After years of working 70 hours a week at jobs I detested, I felt like the proverbial "hole in the donut" - solid on the outside, but empty on the inside. Searching for meaning in my life, I abandoned my successful but unsatisfying career and set out on a six-month solo backpacking trip around the world to pursue my true passions of travel, writing, and photography. My blog features stories about the destinations I visit, people I meet, the crazy things...Read more here....
This week, the prolific Blogging Boomers are reviewed by Janet Wendy Spiegel at GenPlusUSA.com. JWS is passionately dedicated to the issues affecting boomers and 50 plussers, and that enthusiasm spills over into her synopses of the carnival articles on tap. Cruise on over to Gen PlusUSA and to see for yourself the variety of subjects that our boomers are discussing – everything from to the new Facebok craze among our generation to why women in menopause have so many bad hair days.
Visitors to Stonehenge have forever wondered, “How did they do that?” Now one man may have come up with the answer to that age old question. Wally Wallington is not a scientist or an engineer. He’s just a retired construction worker who is fascinated by the challenge of moving large items. Take a look at the video he created, demonstrating the process he used to build a Stonehenge replica:
His solution is so simple, yet pure genius. What I find most intriguing is that a common, everyday guy figured out what has mystified generations of “experts.”
Things used to be so simple. Back in the day, we were backpackers. We carried all our stuff in a pack, on our backs. Period. Then life intervened. I grew up, got a job, made lots of money, and shifted into luxury mode for the next 20 years. When midlife stole in, I found myself yearning for those simple times when I would slap on the backpack and wander. Before long IÂ was again choosing the backpack over the traditional suitcase whenever I traveled, until one day I chucked it all and headed out to travel around the world for six months. But by that time I was 54 and not willing to carry everything on my back, so I stuffed all my essentials in a smaller pack (laptop, iPod, camera and lenses, wallet, swimsuit, sarong, book, etc.) and the rest in a small, 22″ rolling suitcase.
Throughout my RTW trip, I defined myself as a backpacker – after all, I was carrying some of my gear on my back, staying primarily in hostels, eating on less than $10 per day, and traveling to adventurous destinations. It was during this trip I learned about gap-packers, a term first applied to European students who take a year off to travel between school and university, or between university and their first job. A “gap year” so to speak. Made sense. Since I was taking time off to travel mid-career, maybe I was a gap-backpacker.
Lately I’ve been hearing the term “flashpacker.” The third time I heard the word, I had to look it up. Wikipedia defines flashpacker as follows:
“Flashpacking refers to affluent backpackers. Whereas backpacking is traditionally associated with budget travel and destinations that are relatively cheap, flashpacking … has been defined simply as backpacking with a bigger budget. A simple definition … can be thought of as backpacking with flash, or style. One school of thought defines the flashpacker as a rapidly growing segment of travelers who Continue reading
LifeTwo.com hosts Blogging Boomers Carnival #106. Click on over to read a summary of all the the articles on tap this week from our prolific group of baby boomer blog carnival participants!
When I traveled around the world for six months in 2007, I racked up more than 80,000 frequent flier miles with USAirways. Since returning all of my travel has been by car, so I haven’t had an opportunity to redeem any of my mileage. Recently I discovered that USAirways frequent filer miles expire if there has been no activity on the account for18 months – and my 18 month deadline was fast approaching.
USAirways Dividend Miles program bears watching
Initially I thought about going out to California to visit some friends, but the more I tried to purchase a ticket, the more frustrated I became. At one point I thought I had figured it out, until discovering at the last minute that the airline’s web site had booked me into Santa Barbara on the outbound leg but through San Diego on the return leg. Eventually I decided I just wasn’t meant to go and started looking for another solution. I phoned USAirways and asked if, like American Airlines, I could buy a certificate with my frequent flier miles and redeem it any time during the next year. No, USAirways doesn’t do that. Could I pay a fee to extend my miles? Nope, they don’t do that either.
The customer service representative’s only suggestion was to buy a magazine subscription through the web site – that would extend my mileage for another 18 months. But the last thing I need is more garbage in my mailbox; with the amount of travel I do I am always trying to get rid of extraneous mail. Her suggestion did, however, get me thinking. Continue reading
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Metasearch Engines Evolving Into Excellent Travel Booking Sites
In the beginning, if you wanted to book airfare online you visited each airline’s individual website, entered your search criteria, and compared the prices, routes, and travel times from the multiple sites prior to booking. Ditto for hotels. It worked, but the process ate up a lot of time and was extremely frustrating.
Sensing an opportunity, sites like Expedia and Travelocity sprung up. These search engines gathered all the information on airfares and hotels and made it available on a single site. That was better, but some things were still missing. In order to read customer reviews about hotels travelers could visit TripAdvisor, but once again that meant visiting multiple sites prior to making travel decisions.
Enter metasearch engines. These relatively new sites incorporate everything into one place, making travel research and booking a breeze. If you’d like to know more, check out the recent post about travel metasearch at UpTake.com. UpTake just happens to be one of the top metasearch sites on the Internet, if not the best. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I am a contracted travel writer for UpTake.com, but then I wouldn’t be working for them unless they were the best.