows screaming “You know what you did,” and then trying to physically open my door. Luckily, I had locked the doors, feeling like the fact this guy had been behind me and then drove into my complex for six miles or so was kind of weird. Then after he left and I went inside, I looked out the window and saw that he had come back and circled around, most likely copying down my license plate so that he could find me and kill me. True story people. If I go missing, you know why.

I’m no genius (obviously). I’m not an engineer, I don’t know the makings of how to build a highway, or how to manage traffic issues, or how to deal with energy usage in this country or any other problems that I have mentioned here. But I do know one thing for sure – something isn’t quite right, and it’s not the residents of 740 Park who are seeing the effects. It’s you.

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Five Reasons to Cruise the Open Seas

Let’s get serious here… I have been on my fair share of trips (although I’m certainly nowhere near finished). I love running ragged across the world, carrying my $20 backpack filled with old t-shirts and a toothbrush, living by, quite honestly, the seams of my dress. However, every once in a while (i.e. when my parents pay for it) I enjoy a good ol’, carefree, luxurious, and easy, cruise.

When cruising, the only map you need is the (overly complicated) deck map. The only decision you need to make is which colorful drink will accompany your breakfast. The farthest you need to walk is up a flight of stairs.

Cruising isn’t for everyone, nor is it fitting for every trip. However, here are a few reasons why it’s worth the indulgence every once in a while.

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1. The only line you will stand in is one for the buffet. Cruises are a ready-made vacation. See it as a positive or negative, but the security on these babies is incredibly lax. You’re not going to be patted down by a man named Harmony and it is scarily easy to sneak liquor in. If you’re like my large Sicilian father or you have a hard time staying in a seat for eight hours, cruises are a great way to get the fun of a vacation without the beforehand hassle.

2. Drinking at breakfast isn’t only accepted, it’s expected. I’m not totally sure why only some cruises are classified as “booze cruises,” because really, all cruises are like this. Let’s be serious here, what else are you going to do for 5+ days on a ship. There are more bars than there are restaurants and grandparents, grandchildren, and everyone in between drink together in one happy (and sloppy) union. They are truly the great equalizer. Plus, the heavy cabin shades make it easy to sleep in the day after… and after.

3. You can make neighbor friends you can ditch at will. Cruises are great for making friends because everyone is drunk (see above) and you see everyone over and over again, making the ship kind of like one big family hangout. Since everyone is on vacation and obviously wearing their favorite outfits, they’re already in a great mood and everyone is easy to talk to. If you depart from a port close to where you live like most people do, you will also probably make friends with people who live close enough to that you can hang out with them again later. And if you don’t want to see them again… well you’ll be home in seven days anyhow.

4. There’s a lot of free stuff. Well I guess it’s not really free since you shelled out somewhere in between $500 to $1000 for this (or your parents did) but the nice part is that you don’t have to hand out a lot of money once you’re onboard (you’ll just pay the bill later, when you’re sober). No paying for meals, shows, towels, movies, tastings, room service, etc.

5. You don’t have to do anything yourself. If you’re an overachiever like me, you probably run around like a maniac all day organizing all the idiots you know who remarkably haven’t fallen out of an open window yet. It gets pretty tiring. However, cruising is a lot like being a kid again, only this time, your parents let you do whatever you want, because you’re a damn adult now. Cruises tell you where to go, what to eat, what time it is, and what you’re doing, so for the first time… there’s nothing to worry about. Now that’s a vacation if I ever knew one.

 

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This is how you get on the Titanic without the whole iceberg thing

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The Weight of The World

“How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

– Up In The Air (2009)

I’m not sure if I can ever say it quite so eloquently or quite so sadly as George Clooney did when he played Ryan Bingham in “Up In The Air,” but after the last few days in the hoopla of the final and rather surprising selling of my house, not the only house I’ve ever lived in but certainly the most significant, I can say that I agree with our handsome friend.

Traveling is a funny thing. When we’re on the road, we depend on the little we have on our backs. Which is probably why many of us sweat wondering what we’ve forgotten, double-checking for our phones and our keys and our credit cards and if you’re me, a pair of ear plugs and extra underwear. By the end of a trip, as much as I always love the destination I had the pleasure of visiting, I’m always a little relieved to be free of this stress and to be back at my house, my house, where everything is where I put it and everything is comfortable, familiar, and ordinary. In a life of uncertainties and insanity, it is this ordinary, this average, that is effortlessly grounding. 

However, when you have to give the place you live to someone else, a total stranger, your life is at ends with itself. When I think about someone else who I don’t know and never will know sitting in the exact place I’m sitting in now, closing a broken window that is mine and running down hallways that are mine and stumbling into doorways drunk that are mine, it makes me pretty uneasy.

Unfortunately, this is the way of the world. I’m a 22-year-old postgrad living in my mother’s house so quite honestly, I have zero say in the matter, and rightly so. I can’t make my family and my childhood toys stay in a place that I would desperately love to move out of just so that I can always know that they are there, my life, my ordinary, waiting patiently for my return on a particularly gloomy weekend.

It’s at this point where we have to ask ourselves: How much do I weigh? When your house is gone, when your life is gone, you have to restart. You have to look at your life and arm yourself with what items, what memories, and what people matter, and you have to create a new home within yourself.

And this is travel. When scavenging the open road, we don’t have our comfy beds and our mother’s cooking and the safety of our locked windows at night. Instead, we will stay in unfriendly rooms with people we will never see again and we will pack our toothbrushes up after using them. In this way, what we do in our travel is what we must do in life when it is time to reevaluate, move on, and restart. We create homes inside ourselves while packing as little as we can possibly fit into our patched backpacks.

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Because, as always, for an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself.