Travel Lifestyle

After I had been on about a half dozen international humanitarian aid trips, I found myself with the amazing opportunity to prepare my mother, who had never been out of the country, to spend a month in India visiting a missionary friend. But how to explain to someone how to deal with culture shock? I [...]

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In these dismal economic times it’s easy to argue that luxury has no place in the world of the thoughtful traveler. Who but Gordon Gekko could possibly contend that business-class flights or grand hotels should ever figure into an ordinary person’s vacation plans? Of course luxury travel isn’t essential. You can see the world wonderfully [...]

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Last week, I went on a short guided hike with Dave Nissen, owner of Bend, Oregon-based Wanderlust Tours. It might have been a short and simple hike, but one thing that Dave reminded our group was something I found quite profound: don’t forget to use all five senses.

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Recently on our Facebook wall (you’re a fan, right?), I posed the following pithy question: What do you prioritize whenever you travel? Our good friends at ExOfficio responded with a very good answer that left me pondering. Still. Taking a little extra time to sleep so a fully-rested me can completely appreciate my travels. No [...]

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Happy “Everything You Think is Wrong Day” dear reader! This unusually named event doesn’t seem to have much ‘official’ descriptions, but the common descriptions seem to be “a day when nothing goes right.” So to celebrate, I thought I’d share some “worst case scenario” travel disasters and traveling mishaps, and how to deal with them. [...]

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One question I seem to be getting a lot these days: Where Should I Go in 2011? It is a fair question – especially after we challenged you to go out and celebrate something this year. Many travel magazines and publications printed their “120 Places to go in 2011.” Those are fun, but we opted [...]

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Right about this time last year, our superhero lifestyle-guru friend Alex Fayle wrote an article titled “Make 2010 a Travel More Year.” Did you? (Travel More, that is.)

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Recently, an interviewer asked me the following question: Now that you’re in the tourism business, how has your view of travel changed? I understood where the question was going, but perhaps what I think the reviewer failed to appreciate is that my travel lifestyle has undergone a number of metamorphoses over the past 33 years [...]

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These days, I’m spending a lot of time working my way through journals, notes, and old blogs, trying to sum up four months of rough travel in South America to see what I might have to say to the world in another book. My main take on foreign countries is that they are basically safe places, [...]

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