So, the travel blog

Today, somewhere in the world, someone googled the phrase "otter, river tiber, rome" and ended up finding this post, which I wrote a year and a half ago. Nine other people also searched for other assorted phrases and words, mostly city names, and found my Tripping Over the World Blog. It continues to amaze me that it randomly shows up in search results while I do nothing on it.

My New Travel Blog: Tripping Over The World

Originally, I had planned to blog here about mine and Laura's trip. However, over time I decided that I wanted a blog dedicated specifically to traveling, that wouldn't be muddied with my rants, raves, recommendations, etc. about non-travel things. Also, blogger isn't super easy to use on an iPod Touch, which is what primarily I'll be using to connect to the internet for the next two months.

Thus, I have started a new wordpress blog that will focus exclusively on mine and Laura's trip. I've posted a couple of things there, but hopefully it'll have more interesting and exciting details about what we're up to as soon as our trip begins. Here it is:

Tripping Over The World

Final Preparations

Laura I leave for our big trip in about a day and a half. So for the last couple of days we've been doing last minute preparations. Here's some of the things we've done:

1. Cleaned of our camera's memory card. And bought a new, 8 gig card. Hopefully that and our old 4 gig card will be enough for all the pictures we're going to take.

2. Bought some new clothes that we needed. (I got some socks. Laura's out shopping now so we'll see what she gets.)

3. Cleaned up the guest bedroom of my parents house, where we've been living for the last month.

4. Altered clothing. I added a button to a shirt (which included me learning how to sew a button hole), and turned a long-sleeve shirt into a short-sleeve shirt. I also cut off a pair of pants so I'd have some shorts.

5. Found backpacks to use. (Specifically, I found a small-ish backpacking backpack in my parents garage that I'm using).

6. Printed out tons of documents that we're taking.

7. Bought some travel apps for our new ipod touch with an old iTunes gift card.

8. Bought Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door 2010.

9. Bought other guidebooks from as ebooks from the Kindle store. That was a new experience, but infinitely better than lugging 50 pounds of books around with us.

10. Lots of other things that I'll have to go over later, because right now I need to go continue packing.

Brazilian Itinerary

Somehow, in all the trip preparation, I forgot to post a detailed itinerary for Brazil. We'll be traveling all over the place down there, so I wanted to give a more detailed account, similar to the one I already posted for the European leg of the trip.

May 31: Depart for Sao Paulo from Salt Lake City

June 1: Arrive in Sao Paulo (2 nights) at 7:30 am

June 3: Bus from Sao Paulo to Rio De Janeiro (6 nights) sometime in the late morning/early afternoon

June: 9: Plane in the morning from Rio to Salvador (5 nights)

June 14: Plane from Salvador to Manaus (3 nights)

June 17: Plane from Manaus to Brasilia (5 nights)

June 22: Plane from Brasilia to Curitiba (1 night)

June 23: Afternoon bus from Curitiba to Foz do Iguacu (i.e. the city by those huge waterfalls) (2 nights)

June 25/26/27: Overnight bus from Iguacu to Sao Paulo (1 or two nights, depending on how much we liked Sao Paulo at the beginning of the trip)

June 28: Plane from Sao Paulo to London (non-stop!)

(Para meus amigos brasileiros, vou estar no Brasil durante Junho. Se quiserem se encontrar, deixa um "comment" aqui, fala comigo no facebook (espero que ja somos amigos la, mas se nao adiciona-me como um), or manda uma email a james.dalrymple52@gmail.com)

I'll have more to say about why and how we're doing this itinerary later, but for now, that's it.

Our Hotels So Far

Laura and I leave one week from today, but we still haven't booked every night of our trip. In the early stages of our planning we struggled to decide if we should book hotels in advance—which would mean we'd have to really nail down our dates/itinerary—or simply should up in different cities and try to find lodging on the spot. Ultimately, we've decided that in heavily touristed areas, we needed to book in advance, but when we're off the beaten path we'll try to give ourselves more flexibility and find places when we show up.

This means that we've book hotels so far in Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, and Rome (and may a few more places that are slipping my mind now). And some of these places sound pretty exciting.

In Rio, for example, we're staying at the Maze Inn. This may be the lodging that I'm most excited about for the entire trip. It's an independently run budget hotel, located in a favela near the beach. At first I was ambivalent about staying in a favela. Rio's slums are ultra dangerous, and I didn't want to go there to gawk at the poor. However, the reviews I've read suggested it was relatively safe, and as a missionary in Brazil I experienced a fair amount of poverty which will hopefully prevent me from assuming an overly touristic or voyeuristic attitude. In any case, however, the hotel has great prices, a big breakfast, and a jazz night that we'll be in town for. So far, the staff has also been super helpful—this morning, for example, they emailed a response to my request for instructions on how to get to the hotel using the city buses. I initially thought I found this hotel in an Lonely Planet guide book, though I subsequently can't find it in any of the ones I have right now, so either I already returned that book to the library or I found the hotel somewhere else.

In London, we're staying in easyHotel's Victoria location (I may have mentioned this in earlier posts, but I can't remember.) As a chain hotel, this experience will contrast sharply with our Rio experience. However, the hotel is an ultra economic company that bases its rooms off of ship cabins. They're really small spaces, which translates into really low prices. This hotel was recommended by Rick Steves.

In Paris, we're staying in a hotel called Hotel Camelia Nation. At first I was very skeptical about this hotel, because it wasn't listed in any of the guide books Laura and I checked out. However, we found it on a hotel listing website and because we hadn't read about it elsewhere, we checked practically every website we could find that reviewed it. Ultimately we decided that was in a cool—if potentially loud—location (near the Bastille, and we'll be there on Bastille Day), and it was the lowest price we could find at a non-chain hotel. I'm still slightly afraid that it's going to be crawling with rats or something, but it looks cool and had a lot of decent reviews.

We just booked our Rome hotel a few nights ago, so I haven't decided what to think about it yet. It's called Hotel Italia Roma. It came recommended by the guide books I mentioned above, as well as Fodor's. It's well located as well, and so that sounds good.

The latest travel update and iPod touch

So, Laura and I are preparing to leave on our trip this month. We've seriously started planning our day by day brazilian itinerary, recently received our visas and are just about ready to go. However, one the that we have thought a lot about is how to stay connected while on the road (or in the air, or kn the rails, etc.). For some people, I suppose that a trip like ours would be a welcomed chance to disconnect with the plugged in world, but for me at least (if not exactly for Laura) I really want to stay in touch while we're gone. More specifically, I hope to blog about our trip while it's still taking place. Plus, it'd be nice to be able to check or bank account, email family, etc. whenever we need to.

Our cell phones aren't internationally enabled (and it would have cost a lot to get new ones that are), and we didn't want to take a computer that would easily get lost, broken, or even stolen, so we decided to get a portable device that would be relatively cheap, but still allow us to stay connected when needed.

So, we settled on and iPod Touch. I really like the iPhone, but we're on Verizon and I didn't want to switch (plus I wasn't ready to commit to some expensive two year contract). I also considered the uPas, but decided that it had most of the same vulnerabilities as a laptop.

Thus, and iPod Touch seemed like it was the best option. It has wireless, which most of our hotels provide (as does, I discovered, the entire beach front in Rio de Janeiro), is small and easy to conceal, and is less expensive (on the long run, at least) than most other, similarly capable devices. Obviously, it's not going to be good for writing a novel on, but I think it will allow us to keep in touch with what's going on back home.

In the spirit of preparation, I've actually written this entire blog post on the iPod touch. And actually, I've been surprised by the experience. There are some really annoying aspects to it (like having to switch keyboard screens everytime I need a non-letter character like a dash or parenthesis) but the software that automatically fills in words and fixes typos far exceeds my expectations. Obviously, I can't say how well this is going to work on our trip, where we'll have more intermittent Internet access and probably be more tired a lot of the time (and so less excited about writing blogs on a tiny keyboard), but at least for now it looks like well able to stay in touch and document our trip.

European Itinerary

So Laura and I finally sat down and hammered out a schedule of where we're going to be, and when, during the European leg of our trip. Here's what we have so far:

June 29-July 1 (2 nights, 3-ish days): London

July 1-July 2 (at night): cross the English Channel on a boat

July 2 or 3: Amsterdam (for most of a day) en route to Berlin

July 3-5 (2 nights, 3 days) : Berlin

July 5-6 (at night): train from Berlin to Prague

July 6-8 (3-ish nights): Prague

July 9: Vienna, en rout to Franfurt and/or Munich

July 11: arrive in Bacharach (Germany/Rhine River region)

July 12 or 13: leave Germany

July 13-17 (4 nights, 5-ish days): Paris

July 18: French country side

July 20: Chamonix (French Alps), en route to Aosta, Italy

July 21-23/24 (3 nights, 4-ish days): Venice and Venetian countryside (Padua, Ravenna, etc.)

July 24-27 (3 nights, 4ish days): Florence

July 27-28: Cinque Terre

July 29-Aug 4 (6-ish days): Rome

Aug 4: Salt Lake City

A few things about this schedule. First, it's just tentative. We've already booked our hotel in London, but other than that we haven't paid for anything but our plane tickets. In the big cities we'll probably book in advance, but we also want to keep things as flexible as possible. If we like Berlin, for example, we'll try to stay longer and cut something else short.

We've also decided to do some of Europe's "hits." Though Paris, Rome, Venice, etc. might be pretty typical tourist spots, we've never been to them and felt like our first trip to the continent (or at least, my first trip) should hit the major sites.

On a similar note, we've realized that even a month isn't enough time to visit even close to all the places we want to go. I'll mention what went on the chopping block my next post, but the biggest lesson I've learned from this lesson is something I saw in a Rick Steves' video: assume you'll come back. If anything, planning this trip have given me a greater desire to return on future trips.

Also, we are getting the Eurail pass. More about this later, but for now suffice it to say that we tried to hit cities that are all close together. Our trip, if plotted on a map, zigzags across the continent in such a way that we'll rarely spend more than a few hours traveling. It means we'll be able to hit more cities than we could by using budget airlines (and we'll have less stress).

Travel Blogging

If you're friends with me on facebook, you may know that I recently bought plane tickets for a rather extensive trip. This summer, Laura and I will be traveling from the U.S. to Brazil, and then from Brazil directly to Europe. We leave on May 31st, stay in Brazil until June 28th, and then leave Europe on Aug 4th (so about a month on each continent). During that time I probably won't blog about anything but the trip, but I'm also planning on blogging about our preparations leading up to it.

Eventually, I am going to have a different site to chronicle the trip, and share any tips that Laura and I learn a long the way. However, in the meantime, this blog will be were I talk about the trip. I'm planning to share this information for a few reasons. First, because I think it might be interesting, at least to a few people out there. I know I love reading about my friends adventures on their blogs. Also, I've found that blogs have generally been an invaluable resource as I've been planning my own trip. My friend, for example, wrote this blog about his extensive trip in South America. Though it wasn't strictly a "travel blog" in the sense that it only talks about travel and tries to advise people, it is actually a great resource for finding out to do a trip down there.

I've also found that while I've been to a fair number of places, I know people who have traveled to just about every country in the world. Not only is it interesting to hear what different people have to say about different places, it's also been useful to me as I've been figuring out what to do. So, hopefully, my upcoming travel posts will be similarly useful and helpful. Next up: how Laura and I got cheap airfare for a long and complicated flight itinerary.