Our journey to East Africa, just about underway. What follows includes not only our itinerary and a call for your recommendations, but a personal note and a couple of back-stories including $100 given to us with a purpose on a ship in Antarctica.
As you read this, we're on our way to Ethiopia to begin a six week journey through Eastern Africa. We expect the journey to take us from Ethiopia to Uganda, Rwanda and finally Tanzania.
Travel is like a good, challenging book: it demands presentness—the ability to live completely in the moment, absorbed in the words or vision of reality before you.
– Robert Kaplan
A few thoughts on how to find the essence of a place, and I suppose ultimately the essence of life — told through a long weekend in Strasbourg, France. It's about how a fully cooked itinerary might actually get in the way of getting what I really came for in the first place.
Travel. It places us in situations we couldn’t otherwise imagine. It often spurs us to do things we thought we couldn’t do. It provides perspective on our lives and our place in the world.
Amidst all this, travel also offers freedom. Among those freedoms, the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to let go.
Sounds about right, doesn't it? But what does “let go” really mean?
When late afternoon falls and the day comes to a close in Southern Namibia, a ritual begins: the sundowner.
Prepare yourself by four-wheeling it to an overlook, high perch, or just about anywhere you can catch the sunset bathe the vastness of the Namibian desert landscape.
Then wait.
Have you ever told yourself that you weren’t able to do something? That you couldn't motivate yourself? Then one day you just got up and did it? This is that story. It shares how I motivated myself to run and changed the narrative in my head. However, these nine steps can be applied to anything you want to motivate yourself to do that you've been resisting getting started.
How a two-day 258 miles bus ride through Kashmir served as my price of entry to Ladakh.
Interested in doing a road trip around Ireland, but don't know where to start with creating a 7-day Ireland road trip itinerary? You're in the right place. We share our itinerary, as well as all the details and recommendations on things to do, where to eat, and places to wander from our 7-day road trip in Ireland.
In honor of giving thanks, the best of intentions underpinning the Thanksgiving holiday, I offer this reflection on gratitude — the condition, the emotion and the state of being. Note to Thanksgiving critics, skeptics and cynics: to underscore my awareness of the historical complexity behind the holiday, I point you to this article. Also, if it appears that I’m repeating The Importance of Saying Thank You, I’m not.
Now, on gratitude.
I set my watch 15 minutes fast. That way, when I die I’ll sneak into heaven before the devil figures out I’m dead.
– words of wisdom from the local dispensary, a spry gentleman one Guinness down in Westport, County Mayo
In almost every country we’ve visited around the world, with perhaps the exception of Bangladesh and Iran, we seem to stumble across an Irish pub. The problem with many of them: there’s usually something dubious, something un-Irish about them.
Possibly the food. Maybe the owners. Definitely the accent.