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lessons learned

Saturday, October 14th, 2006

The indian embassy will always be slower than it should be.

Your pack can always be bigger.

Your pack can always be smaller.

Cancelling X is more difficult than you think, where X is everything.

You’re never as ready as you want to be, but one more trip to REI always helps.

There really is no way to contact us, but you can try.

You can never say goodbye enough.

Posted in Planning | 1 Comment »

you can’t miss this

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

The Eiffel Tower, The Acropolis, The Empire State Building…words that most people recognize as sites to see in places worth visiting. The problem with “sightseeing” is that it implies seeing the sights, that in its very nature suggests that for a place to be worth visiting it must have said sights. This leads almost every travel book in existence to attempt to categorize and invent sights/sites that make a place worth visiting. This sentiment drives me absolutely insane the more I travel. It is the mentality that keeps the lines queued for the Mona Lisa and the Blarney Stone. The mentality that “you have to do this” in order to have truly visited the country, state, museum, etc. I’ve been suckered like everyone else time and time again, and will likely continue to be until I can ween myself entirely. The allure of that object or representation that is etched into your mind as that thing you must see or do.

Looking objectively at all my past travels though, it’s not those moments, those sights that I remember most vividly. If its the look and feel of one particularly place that is the only thing that has made my trip than I have failed as a traveller. What I realize looking back on where I’ve been, and where i”m going, is that if I missed every single “sight” I would have had just as good a trip.

The extension of the “sights” is that you have to go to a certain area. In Hawaii you have to go to certain islands because they are the most beautiful, in Ireland you have to go to certain counties. One thing I’ve come to realize is that there is beauty just about everywhere. You don’t even have to know where to look, you just need to open your eyes and actually look. Constantly worrying about MUST seeing one place or another, especially seeing it in the correct weather with the correct light is just a waste of time. Not only will you be dissapointed a lot, but you’ll miss the beauty of the reality because it doesn’t match your expectation of it.

You might not have as many pretty pictures, but it’s the things that you can’t capture on film that are truly special. To me, anyhow. Why I can’t I be satisfied with seeing things more local to me? I’m working on an answer to that one.

Posted in Inspiration, Planning, Travel | 1 Comment »

blog – 4 letter word

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
Looks like it has been more than three months since I last felt like writing something. We've been in a sort of limbo since then, waiting for our place to sell. Our renter (cara's brother that is) is settled in ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in moving, Planning, Travel | 1 Comment »

my first swahili

Friday, April 28th, 2006
The word safari in swahili means "journey". Or at least, it used to. Nowadays it seems like safari means "rich man's journey". A few weeks ago I was looking into the safari options that exist in Tanzania, and just about ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in Planning | 1 Comment »

stuff it

Monday, April 10th, 2006
WIth the amount of walking I'm going to be doing, it seems practical to have a small pack size. I've seen a lot of people lugging around the titanic on their backs, and it just doesn't seem like I would ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in Planning | No Comments »

this couldn’t be easier

Monday, April 10th, 2006
Originally the thought was to look into the various around the world travel "packages" offered by different airline conglomeration. To name two, there is the Star Alliance and One World. One of them is by total miles, and one of ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in Planning | 1 Comment »

itinerary and world weather for dummies

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
We have known where we were going to go for the most part for awhile. We just altered the end of our trek to fly into Dar es Salaam and then fly to Egypt, and are probably going to book ... [Continue reading this entry]

Posted in Planning | No Comments »