Giving Back in India, with Art Refuge
When Mariellen sent us her story about volunteering as an art therapist in Dharamsala we were eager to include her in our Giving Back Series. Although it is a copy of what she has on her site, she wanted us to share the story as it is written from the heart and impossible to write any other way. It is beautiful and we are happy to get word out and to raise more awareness for great projects like Art Refuge.
Happy New Year 2010!!
Happy New Year Everyone!! If you are not subscribed to our monthly newsletter here is what you missed. Our subscribers enjoyed are year end wrap up so much we wanted to share it with everyone! To keep up to date with all of our adventures just fill out the sign up form at the top right of the page. /
Happy New Year Everyone!!
If you are not subscribed to our monthly newsletter here is what you missed. Our subscribers enjoyed are year end wrap up so much we wanted to share it with everyone! To keep up to date with all of our adventures just fill out the sign up form at the top right of the page.
Make Money with Your Travel Blog Holiday Sale
NomadicMatt’s excellent ebook is on sale for the Holidays! We are now traveling the world fulfilling our dream of being full time travelers. It wasn’t always this way. We had loved to travel, but had to keep coming home to work and save money between trips.
Surviving Paradise, One Year on a Disappearing Island
It takes great talent to talk about culture, politics and history while keeping the reader amused and immersed in the book. I am a traveler, but I will admit, there are very few travel novelists that I love reading. I find that I lose interest part way through the book because the author doesn’t have a lot to say. This was not the case with Surviving Paradise. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from cover to cover.
CheapOAir’s 12 Day’s of Travel
A couple of weeks ago we posted a holiday travel adventure gift guides. Other fantastic blogs took part and gave great suggestions of their favorite travel gift ideas in their niche. Keeping in the spirit of holiday’s CheapOair which officially launched on October 27, 2009 their new blog (http://blog.cheapoair.com/), CheapOair is launching a “@CheapOair 12 Days of Travel” contest where customers can win great holiday prizes ranging from gift certificates to airline tickets everyday for 12 days! Prices include American Express gift cards, Macy’s gift cards and CheapOair gift certificates.
AccessMyID – Peace of Mind for your Travel Documents
During our previous travels we have made sure that we have had all of the necessary documents photocopied in duplicate. If something gets lost or stolen we knew that we had all of our vital papers tucked away safely in another bag. However, if our documents were stolen, the thief now had access to very important and private information. This year we have decided to add another layer of security for our documents. AccessMyID is a website that gives you a simple interface to upload and store your important documents safely and securely.
Cycling is Such a Great Idea – But can Everybody Have a Bike
Cycling is such a great utilitarian activity many of us take it for granted. And there are people that have one or two bicycles for each different kind of activity. Many of us are so fortunate, living in an affluent society like Europe or North America, to find so many bicycle stores and other suppliers of bicycles in every neighbourhood. Yet we fail to realize how lucky we are. Many of us simply don’t know how hard it can be for a person living in most parts of the third world to have access to a simple two wheeler. People who earn about one-tenth of our hourly wages in a whole week will have to pay the same price as we do to buy the same bike in their places. It is simply not fair.
It’s About Time, India Here We Come
We have been Blogging for months about this day and it has finally come. We are off to India! Even up until a few days before leaving, it didn’t feel real. But the reality is, we are going to travel and explore this beautiful planet. We will be spending our days in some of the most beautiful destinations on earth. We both love discovering new places, meeting new people, trekking through jungles, climbing mountains and we really enjoying doing all of this together.
What We Have Been Reading Lately
We follow many wonderful Bloggers and try to check out their great posts regularly. (Thank God for RSS feeds) It has been a busy few weeks out there in the land of Travel Blogging and here are a few posts that we enjoyed, caught our attention, gave us important information,or caused a bit of a stir.
How to Travel the World
We have received a few emails lately asking us how we travel the world. People want to know what we do in our day to day lives to save and budget and people want to know how we afford it. Many people are so afraid to take a chance to follow their dreams that they forget to live. As travelers, we view life as living, not the amount of things that you have in your possession. If you are feeling the same way, you just may want to check out the links that we have listed above.
This Weeks Adventure’s in Blogging
The big news is that we are starting a monthly newsletter while we are away. Make sure to sign up for it at the top right hand corner of this page! All you have to do is leave your email address and first name and you will receive a monthly update from us. You can unsubscribe at any time. We won’t be doing these “week in review” posts once we start our travels, but we really do enjoy sharing our successes and failures of running the blog. It is in that newsletter that we will share recaps of what we have done with the website and what we have done on our travels. Plus, we will be giving some tips, tricks and insider scoops of our travels. Along with some more in depth articles regarding our experiences.
Strange Sites Cycling Africa
We saw some crazy things when we were in Africa. What do you expect when you are cycling through some of the most remote regions on the planet. Here is a list of what we found to be some of the most surreal, strange and odd sites in Africa.
Write Right Online, New Book by Andy Hayes
Write Right Online” teaches you in an easy to follow format how to catch your reader’s attention, how to tweak your article to make it stand out and how to target your audience. Andy teaches you formatting tips, how to grab people’s attention with a great headline and how to avoid common mistakes that online writers make.
Three Weeks Until India and ThePlanetD is Going Strong
I wanted to thank Andy Hayes for his help this week. After taking a look at our blog, he noticed an error that he showed us how to fix immediately. Within a couple of days, our site was bumped up to a PR4, we owe it all to him. We would never have even noticed the error. His insight and knowledge with code, online writing and marketing is second to none.
Nomadic Matts: Make Money With Your Travel Blog
It wasn’t until this past April that we actually looked into the business of Blogging. We stumbled upon it really, we were looking into travel writing and how to submit to magazines and newspapers. As we followed links from one blog to another looking for information, we came across a great travel website called NomadicMatt.com We have learned a great deal in the past 6 months and one of the biggest contributors to our progress has been by following Matthew Kepnes word of wisdom in How to Make Money With Your Travel Blog.
The Misadventures of Pre-Travel Planning
It’s Monday, you know what that means. Time to tell you the mis-adventures of Dave and Deb preparing for India and how things are going at theplanetd. Let me start by talking to you about our electronics.
Imagine: A Vagabond Story – My Review
It was a snowy autumn in Michigan and all of Grants college friends had already made plans for their future after graduation. A technical glitch left Grant 7 credits shy of graduating and instead of going back to the books he planned to leave America and travel. He bought a one-way ticket to Mexico with hopes of working in a resort entertaining guests with activities.
It’s Monday, What Have We Done This Week?
We have a lot of work to do on the blog still. We are very unhappy with the speed of the site and we are going to have someone work on fixing it up. We have a few bids and hopefully by next week it will be running faster. Dave added a neat little side widget with choices of Recent, commented and favorite posts. I was just hating the long bar of recent posts and top commented posts. He cleaned it up nicely and I love the slick look of it. We have a few other little tidbits that we are working on, but overall, we are liking the look of the site. Other than the speed we are happy.
The Impact of NGO’s and Voluntourism
I am a strong believer that travel can be done better, as can anything else, if we come up with new and creative solutions to the negative impacts that come as a side product of the actions that we take. I think tourism can and has been a negative force in many areas and I feel the same way about Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) yet I have my feet in both of these worlds.
Confessions of a Post-luggage-loss Shopaholic
Sometimes, the best part of travel is getting your luggage lost. Wait, wait! Hear me out. I’m serious. Here’s the story. A couple years ago I flew from Toronto to France via London. I was traveling with my friend Gillian. We went in September and planned on spending time in Paris, Marseille and then Poland. We were prepared for an assortment of weather possibilities.
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- So You Want to Be a Pro Blogger in The Travel Business on November 14, 2011 by debndave - 126 Comments
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