I find it highly enjoyable to read about others who have taken the plunge and slogged the backpack around the globe. There are countless travel logs and journals online, from the extremely basic page of pictures with captions to sites of expert HTML coding and Java scripting. Of course, its the author that determines if its special. It takes skill to write about your own experiences and make them interesting to a third party.

Here are a few sites that take me places through the eyes of others. These are all people just like you who decided to just go for it. They're alive and loving it.

Off The Road documents the ongoing travel of Mihai and his girlfriend Marcella. They're twentysomething Canadians who appear to have a great appreciation of life. They seem to be regularly meeting and hanging out with both locals and fellow travellers. Mihai writes most of the content and it is an engaging and humorous read. The design of the site is nice and you can link to their photo pages, which are excellent.

The Global Trip is Erik Trinidad's brain child. Erik is well-known by BootsnAll regular's as Eeyartee and has been very helpful in offering his travel writing tips to newbies. For such a seemingly simple thing, Erik's slide show that's on his site has been a huge source of inspiration for many BnA'ers. (And before you ask...yes all the pictures in it were taken by him. Impressive, I know.)

Vagabonding chronicals Mike Pugh's trip around the world. Mike hails from Chicago and lugged 55 pounds of gear around, including a laptop, high end video camera with tripod, digital camera, cell phone and other such heavy, expensive items. It was a lot of work I'm sure, but the end result is clearly visible in all of the nice videos and photos available on this site. The site was built by Mike (I believe) and its of professional quality. Whether you plan on travelling or not its a great place to browse.

Traveling Armchair belongs to Nigel and Julie, two travellers who spent a year hopping around the globe. In addition to wonderful articles and photos of the places they've been, their site gives a "Nuts and Bolts" section that is always popular with those planning a trip. It's great to see how much others spent, what they packed and what vaccinations they endured.