When you do a ton of traveling, you are invariably faced with finding accommodation wherever you end up. While it’s possible to find private apartment rentals for a week at a time, most people that aren’t traveling as part of a vacation package generally opt for a hotel for shorter trips. I’m no stranger to booking hotels online. In fact, I started using Hotwire for most of my bookings not long after the service first came out. While I sometimes wait until I get to a destination prior to booking a hotel, for the most part I book online beforehand to minimize stress when I arrive. Through ...

I was recently generating some new server and email passwords, and realized that while most of the strong password generators available online work great for desktops, they aren’t very user friendly for entering on iOS or mobile devices. Often you can find a few checkboxes and sliders for those tools to make it a bit more iPhone friendly, but they don’t always work. Ideally a password that you frequently use on an iPhone or other iOS device should be “strong” (i.e. have possibly a symbol or two and a mix of upper and lower case characters), but should also be fairly easy to type. So this ...

When you travel around as much as I do, you eventually find yourself in need of a rental car. While I’m usually quite happy to take a bus, often it’s more economical to rent a car for a few days, especially if you’re trying to get to a hard to reach destination (Cape Reinga in New Zealand was one location where I purposefully rented a car). If you’ve ever pulled up to a gas station in a rental or unfamiliar car, I’m sure some of you have wondered how to find the gas tank. I personally used to slow the car down, pop the gas tank open (often using the lever near the floor), then rock my ...

Other than the odd time when I’ll go down to Future Shop and make a purchase, I do almost all of my shopping online these days. Part of that reason is that I live in a small town that really doesn’t have a great selection for many items. The other reason is that I’m often busy, and so I can simply make an order online and have it show up a week to ten days later. The same can be said when I travel too. Other than the markets that you find all over the word, and the odd mall, some things on the road are still best to purchase online. A good example of that is when I bought a new DVD drive ...

I’ve been a ‘world traveler’ for almost two and a half years now. Back then I hadn’t really been away from Canada for very long before, and the thought of spending multiple weeks, let alone multiple months, in a foreign country was a pretty strange idea. Now the idea of loading a backpack up and heading to a new country feels about as foreign to me as doing a load of laundry. If I saw a plane ticket somewhere for a good price, I could probably be at the airport in three hours, ready to go on a new adventure. One of the pains of being away for an extended period of time though is figuring ...

As many people know, I tend to travel quite a bit – over the last 18 months I believe I have visited on the order of 13 or 14 countries. And while there are always interesting things to do in each new city or country I visit, sometimes I miss some of the comforts of home (such as english TV or movies). Back home when I am bored I typically watch Apple TV or Netflix. Unfortunately when I am outside of North America and I try to access Netflix I often end up with a message like this: One way I’ve found around this is to simply tunnel all my traffic through a VPN server in the United States. ...

While I own several guitars, I previously have never attempted flying with a guitar. A quick Google search on the Internet reveals a lot of confusion about the process, as well as a few horror stories about damaged or stolen guitars. An infamous story of breakage ended in a viral internet video known as “United Breaks Guitars”: When I was in Argentina in 2011, I ended up having more free time than I thought I would have. In those moments, I really missed having access to a guitar that I could pick up and play. I went down to a local guitar store thinking I would buy something cheap, but it’s ...

Rebuilt Storage Locker When I returned from Europe in April, I went down to my storage locker to grab a few items. Unfortunately, five months of boxes sitting on each other had taken its toll, and a few of them had shifted and fallen. Thankfully nothing was broken, but it was pretty clear that I needed to spend a bit of time rebuilding my locker at some point this summer. Yesterday I went to the locker and spent about two hours rebuilding everything. Based on the experience, here are a few pointers I would give to anyone putting their stuff away into a storage locker for an extended trip: Use ...

In North America, it’s pretty easy to get by without carrying much cash around. For the most part I pay for all my smaller purchases with debit these days. If I have a larger purchase to make, I generally use my credit card to accumulate some points. But outside of North America and Europe, it’s been my experience that cash is generally still king. And while having a credit card is great for emergencies (such as being able to get a hotel or a flight in a pinch), I generally make a run to an ATM machine once a week and pull out enough cash to get me by. Local currency is best for obvious reasons, ...

Not that long ago I lost my only accessible set of keys to my Mazda 3 Sport. I have a spare set somewhere, but thought at the time that they were probably buried in the back of my storage locker in Chilliwack. Going out to Chilliwack to get them may have been an option if, you know, the key to the storage locker wasn’t also on the same keychain that was lost. Ultimately I had to tow my car to Mazda and get them to give me two new keys, both of which were entered into the onboard computer to allow them to actually start the car. Since that time I’ve reclaimed the set of keys that were lost ...

I wrote a post recently about my travel metrics from the last six months. One of the observations I made was that I had spent roughly $500 a month on average for airfare. Given that I gave my apartment up in British Columbia prior to leaving, airfare is one of my only extra expenses I have when I travel. Taken together with a $90 a month storage locker and roughly $50 a month in travel insurance, that’s a rough cost of $650 a month that is in excess of what I would normally spend back in North America. If you do the math, a person will realize that they can actually make money traveling the ...

One of the hardest parts about traveling with technology is lugging all of your gear around with you. Once you arrive at a destination and rent an apartment, you can store some items and only carry along a few things at a time. But when you’re in the process of traveling to or from a destination, you have to have all your items on your person for a period of time. I’m actually using the MEC Pangea 40 litre backpack as my main travel bag. For small trips I only bring the backpack with me, but for my major travel between destinations that I plan to live at for more than a week, I store everything ...

Given that I’m about to head out on my second round of travel this year, I thought it might be fun to tally a few metric from my travels so far. First, some quantitative metrics: Flight Segments: 15 Flight Distance: 51,908 (kilometers) Total Flight Costs: $4,240 Total Cost / 100 km: $8.17 Countries Visited: Six Next, some qualitative ones from this segment: Favourite Experience: Visiting a penguin rookery in Ushuaia, Argentina Favourite Restaurant: Lupita, Las Cañitas, Buenos Aires, La Cabrera is a close second Best Photography: Iguazu Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina Notable ...

I was downtown a few weeks ago and parked my car in a parking garage. Somehow over the course of the day though I accidentally misplaced my key chain, which has of course my car keys, my house keys, and several other keys. While I’ve misplaced my keys for a few hours before, I’ve never outright lost a set in my life. Prior to going traveling I always had a spare set around, usually over at my sister’s house, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But my current set of spare keys is actually either in my storage locker back or over at my dad’s house. Given that the storage locker key was ...

On my original flight from Houston to Buenos Aires I commented on the fact that we hit some turbulence near the equator. It was probably about 2am for me and I was a bit groggy from ativan, so I didn’t really take too much notice. But I thought at the time that it may be related to crossing from the nothern hemisphere down to the southern hemisphere. Clouds in the ITCZ, Photo from Wikipedia Sure enough, there’s a region of unstable air around the equator called the Intertropical Convergence Zone which often causes turbulence for flights crossing between the two hemispheres. Sometimes the turbulence ...

One of the biggest questions people always ask me about Buenos Aires is whether or not it is a safe city. Buenos Aires has an international reputation (at least lately) of being riddled with petty crime. Prior to coming here, I did quite a few scans on the internet and there is no shortage of sites talking about people’s personal experiences with crime in Buenos Aires. In fact, many of the locals talk about it like getting something stolen is almost a rite of passage in this city. Upon landing in the city for the first time, you’re immediately bombarded with stores covered in iron bars and ...

One of the hard parts of traveling around is deciding what to bring with you and what to leave behind. That’s relevant before your adventures, and it’s also relevant while you’re traveling. Despite Buenos Aires having a relatively high petty crime rate, I spent my first week and a half here walking around with my wallet in my back pocket and basically every piece of ID and financial card in there as well. It wasn’t until I lost my bank card a few days later that I started to really think about the stupidity of carrying everything I have on my person at all times. So, I’ve made a few ...

For whatever reason, people keep acting like the only way to do what I’m doing is to be filthy rich. That is the myth I mentioned in my other post about world travel only being attainable for millionaires. Tim Ferris has a great example in his book about some actor saying if he won a million dollars he would take a few months off and motorcycle around Thailand – Tim’s point is that you can do that for probably a few thousand dollars, so no need to gamble that experience on the lottery, just save for six months and then go experience it. I was just down at Starbucks in Palmero Soho, Buenos ...

I’m one month into what could very well be a one year travel adventure, potentially longer, depending on how things go (don’t worry mom, I’ll come home for a visit). My plan has always been to give monthly updates on costs to help those people budgeting for trips such as these. I’ve been told that one of the greatest myths about world travel is the belief that it’s only within reach of those who are very rich. My goal over the next year is to help dispel some of those myths. While I’m not expecting to always save a pile of money while traveling (although I expect in some destinations ...

This was one of the things I was afraid of. About six months ago I decided to sell off most of my camera gear. Part of that decision was due to the fact that if I was going to go on this trip I would need more money, and my camera gear represented a significant investment ($5,000+) that I could tap into. I could always buy another camera, but I may not always be able to do a trip like this. The second was that I was originally planning on traveling with just a backpack, and there really wouldn’t be any room for a big SLR or lenses. About a month before I left for Buenos Aires, I decided it would ...