BAckpacker Friendly: A List of Don'ts
On a Junket

One of the best parts of backpacking, despite its anti-immersive nature, is the camaraderie that occurs in crunched buses, hammock-slung hostel gardens, and around the old grub-time table.  Other travelers often provide the most lucrative tips, funniest tales of woe, as well as the most inspirational conversations...

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PaddleWheeling Down the Mississippi River
BucketTripper

I hit a full gallop in about two seconds flat on the sidewalk outside the New Orleans Riverwalk, a shopping center famous for being hit by a wayward cargo ship on the Mississippi River in 1997. A few years back, after the repairs, they installed a plaque commemorating the exact spot the vessel hit the mall. Just making the most of it, I guess. On this particular day...

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A Graduate's guide to Living and teaching overseas
transitions abroad

Most of us go straight from high school to college, setting aside dreams of adventure travel, garnering ourselves descriptors like “responsible,” all the while hoping that our summers might be filled with trips to Europe, jaunts through Central America, or beach-hopping the islands of Southeast Asia. However, one

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Voluntary vacation: hostel-hopping in Guatemala
bootsnall

In front of me, two volcanoes are rising through the skyline like Mother Nature showing off great mounds of green-earth cleavage.  I’m trying to write, but I lose focus, take the occasional glance to see that they are still there.  Last night, I watched one of them, the aptly named Fuego, erupt in spits and sprays before downward currents of glowing lava lit up the mountaintop.  Ironically, the most...

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Current Blog: The Antigua Expat

Isn’t it odd how we become so complacent in the places we are, be them a hometown defined by our knowledge of shortcuts and old haunts or (oh, I don’t know, let me see…) the enchanting streets of Antigua Guatemala. A craving for something new, some slice of adventure, becomes consuming. I think old people call it stir-crazy, or mountain people call it cabin fever, or island people call it trapped on an island. Nowhere, no matter the tropical paradise outsiders may see, is immune to such abandonment. Where there are people, there are people who want to go.

That’s right. It’s been quite a while since this place has completely blown my skirt around my ears. It’s great and all, real sexy for a 16th century town, still curvy in all the right spots with curiously arousing wrinkles, but Emma and I have been around this joint long enough. We have routines: the shopping day, particular routes for walking to work, a place for restless Sunday afternoons when we don’t want to be stuck in the house. In simple terms, it’s become home. As the last eight years certainly suggests, sometimes, we aren’t good with homes.

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