Tag: Travel

A real love fest went down in the strip mall off the highway in Santa Cruz. We stopped for lunch, at Chipotle of course, and I saw a T-Mobile store. One of my todo items for the following (overloaded) Monday, was to go to T-Mobile and enable wifi calling. But, hey, it’s not often you…

I really agonized over the purchase of my latest jacket. For about fifty dollars more, I could get a jacket that was .8 ounces lighter than the other one. It sounds crazy just writing that. In the end I found a deal to get that jacket for the same price, so I was spared the…

I’m not sure how many countries I’ve visited in the past year, but the fact that I have no idea gives you an idea. Four in the past week, if you don’t count the US. A lot of good flight deals popped up, and I booked them more quickly than I could ask myself if…

Some cities I love because they’re full of things I like to do. Tokyo, Shanghai, and Budapest, for example. Others I love because of how they feel, but I don’t always know what to do with myself there. Amsterdam is one of those cities. I love walking along the canals, I love seeing people biking,…

For a while I just accepted that I wouldn’t have good tea when I traveled. I drank good tea in my RV, or at Samovar, but would drink nothing but water when I was on the road. I slowly began to experiment with ways to have tea on the go, and now I really have…

I travel a lot. Not as much as a lot of business travelers, but maybe in the top 1% for independent travelers. That means that I spend a lot of time on planes, in airports, and experiencing just about every air-travel scenario possible. People get to airports ridiculously early in fear of missing their flights.…

Sometimes a preference can morph from being your best assessment of a particular situation into a fixture of who you are. When that happens, you’re in a bad position to reevaluate and make a better decision, because your ego gets caught up in that decision. That happened to me when I decided that I preferred…

At last! I’m going to start this gear post with a promise, since everyone’s been so patient: the 2016 Gear Post will be out on or before the Monday following Thanksgiving of 2015. The bad news is that I fear my gear posts are going to slowly become more boring over time. While my main…

Glasses clinked and spoons rattled against porcelain as we sat in a backstreet cafe in Tokyo. Our table was three chairs one one side and a low couch on the other. Across from me was Jimmy. We met a couple years ago because a mutual friend moved to Jimmy’s town in New Zealand. He introduced…

I spent the weekend in Hong Kong, which sounds a lot more extravagant than it actually was. Early last year there was a flight deal that offered a round trip flight to Hong Kong cheaply enough that the miles earned in the process were worth the price of the ticket, and the flight alone was…