Audience
I intend to write for real people making real travel plans with little or no help from a travel planning professional. If you like to make your own travel plans, or would like to be better at making your own travel plans then I'm hoping you find the site useful.In part, the blog is also for myself, friends, and family as a record of our travels. I'm not going to load the blog with tons of family pictures, but I do hope that what I write here will be useful to ourselves and others who want to keep track of where we are and what we're up to.
Purpose
I have a few primary goals for this site:Real-time experiences with travel planning, execution, and evaluation
I've gained a decent amount of experience working with publicly available resources to develop travel plans that I feel confident that my family and I will enjoy. Everything you see here will be based on my real-life, pretty much real-time travel experiences. Some of those experiences will be with planning. Some will be on the journey. Some will be reflecting on what we did.Assimilating information for the amateur travel planner
With the growth of online travel agencies and travel information sites, it's certainly easier than ever to make your own plans. But the sheer amount of information can also be daunting. I'm not a travel professional and I won't pretend to be. I don't know the lingo and I don't have a professional interest in pushing certain products. But I think I am pretty good at examining a lot of information, sorting through it, and figuring out what really matters and what doesn't. I'll share a little bit about that process as I do trip planning.Focusing on our trips, developing general insights
An important caveat here is that I will only be discussing trips that are designed for me and my family. What we like isn't for everybody, so the details of some of the trips just may not be up your alley. That's ok! I hope that as I describe the specifics of trips I plan and take I can also point out some general principles of trip planning and execution that go beyond our specific travel style.That said, it's useful to know a little bit about how I and my family like to travel since the site will be most useful to those with similar travel styles. I like to travel in large part to connect with different cultures. I also like to be comfortable and safe and experience things that are generally edifying and expand my experience in a useful way. Sometimes I travel on a tight budget. Sometimes I travel with much more budget flexibility. But the constant is that I want to get to know a place as well as I can in the time there, while prioritizing safety and comfort. (Oh, and good food is important, too!) Many of these dimensions are arbitrary and very much in the eye of the beholder. Along the way, you might find some of our travels to be far from "authentic," perhaps not very safe, and even not edifying in any obvious way. And I'd certainly say we have and will do some traveling that doesn't meet up to our hoped for standards. But these are our real travels, and we will always do our best to learn about real life in a place and get somewhat off the very well-beaten path.
General experiences, specific places, non-US focus
There are plenty of resources for learning about specific hotels, vacation rentals, attractions, and restaurants. As I mentioned above, a big focus will be sifting through the information available to get down to a real, workable plan. But once the plan is in place and we're on to the trip itself, I will post some discussion of specific places and experiences. You won't find hundreds of restaurant or attraction reviews here, and I won't even plan to review every place we go. But if I find a place that's particularly notable (either good or bad), I'll certainly provide some details here.Also, the focus will be mostly outside the United States. I won't hesitate to discuss trips we take within the US, but I think I have more value to add on destinations outside the US - dealing with language barriers, finding resources beyond the typical, and figuring out how to connect in other cultures. I will feel free to mention trips that didn't require much planning on my part if I find something useful along the way. For example, we have a trip to Florida coming up, but we're staying with Jana's parents in a condo they located, and it's less a vacation than an opportunity to get together with them. So I may post about it a little bit, but that sort of thing won't be the heart of the content. On the other hand, I'm in the midst of planning a summer-long trip to Spain. There will likely be several posts related to that trip, which I've already mostly planned but not yet completed.
Staying flexible
As I get the site started, I'll do my best to stay focused on the four items above. But, as time goes along, I expect I'll see the need to change things. As I decide to go in new directions, I'll update this post to reflect what's new and why. To start with, I think I'll commit to at least one post a week. Maybe it will be more, or maybe a little less, but that's what I think I can do at first.Our Family
My profile has a bit of information about me, but along the way you'll see me make reference to both my wife and my daughter. Jana and I have been married since 1999. Both of us are political scientists, and much of our travel is motivated by Jana's need to conduct field research in Latin America. When we travel to Latin America for her research, it's pretty easy to travel "authentically" to at least some extent. We live for months at a time in Latin America, and we try to live for months at a time in other places when we can as well. This gives us the opportunity to get a real flavor of a place and how people live. Sometimes we take trips where we stay in hotels, but we often find ourselves in apartments in non-touristy neighborhoods.Our daughter was born in 2012, and I generally will refrain from calling her by name on the site. We call her our Little Lady, and that's how I will refer to her here. Having a child will certainly change the way we travel, as it gets more expensive and the things we have to consider shift by necessity. And as time goes along, I have no doubt that our travels will be influenced. I am sure as I write about our travels, one of the aspects that will work it's way into the discussion is traveling with a child, as that is now a big part of our experience.
Let's get started. Let me know what you think, and happy travels to all.
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