There are so many different ways to travel and see the world. If you enjoy cycling, why not combine your passion for the bicycle with your passion for travel? This summer, consider dusting off your bike and hitting the road. In this post, our guest author outlines the benefits of bicycle touring for teachers and suggests some possible destinations. Take it away, Mike!
I didn’t start traveling until I was about 30 years old, so I never experienced the gap year/party hostel mode of travel. But I have always been a budget traveler, so I’ve had to learn how to balance budget strategies with making decisions that felt age and comfort-appropriate. I don’t think budget and comfort are mutually exclusive concepts, but I do think you have to know the budget travel tips and tricks that will give you a happy medium while on the road.
It can be difficult for teachers to plan their vacations when so many others share the same holidays and breaks. However, there is one great advantage to this – many homeowners who need housesitters also tend to travel during these times. So, if you’re a teacher who likes immersive travel experiences and saving money, this is the perfect travel opportunity!
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Sometimes my readers write to me with travel-related questions. I always do my best to help out, and sometimes share some of the questions and answers here in my blog posts. I hope you find them helpful! Feel free to add pointers of your own in the comments below, or ask me anything about travel. Who knows, maybe your question will be featured in a future blog post?
My most favorite podcast ever is Travis Sherry’s Extra Pack of Peanuts Travel Podcast, and if you’ve been hanging around my website here looking for some good travel tips, then you’d definitely also love Trav’s podcast which always has a ton of them! CLICK HERE to open up his podcast page and check it out.
So one of Trav’s recent podcast guests was Sasha Martin, from GlobalTableAdventure.com. A few years ago, Sasha set out to cook a meal from every single country in the world–all 196 of them–and she did it! On her blog, she recorded her quest and shared all of her recipes. Trav and Sasha shared a listener challenge on the podcast to get as many people as possible to cook one or both of two possible recipes. CLICK HERE to open the show notes page for the episode on Extra Pack of Peanuts. I was glad that both options were vegetarian, and chose to try the Roasted Pumpkin Salad with Arugula and Chevre, which comes from Argentina (I’ll attempt the Guinness Cake from Ireland some other day). Continue reading
UPDATE: This issue is now available for sale in PDF format. CLICK HERE to buy it now!
The September 2014 issue of Travel Beyond Excuse Magazine is live! It is also the final issue of Travel Beyond Excuse Magazine. Why?
I’ve been having lots of fun with the magazine, but have found that it takes too much of my time and resources away from other projects I would like to work on for my Travel Beyond Excuse readers! A magazine, I have discovered, is really a project for a team–not an individual like me. As Steve Pavlina so eloquently put it in one of this month’s articles, “To free up time and energy for future growth in new directions, you have to drop the merely satisfactory. This gives you a shot at the truly beautiful.” Continue reading
The bright yellow house down in the green jungle valley below beckoned us. We were in Baños, one of the most popular tourist towns in Ecuador, walking up a dirt road off the tourist radar, beyond all the hostels, tour companies, and restaurants and into the surrounding farmlands. Huge greenhouses growing babaco fruit (which resembles a papaya but tastes completely different) and tomates dulces (”sweet tomatoes”—another tropical fruit that resembles a tomato but is unrelated) dotted the hillsides. The yellow house had a huge sign on it which read, “Cafe Bar.” We strained to see a road to the place, perhaps in the trees behind the building… But it looked like it was down there by itself, in the jungle across a river canyon, with only a footpath leading to it. Continue reading
A couple months back, I published a blog post on how to pack everything into carry-on luggage. Now, recently returned from our two and a half month trip to Ecuador, I have some real-life examples of how not checking a bag saved our behinds (twice!) from being stranded in an airport overnight, hundreds or thousands of miles from our origin and destination. Not only that, but by carrying everything with us we were able to jump into the front of many long lines and avoid what could have been hours of hassle. FREEDOM!
FREEDOM!!!
Currently my husband and I are traveling in Ecuador for 2.5 months, and we came down without any checked luggage. Each of us packed a small duffel bag that easily fits in the overhead compartment on the airplane, and a day pack.
Day pack and small duffel bag: my only luggage for our 2.5 month Ecuador trip.
Packing light proved advantageous several times over even on the flight down. Continue reading
Being able to speak even a few basic phrases of the language of the country you plan to visit will pay off in more ways than one. This is a strategy I use to not only help me save a little more money, but also to increase my safety and connect with the locals in a more fulfilling way. By making the effort to speak the language of your destination, in most cases the locals will be far more likely to help you, give you better prices on their goods, and generally like and respect you much more than the next tourist who expects everyone to speak English to them. Even in situations where the guides, shopkeepers, waiters and others speak English, if you speak to them in their own language it will put a smile on their faces and you’ll get a lot more positive attention from them.
A few nights ago my husband and I landed in Ecuador. We spent our first day in Guayaquil. As we walked along the Malecón Salado (boardwalk along the river), we found a man with a long pole reaching high into a mango tree and decided to interact with him. “¿Qué está haciendo?” I asked him (What are you doing?). Continue reading