Tips Posts

One of the obvious problems with going away for a whole year is figuring out what to do with your mail. While many services and companies these days offer paperless options, many still do not. I know first hand that if your VISA bill gets returned to sender, the very first thing the VISA company will do is put a hold on your card until you get a proper address again. So it’s important to have your mail end up somewhere. I briefly debated asking someone in my family to look after all my mail for me. The idea there would be to simply use one of their house addresses as my address, and have them toss my paperwork into a box. The main reason I opted against that option is because I really don’t want to inconvenience anyone by having to look after my mail for a year. Also, […]

My recent trip to Mexico gave me my first real opportunity to use my iPad on a travel adventure. I haven’t really had a lot of time to try watching movies or TV shows on it, and thought it would be fun to try watching a movie on the plane instead of paying for an inflight movie on WestJet. I loaded my iPad up with Mission Impossible III, Dances with Wolves (I had a copy floating around) and a few new episodes of House. I also made sure I charged the device up to 100% before leaving for the airport. The first great thing about having the iPad loaded with movies is that you can watch them whenever you want. On WestJet, you basically have to purchase your in-flight entertainment within the first 30 minutes of the flight. If you fail to do that, you’ll be forced to watch satellite […]

Today marks the two week mark before I’m officially homeless. It’s the first big milestone for my adventure, and I’m looking forward to finally hitting that point. I have about 80% of my apartment boxed up, with only the kitchen to go. I’ll slowly box up the remainder this week, and hopefully start transferring everything into storage next weekend. Tomorrow my landlord is bringing some people over to look at the place and hopefully rent it out. He hasn’t seen the apartment in about six months, so hopefully he doesn’t find anything wrong with it. I’m counting on getting my full damage deposit back to put as a deposit for my place in Buenos Aires, so I’m going out of my way to make sure there’s no fault when I’m out of here. That’s why I’m also paying for house cleaners to come on the 29th and do one final […]

Today is November 4th, and my flight to Buenos Aires leaves on January 4th, 2011. That means there are only 60 days left to go until I depart on my big adventure. It wasn’t that long ago I was doing a post in celebration of 150 days to go, and now here we are at the two month point. I’m heading to Mexico tomorrow via WestJet in Vancouver. I spent most of last night packing my suitcase and trying to get my apartment as clean as possible in case my landlord decides to show the apartment while I’m gone. In truth, there really isn’t too much more to do in my apartment when I return. Other than the kitchen and a single closet full of hanging clothes, I’m pretty much packed at this point. Which is good, because I’m anxious to get everything into storage when I return. I return […]

I had an idea roughly ten years ago out in Ottawa for a website or service that would let you pick your starting destination and get a list of possible ending destinations. That idea came out of a trip my friend Rob and I tried (unsuccessfully) to go on. We were both sick of our day jobs in Ottawa, had lots of money (compared to other 24 year olds), and had a long weekend coming up. So we started calling travel agents, telling them we didn’t really care where we went, as long as we got the hell out of town. Despite our efforts, we came up empty handed since none of the travel agents or their computer systems were really able to accommodate our request. Jump ahead nearly ten years, and it looks like we’ve made some progress. I found a website called Adioso which advertises itself as a […]

It would be pretty hard to call myself a Migratory Nerd if I wasn’t in fact a pretty big technology nerd. Thankfully, I have enough photography and technological gear around here that it’s pretty easy to describe myself as a nerd. In a perfect world, I’d be able to bring everything along with me. But given that I want to travel with a 40L backpack, I’m not really going to have a ton of room in there. The following is a list of the technology I’ll be bringing along on my little adventure. 13″ Macbook Pro The idea that people used to once travel the world for months at a time without really being able to contact home seems pretty foreign to me in this day and age. Even five years ago when I was on a fairly remote trip to Costa Rica there was always an internet cafe close […]

I’m originally from a small little town about 150 kilometres east of Vancouver called Chilliwack. It’s a picturesque farming town nestled between a few mountain ranges, and far enough away from Vancouver to have a little peace and quiet. And while Chilliwack is my birthplace and where my most of my family lives, I’ve spent nearly a third of my life living in Vancouver, either out at UBC where I did nine years of post secondary education, or in the downtown core, where I’ve worked the majority of my career. When I set out on my upcoming travel adventure, it’ll be from a familiar place: Vancouver International Airport. While I don’t do as much traveling as I used to, there was a period of time when it felt like I was in the airport all the time, often making quick trips down to the San Francisco Bay area to assist […]

There was a time when I had over $6,000 worth of camera gear sitting in my computer room. I love photography, and having a whole kit full of professional lens is great to have, but it’s not really very practical to lug that much gear around, especially if you’re trying to travel light. I’ve spent a lot of time over these last few months thinking about what type of camera gear to bring. My first plan was to simply take along a high-end point and shoot camera and make due with that. Given that my old Canon Digital Elph was dying, I went out and bought one of the nicest compact cameras I could find: the Canon PowerShot S90 The Canon S90 was definitely one of the nicest cameras I saw when I was out looking. It sports a 10MP digital sensor and can handle an ISO of up to […]

I decided about six weeks ago that I wanted to have a completely different online presence for my travel adventures. While my personal site has served me well by allowing me to write about personal subjects and technology over the last few years, it’s become somewhat disjointed. So, with conscious effort I have finally managed to put something together with a specific focus: travel. Unlike most versions of my website, which normally take all of about two or three days for me to get online, I’ve slowly been tinkering with this one for the past few weeks. I haven’t had a lot of time, so mostly it’s been 20 minutes here and there before bed, but I think this site is far enough along to finally pull the curtain back. As most people know, I’m about to leave on a big adventure. I’ve spent the last two years living back […]

In just 45 days, I’ll be out of my apartment out in Chilliwack, and essentially homeless for the next 30 days. Truthfully, now that my place is partially boxed up, I’m getting antsy to hit the open road. My current plan is to have a lot of my stuff already in storage around November 1st, so I can possibly go visit a few people in the United States in November. As I mentioned before, I’m also heading to the Mayan Riviera in just three weeks, which will be a nice break from the norm. I haven’t had a vacation in the sun since about the same time last year, so I’m definitely looking forward to chilling out by the pool with some beers and my Kindle. The resort we’re going to is called the Bahai Principe just outside of Playa Del Carmen. We’ve been there once before, and liked it […]