What’s Next?

We’ve been home from Mongolia for just over a week and that is the question we have constantly been asked. It’s a legitimate question, we are travel bloggers after all and we need to stay on the road to do our job.

It’s been a very busy couple of years since we left for India in November 2009.

Dave and Deb in India

It was our first time running a travel blog as a business while traveling and we have worked hard to build ThePlanetD into what it is today. Travel is what has helped us gain an audience and stand out in the travel world. People have started to take notice of our adventures and by taking on a new challenge every couple of months we have remained fresh to our online audience.

“It’s funny that traveling full time can sometimes be the worst thing for a travel blog.“

It is also that travel that has caught up with us and caused us to fall behind on the ever important business of travel. Traveling full time is fun and exciting, but it doesn’t allow for a lot of time to do the work that needs to be done. And that is why other than some short getaways here and there we are staying put until the New Year.

The Plan

We have so many things that we have wanted to do with our website that we haven’t had the time to work on. Now that we are home for a bit, we are working on updating the site to run optimally with the help of Warren Talbot of Married with Luggage. Our current website is built from a template that we found when we knew nothing about blogging. We customized and changed it with plugins and shoddy code and ended up doing a lot of damage behind the scenes. It ran slow, it left doors open for hackers to come in and put in follow links to pharmacy sites and it didn’t have the sleek design needed to keep people on the blog once they finished reading the article that they found either through search engines or social media sites. That is all about to change thanks to having the time to design what we want with the knowledge we have today.

Videos

We have 1 year of solid video that we haven’t had the chance to edit. We aren’t quick editors like Kick The Grind but we want to be. We want to take our time to learn Final Cut Pro inside and out and to share our hours of video footage with the world. When we get back on the road, we hope to be efficient enough with our video editing to put a slick piece together in a couple of hours. But we need time to be able to sit in front of the computer to learn all that first. We take a lot of video on our travels and we enjoy being in front of the camera.

For More Videos check out ThePlanetD on YouTube

TV Careers

Deb's 5 Minutes of Fame on YTV

Dave's 5 Minutes of Fame on YTV

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As many of you may have known, we went into travel blogging with TV careers in mind. Dave and I both worked in the film business for years before we started blogging and when we decided that we wanted to turn our passion for travel into a career, our initial thought was to pitch a TV show. We brainstormed ideas, hired a publicist and got to work on transforming ourselves into Canada’s Adventure Couple. Bad timing, wrong decisions and lack of knowledge contributed to us not getting our own TV show, but now after nearly 3 years since deciding to go for our dream, it is starting to come true.

Next week we start working with CTV News Express to discuss travel during their weekly show on Fridays 9:00 am to 12:00 pm EST. We are thrilled to be a part of this cutting edge idea. We joked that we’re like the Perez Hilton of Travel Blogging. (on a smaller scale of course) While he goes on CNN and Larry King to talk entertainment, we get to go on our Canadian National News Station to talk travel!

It’s an exciting time.

Networking

Networking with Fellow Travel Bloggers

We have watched our fellow bloggers unite and bond during conferences and events. We have seen them travel together on press trips, partner with companies and form alliances. We have admired the work that they have done and what they have accomplished together.  Travel Bloggers Unite has opened up an amazing opportunity for Bloggers to discuss ideas and learn from one another. The Toronto Travel Massive has shot into the stratosphere as travel professionals gather monthly in Toronto to meet local PR agencies and travel companies.  We want to be a bigger part of that community. Toronto has some of the best travel Bloggers in the world and to meet with them and share ideas is something that we look forward to having the time to do.

While being on the road full time, it has been difficult for us to get involved with our peers. We mean well and want to comment on their blogs, read their latest news and support their latest projects but when we have unreliable Internet at best and a busy schedule of travel, we fall behind and fall off of people’s radar.

Events

This week alone is filled with events from The Future of Tourism hosted by GAP Adventures to tweet ups with fellow bloggers and the Monthly Massive hosted this month by Hostelling International Toronto. We have had lunch with PR professionals, met with TV stations, talked with companies regarding partnerships and we have only been home one week.

How could we have done any of this from the road?

It’s funny that traveling full time can sometimes be the worst thing for a travel blog.

While we don’t plan on staying in one place for long, we do need to stay in one place to take our careers to the next level. It will be short adventures for the next couple of months, but never fear, we will still be traveling.

We already have the next big one in the works. We have already been asking ourselves, Are We Crazy? Can we Do it? Should we do it? We’ll let you know once we decide.

In the meantime watch for us out there next week. We have an interview with the Toronto Star coming out on October 6th, Our Debut on CTV on October 7th and it’s ThePlanetD week with roomorama all week long. We may have just returned home, but a new adventure is already beginning.

We are working on big things with our newsletter.

We want to bring you the best information on travel and adventure we can find each month and we are offering an incentive to sign you up!

Everyone that is already a subscriber plus any new subscriber to thePlanetD newsletter will receive a free 2011 desk top calendar of Dave’s incredible photos.

We have already given away the January desktop as our Christmas gift to you and now you can change your photos each month and dream of an exotic destination while working at your computer.

Just go to our sign up form at the top right hand side of this page to receive your instant gift.

Free Advertising

We are so confident that our newsletter is going to grow into something that people will want to open each month that we are offering advertisers 3 months of free advertising on ThePlanetD newsletter.  After that time, you will have the option to renew at a discounted rate for another 3 months!

Space is limited so email now!

Contact Us and Subscribe Now!

Advertisers

Do you have an upcoming tour or travel business or product you want promoted? Contact us today and provide information about your business and product.  We will have a look and if it goes with the format of ThePlanetD, your free advertisement will be placed in the February edition of our newsletter and run until April.

Contact us in the Form below or see our Contact us Page to send us an email with the product that you want to promote.

What are you waiting for, there is nothing to lose and no obligation. Send us a message and we will get right back to you with our email address where you can send us all your information.

We will post your button, banner, logo or text into our monthly newsletter that has a higher than average open rate for our niche market of travel and adventure.

Starting in May, you will have the option to renew at an extremely discounted price for 3 more months!

Comments or questions are welcome.

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To the rest of you, sign up for our newsletters today and see what is in store for February.

Newsletter

To Subscribe to our newsletter simply fill out the form Subscribe to our Newsletter by email at the top right hand corner or  you can click on this link for the sign up form and instantly receive your free 2011 desktop calendar.

]]> http://theplanetd.com/free-advertising-and-subscriber-giveaway/feed/ 1 http://theplanetd.com/homeward-bound-in-rajasthan-snapshot-sunday/ http://theplanetd.com/homeward-bound-in-rajasthan-snapshot-sunday/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:05:29 +0000 debndave http://theplanetd.com/?p=9785

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As the sun sets over the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India a lonely local boy, trudges through the sand from a small village in the distance. After an afternoon of trying to sell tourists a beer in the desert he heads home with his leftover product. He did succeed is selling us a couple of beers, but as we looked around we could see that business was not booming. Hopefully with the few Rupees he made for us he can hold his head high as he returns home with the days earnings.

Life in the desert of India is hard and this photo captures the daily trials and tribulations that people must face every day in the great Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India.

Homeward Bound in Rajasthan

]]> http://theplanetd.com/homeward-bound-in-rajasthan-snapshot-sunday/feed/ 5 http://theplanetd.com/travel-blog-exchange-2010/ http://theplanetd.com/travel-blog-exchange-2010/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:00:50 +0000 debndave http://theplanetd.com/?p=9726

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It is a week away from the 2010 Travel Blog Exchange in New York.  We are looking forward to meeting some of our favourite bloggers and friends at these exciting event.   But more importantly, we are looking forward to learning from some of the leading authorities in the travel blog community.

We are currently at sea in Alaska, but we are already thinking about the questions that we are hoping to have answered at the conference.  We won’t be able to make it until day two of the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) but luckily for us there is a great line up on Sunday the 27th.

We cannot wait to hear these excellent writers, personalities and blogging experts share their knowledge with us.

We are happy to see that we won’t be missing these people speaking on Sunday.

Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere
Mary Engle, Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
Julie Schwietert Collazo, Matador Network
Spud Hilton, San Francisco Chronicle
Kim Mance, GoGalavanting.com
Susan Getgood, BlogWithIntegrity.com
Maren Hogan of Galavanting.tv
Pam Mandel & Mike Barish of Gadling
Sean Keener, BootsnAll Travel Network
John E. DiScala, Johnny Jet
Pete Meyers, EuroCheapo
Christina Tunnah, World Nomads
Sheila Scarborough, freelance travel writer & consultant
Jen Miner, The Vacation Gals
Matt Kepnes, Nomadic Matt
Andy Hayes, Sharing Travel Experiences
Chris Christensen, Amateur Traveler & This Week in Travel
Craig Martin, Indie Travel Podcast
Show Guest: Wendy Perrin, Conde Nast Traveler & Perrin Post

For people not attending the Travel Blog Exchange never fear, we will be giving an update after the fact and sharing some great moments from our time in the exciting city of New York!  We are definitely going to make use of the city pass being offered to attendees.

For the Bloggers that will be attending the conference, keep an eye out for us. We won’t be there until Sunday and we will have a lot of making up for lost time to do.

New York, Get Ready because Dave and Deb are going to paint the town!

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The Travel Writers Exchange has a great Giveaway at their site.

Courtesy of the New York Video School, the Travel Writers Exchange is offering one lucky person the chance to win a FREE one-year subscription to the school.

The New York Video School is the top online film school on the Internet that offers training videos of how to create a professional travel video from start to finish.

Your Membership not only gives you training in Video editing and filming, it also gives you access to forums and the Video School community.  Their goal is to make learning fun fast and easy.

Video editing is a must have skill for all travel writers and bloggers these days.  Adding video to your website helps to add that extra touch that you will need to stand out from the crowd.

What you need to do

All you have to do is head over to the Travel Writers Exchange and sign up to their email list.

The Travel Writers Exchange offers valuable information for any Blogger or writer at every stage of their career.  Even if you are not interested in the Video School, signing up for their email list is highly recommended by us and its free!

You will receive great monthly tips in your inbox and you can unsubscribe anytime that you like.

What if I already Receive Emails from TWE?

If you have already signed up for the Travel Writers Exchange’s email list, don’t worry, you are already automatically entered in the random draw that will be held on February 28th.  The winner will be contacted by email and will be announced on March 3rd.

Good luck to everyone and get yourself over to the Travel Writers Exchange even if you aren’t planning on signing up for the contest.  It is an excellent site that you will be able to browse for hours learning about the craft of Travel Writing and Blogging.

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CheapOair is running a hot new contest from January 25th to January 29th.  That means it is starting today!

Get yourself over to CheapOair’s travel blog. Here you will find a new article each day of the contest from CheapOairs Travel expert as he makes his way through the city.  There will be a question about London and all you have to do is answer the question by leaving a comment on the post.

Each day two entrants will be randomly selected and announced the following day. At the end of the promotions, 10 people will be eligible to win the grand prize of A Long Weekend in London!

The draw will be held on Tuesday February 2, 2010.

The winners airfare will be provided by CheapOair as they make their way to London for a 3 night stay at a boutique hotel in Kensington.

You can check out more details at CheapOair.com

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We are off to India tomorrow! We have been Blogging for months about this day and it has finally come. Even up until a few days before leaving, it didn’t feel real.

We have had to take care of many last minute details, organize our lives and tie up loose ends.  We never really had time to think about the fact that we are finished work.  We have moved onto another chapter in our lives.  We don’t have to deal with a Canadian winter, we don’t have to wake up at 6:00 am and we are in charge of our own destinies.

Travel will have its challenges.

We will have to work hard to keep the Blog updated regularly and we want to write and take photos professionally.  We will be spending many nights at our computers and we will be looking at our travels with a critical eye.  We will have to constantly look to how each adventure can be sold to magazines and newspapers.  We will have to think about ways to keep our readers entertained and how to keep people coming back to theplanetd.

Permanent Vacation.

But the reality is, we are going to travel and explore this incredible planet.  We will be spending our days in some of the most beautiful destinations on earth.  We are on permanent vacation. We both love discovering new places, meeting new people, trekking through jungles, climbing mountains and we really enjoying doing all of this together.

Travel as a Couple

Many people ask us, how we can spend all of our time together?  Don’t we get sick of each other?  Of course we do.  Sometimes we can seriously get on each others nerves.  But most of the time, we get along quite well while traveling.

We have had a dream for years to become full time adventurers.   We have always wanted to be “that person” with the title “Adventurer” after their name.  There really are people out there that do it for a living!

Dave and Deb, Adventure Couple. We like the sounds of that and we look forward to pursuing that dream. We have a long way to go to catch up to great adventurer Ranulph Fiennes or the ultimate endurance athlete Ray Zahab, but it is going to be a fun ride adding our own adventures and challenges to the mix.

There is something about pursuing your dream that makes giving up everything worth it. We may not be making millions but we certainly feel rich.   We are finally doing what we have always wanted to do.

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Things are moving along and we have finally checked off a lot of the items on our to do list.

News: Our Monthly Newsletter

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.

Affiliates

We have changed our ads in our side bar and are very happy with endorsing 3 great e-books.  We have written reviews of Make Money with Your Blog and Write Right Online so far and will be writing about Overcoming 7 Major Obstacles for Travel later this week.  We wanted to clean up our adspace and endorse only those products that we truly believe in. and

One thing I learned this week, is the value of twitter for affiliates. I read an article at Problogger and learned that you can tweet your affiliate products.  It was something that we had never thought of before and I gave it a try.  10 minutes later I received an email from ejunkie that we had made a sale.  It really is excellent advice.

So although I am not planning on cluttering twitter with affiliate ads everyday, it is something that we are going to give a try to once a week or so. What are your thoughts?

We also learned this week thanks to Trisha at Travel Writers Exchange that we need to give full disclosure about products that we are affiliates for.  Problogger states this as well.  That includes Amazon and Commission Junction.  So somewhere on the site we are going to have to put some sort of site wide disclosure.  We are also going to be working at linking to affiliates more.

Wake up Call

We got a wake up call when Commission Junction sent us an email saying that they are going to suspend our account for not making any sales. It is easy for us to reinstate it, all we have to do is sign back up once they stop it or make a sale in the next 30 days.  We realized that we signed up way too quickly for commission junction.  We read that all of the “big bloggers” used them when we first started, so we signed up and blindly put a bunch of ads up in our side bar and never looked at it again.  We never promoted the items, we never clicked on the items and we never played around with their placement.  We just knew that we liked the Lonely Planet, we used Blue Host and that we thought Skype was good, so why wouldn’t everyone else click on the products and buy them right?  Wrong.

Where Else we have Shown up

We had a guest post come out about our time in Africa at WildJunket.  Thank you Nellie for having us launch your excellent new series What’s Your Wildest Adventure?”

We also contributed at tip to IsabellesTravels about our favorite item in our backpacks….The ZipLock Bag. We never go anywhere without it.

And we enjoyed writing a group post about Holiday Shopping.  A bunch of travel writers took part and you can check out their holiday list suggestions as well as ours at our post Holiday Gifts for the Adventure Traveler

Small Set Back

While we thought that we had a lot of time to get things done, my toe unfortunately has been a bit of a draw back.  A few weeks ago, I stubbed it on a pin in our carpet. I never did find the pin, but a couple of days later my toe was the size of Fred Flintstone’s throbbing tootsie’s.  After 3 rounds of antibiotics, and finally an X-ray last Friday, they found  a 1 cm long piece of metal is in my toe.  I could not see a specialist in time before leaving, so I had to go to emergency for a quick referral.  After 6 hours in the hospital (backed up due to H1N1 panic) I got an appointment for Monday.  We waited for 2 hours on Monday to see the surgeon only for him to tell me that he won’t be able to fit me in before leaving anyway.

My last ditch effort was visiting a walk in clinic that I went to 2 weeks earlier.  The doctor there just so happens to be a plastic surgeon and I already had an appointment with him this Saturday to take part of my toe nail off to relieve the pressure.   He took a look at my X-ray and told me that he could take it out the next morning. Yahoo!  He let me have it as a souvenir.

UnFortunately…

I thought that I would be able to catch up on reading my blogs and spending some final time tweeting our friends, but I have spent the past 3 days at clinics and hospitals.  It has wasted precious time that we just don’t have right now.  On the bright side, at least I have 2 weeks for my toe to heal and I will be going to India worry free.  We haven’t even left yet, and I already feel disconnected from the travel blogging community. I am only hoping that there are plenty of Wifi Connections in India.

So that is our week in a nutshell.

(Disclosure:  The links to the ebook’s above, do make us some money, but like everything here at theplanetd, we would never recommend something if we didn’t believe it it’s value.)

Another week has come and gone and it is business as usual at theplanetd.

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.

We have just finished reading his new book Write Right Online and it is invaluable.  I am going to write a review later this week, but we highly recommend it for anyone that wants to increase traffic to their blog posts.

We have finally moved out of our place and are officially homeless.

The last 4 days were tough because Rogers cut off our Internet early so we fell behind on keeping up with other blogs and our twitter friends.  We asked for them to disconnect on the 31st, so they followed directions well and disconnected on the 28th. When we travel we are prepared for this, but it caught us off guard when we woke up on Wednesday morning to find that our Internet was gone.  We did get a very weak Wifi signal once in awhile so we managed to get the odd post up.  Luckily I have already started scheduling posts and tweets so it was good practice for our travels.

I am so grateful for everyone that tweeted and stumbled our posts for us.

All of our friends kept our tweets going for us even when we couldn’t make it to the Internet to tweet back.  Plus, for the first time ever, we saw significant traffic from digg.

That is a first for us.  Our Great Canadian Word Post caught on with the online community this week and we saw first hand the value of digg.

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We are going to start publishing a newsletter once we leave for our travels

Our first one will launch at the end of November.  We are in the process of setting it all up and will let you know when you can subscribe to access fabulous updates as to what is going on with our blogging, what will be coming up and a few stories that we won’t be posting on our regular blog posts.

Once we start traveling, we are going to stop these weekly updates so hopefully our newsletter will give you the lowdown on what we have been doing to further our blog and our goals, successes and failures.

Unfortunately, I have let MatadorU fall by the wayside.  Now that we are finished moving and only 3 days left of work for me, 1 week for Dave, I am hoping to catch up on all of the work that I have fallen behind on.

Continuing with a little update from last weeks post…

We have not changed hosts yet, but we want to thank everyone for their advice on which company to go with.  We ran out of hours in the day last week between working at our day jobs, writing posts and trying to catch up with friends before leaving town.  Hopefully we will get to it this week.

There is still a lot to be done, but, all of our hard work from last month paid off and we have the next 3 weeks to relax and focus on the Blog and writing. Maybe just maybe we will have everything in order before our flight to India.

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. As many of you know, we bought and Iphone and are ready to use it to keep in touch during our travels.  We made sure to buy one that is a little bit older because the software is easier to unlock.  Or so we thought. Dave went through all of the steps to unlock the phone and we thought all was well.

That is until we put in our Sim card and didn’t get a signal.

After further investigation on the Internet, Dave discovered that the guy that sold him the phone updated the firmware for which there is no way to unlock.  Can’t blame the guy, he thought he was being nice.

So now we have an Iphone, that cannot be unlocked at the moment.  We have it up on Craigslist now and are hoping to sell it before buying an already unlocked phone. The good new is that at least we tried it here in Canada before leaving for India.

The next misadventure happened when we bought batteries for our new Panasonic GH1 Camera.  We like to have 3 batteries.  One came with the camera and then we bought an extra battery at the camera shop.  But at 90 bucks a pop, we decided that one Panasonic battery was enough and we would buy a third party battery for our other back up battery.  It is much cheaper and we have always used third party batteries for our cameras in the past and they have always worked fine.  Not this time.

Yet again the bloody firmware came back to haunt us.

Panasonic updated this specific model so that you cannot use third party batteries.  You have to use the Panasonic battery which is 3 times the price.

So now we are sitting with a battery that we cannot use and an iphone that we cannot use.  Hey at least we don’t leave for 4 weeks.

On a positive note, we have sped up our site.

We hired a great guy once again from Scriptlance and he made our site 70% faster.  We have noticed a huge improvement.  He says that he has done all that he can for now, and the next step that we need to do is change hosts.  Bluehost is too limiting for our site and we haven’t been thrilled with the amount that bluehost is down anyway. It seems that several times a week our site is down due to server problems.

We are considering changing as our term is expiring with bluehost in a couple of weeks, but it seem like a daunting task.  He is suggesting we change to Host9.

Anyone else have some advice on servers and changing from one to another?

We still have to re-size our photos as well to speed it up even more. We uploaded way too big of files, so that is a task for Dave to do in the next couple of weeks. But for now, we are feeling pretty good with the loading time.

Other News…

We are going to be trying out some Microfiber Firm Support Travel Socks for our adventures and travels. It is always nice to be contacted to try out a product or two and we are going to put these socks through their paces. We let you know how they hold up as we hike and trek our way through Asia.

We developed some nice links this week too.  Is it just me or is it the time of year? But we suddenly started receiving offers from companies to place ads and to do some nice link exchanges too.  We assume that it must be because it is October. It is the beginning of the 4th quarter of the year, so people are updating their links and adspace.

The business of Blogging still baffles us, but we are slowly learning and with great friends out there sharing information, we are starting to catch on.

Last and probably least…

We seem to be doing well with checking off the to do list for our travels. We put everything in storage this weekend and for this last week in October we are living in an empty apartment sleeping on our memory foam mattress (on the floor)  We still have our Internet and computers, so we will be fine. Oh and we kept our wine glasses out of storage for now so we got everything we need!

We have our Visa’s, our shots, our medications and we are completely. packed  Our addresses are changed and forwarded, our banking is set and our insurance is confirmed.

It is funny though. Everything is falling into place and yet we both feel a little anxious and unsettled. I feel like there is a lot to be done, but really there isn’t.  Actually, this week should be nice. I don’t have to worry about packing or making a tonne of phone calls. I don’t have a giant pile of things that need to be tackled and yet, I keep feeling like I have so much to do.  It is difficult to adjust to suddenly having very little to do.

I actually think that I will be able to catch up on reading other people’s blogs, doing my lessons at MatadorU and finally doing some research on India and Sri Lanka.

It has been so crazy and hectic for the past couple of months, that it is going to be a welcomed change in  the final weeks leading up to our travels to enjoy the company of friends and family and to slow down a bit and relax.

Wow!

The weather has drastically changed already and it is cold.  The mornings are dark and depressing and we can’t wait to be in a warm and sunny climate.  As usual, the weeks are flying by faster than we can keep up.  But also as usual, the list is getting smaller and we are checking things off daily.

Our India Visa is ready for pick up and that is when I always feel that yes, this is official.  We had a bit of a laugh when we brought our Visa’s in.  We had done everything properly according to the website. We made out a money order to the India Consolate of Toronto for $62 (because their website specifically said Money order or certified cheque only) and then we went down to the office.

It turns out the the Consolate has outsourced its Visa applications, which is kind of ironic since so much of Canada has outsourced our jobs to India.

When we got to the application office, what a surprise they accepted Visa, MC or Debit and DID NOT accept our money order.  Plus, they added at $20 processing fee to the application because it is outsourced.  So we ended up throwing away the $7.50 each to buy the money order at the bank and had to pay another $20 each to pay for the application, so all together our India Visa cost us and extra $55.00 above and beyond the actual price of the visa. Sheesh.

If only I knew about the new bank account that I signed up for a week earlier.  All bank drafts, money orders are included!  But the best thing about this account is that for $24.95 per month (I know, it sounds like a lot. Especially since we normally refuse to use a bank account that charges any monthly fees) we get free unlimited withdrawls world wide.  We found it to be worth it because those $3 to $5 transaction fees can add up and we hate to be taking out a tonne of money at a time just to save on fees.   The new account came with a lot of other perks too.  They upgraded our Visa Card to a travel rewards visa where they waived the $99/year charge and they gave us a free U.S. account. (We always refuse to go for any of those credit cards that charge a yearly fee- there are some great free reward cards out there.  But how could we pass up a free upgrade to a travel rewards card that earns 3 points for every dollar spent)  There are many other perks to the account to but you know what?… For $24.95 per month, they should be giving us a lot of perks.

However, I do think that the fee is worth it alone when traveling. Not having to worry about ATM fees is a very good thing.

So our banking and our visa’s are finished, we have changed our addresses and forwarded our mail.  We have moved almost completely out of our place, and the actual big move to storage happens this weekend. For the last week in October, we will be sleeping on a foam mattress and sitting on pillows.  We wanted to move out a week early to give ourselves some time to clean the place and fill in the holes from pictures and shelves for our landlord.  José is such a wonderful guy that we want to leave the place spotless for him.

Once again our great friends Greg and Jody have let us come and stay with them for the final couple of weeks in November before we go.  We realised that we first stayed with them back in 2003 before our Asia trip and it has kind of become a tradition now. Dave and Deb leave and before they go they have a last hurrah with Greg and Jody!  They really are the best.

Dave’s show Happy Town goes until the end of the first week in November and then once the show is over, we are off to visit family and friends for the remaining 2 weeks.  It really doesn’t even feel like we are leaving so soon. Friends and family keep asking us if we are excited, and we seem very nonchalont about the whole thing.  We keep wondering when the excitement will kick in.

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.  I don’t know all of the technical jargon, but a lot of our script is messed up.  We don’t want to start traveling with a slow site. I feel that we are probably losing a lot of traffic due to slow loading times.

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.

We have a guest post coming out tomorrow at ALittleAdrift.  I have been lacking on contributing to other people’s blogs these past few weeks, so I am very excited to have a post coming out again. I just love Shannon’s blog and the travels that she has just completed from the past year. Never fear though, she is going to be taking off again soon to Central and South America.

I am still struggling away with MatadorU.  I am getting the assignments in every week so far and I am really hoping that I can stay up to date with it.  I don’t want to fall behind and be working on a course into my travels.  I have noticed that my writing has sort of a melancholy tone to it lately.  Especially my MatadorU articles.  I don’t feel sad, but there must be something going on because my writing is definitely reflecting a certain down feeling to it.   It is kind of interesting to see.  I have never written so much in my life, so to watch the trends of my writing change with the seasons and energy levels is a learning experience.

So, there you have it. The Week in Review at ThePlanetD

To launch its new bridal registry, Marriott is giving away $50 Marriott Bonus Bucks to one lucky winner on this site!!!

Did you know that engaged couples can now register with Marriott to have their honeymoon paid for?  Redeem points for spa packages, accommodation, dinners and more. The great news is that you can even carry over your points and use them for future vacations at 3000 Marriott hotels worldwide.

Even guests of the bride and groom will be rewarded. For every $100 that they give towards the registry, they will received 50 Bonus Bucks Back! What a Deal.

For more information visit their website at MarriottRegistry.com

To Enter

Just leave a message stating what gift you would choose from the gift choices if you were getting married using the Marriott Registry.

Leave message at the bottom of this post.

Click here for Registry Gift Choices

It’s that simple.

We will announce the lucky winner of $50 in Marriott Bonus Bucks next Wednesday September 30th and you can use it towards anything you like at your choice of over 3000 Marriott Hotels.  Go for dinner, brunch, put it towards a nights stay or treat someone to a spa.  It is like cash in your hand.

We will be posting the video of our random draw and announce the winner right here!

Now is the time for some shameless self promotion on our site. Or should I say shameless begging and grovelling.

As you may know, Dave and I are trying desperately to get ourselves into the Geoff the Campervan for the Vantastic Adventure contest at World Nomads. They are looking for a team to drive a Geoff the Van across different provinces in Australia for 6 weeks at a time.

Australia

This would be a fabulous way to kick start our next trip. We are planning on leaving at the end of this year, so the timing is perfect to showcase Australia during the Victoria leg.  We would just have to leave 6 weeks earlier than planned, and who wouldn’t want to do that!

We have always wanted to go to Australia, but it has been out of our budget. We tend to travel to more developing countries to make our money last. We thought it would be a few more years before we made it Down Under, so when this opportunity came along, we jumped on it!

You would do us a world of good if you visited the WorldNomadsGroup on youtube and give us a vote. By joining the group, you will not only have access to all that World Nomads has to offer, but you can rate our video and others as well. Give us a Love it or Hate it Vote and leave us a message to say hello.

Our username on Youtube is wegobyebye and our video is called Aching For Australia.

You don’t have to join the group to show us love. You can simply have a youtube account to rate it by clicking on the stars below, favorite it (that is if you think it is worthy of a favorite) or leave a comment.

We want to show them at Vantastic that we will be able to give them a lot of publicity and that we will be ready and able to blog, podcast, tweet and promote our time in Australia on the Vantastic Adventure. We will show them that we are an extreme adventure couple that will showcase everything Victoria can throw at us and that we are strong at video editing and having a theme to our documentary.

The more people we can get to our video voting for us, the better.

If you are not a member of youtube, no worries, even a view will help us out.

thanks for all of your support and hopefully in a couple of months, you will be reading posts from us in the Land Down Under.

If you don’t want to go to Youtube, here is our video for your enjoyment.

We have an interview with Andy Hayes online today. His questions were very insightful and we found out a lot about ourselves once again.
He also helped us to really think about what this blog is about and where we want it to go. I feel that we are on the right track and other than a few tweeks, we are liking our focus and niche.
Andy has a fantastic website full of very useful information as well as interesting posts and interviews. We read it regularly and thoroughly enjoy what he has to say.

On another note, we are going to take this time to ask you one last time to check out our audition video for World Nomads. They are choosing the winner of this leg tomorrow, so we are looking for one final push to help us get noticed.
If you could watch this video at youtube by licking on “youtube” in the bottom right corner of the video it would help us greatly.

If you like it, give us a little star rating by clicking on the 5th star under the video on the left hand side. Feel free to favorite it too by checking on the heart and leave a comment if you feel inclined.

Who knows, maybe in a couple of months we will be blogging from the land down under.

Thanks to Marina at the TravelExperta for having us contribute a guest post to her fantastic site about all things Central America. We enjoyed re-visitng Tikal and realized that we have to get ourselves back to Latin America soon. We loved it there.

It is a short post today, but I am in Niagara Falls for work. It is a tough job but someone has to hang out at these amazing falls, visit Marine land and Sky Dive indoors. Well, our host of the show is going to indoor skydive, but if it looks fun, you can bet that Dave and I will be back doing it in a couple of week.

Dave is working on a new Series called Happy Town and he is all over Ontario at fantastic locations too.

Well, another week has come and gone so quickly.  Working on a website can be time consuming indeed.

We have a guest post happening today at the fantastic site The Professional Hobo for her “Week in the Life” series. Nora has been traveling for the past 3 years and is an established writer and contributing author for the book 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget

Also, her guest post for How to travel full-time for less than $14,000 at iwillteachyoutoberich.com a Year drew over 100,000 readers in the first 3 days alone!

For more of Nora’s writing credits check out her site here

We are very honored to be asked to write for her fantastic travel blog about our time on The Tour d’Afrique.

Last year we took on the challenge of cycling from Cario to Cape Town. This 12,000 km bike race was not easy to say the least.  How do you survive riding 120km day in and day out? This was not your every day luxury cycling tour of Tuscany, this was a race down a continent to prove to yourself what you are made of.

You can read more about our trials and tribulations in the Africa Section of our blog and to find out what a week in the life of the TDA was actually like, check out our guest post at The Professional Hobo.

We also just found out that our post came up on CheapOair today about surfing in Bali. I know that I said it would be up last week, but there was a bit of a mix up. It is up now though, so check it out at cheapoair.com

Thank you to Keith at Velvet Escape for posting our peice the Man From Mandalay at his blog. He chose a fantastic title and it seemed to do very well on Twitter, I hope that we got him some great views that day.

TravelBlogs has a new series that we are contributing to about traveling as a couple, it will be out later this week or next.

UPDATE in the meantime check out a series we are part of Why the Journey is Better When you Have Someone to Share it With at TravelBlogs.com

Thanks to everyone for asking us to guest post. We have certainly been loving writing for these fantastic travel websites and hope that one day we will have the success that all of you are having.

Also for those of you subscribing to our RSS feed, we are sorry that you had an onslaught of new posts. Our site is now on Lonely Planet and if we want our posts to show their, they have to be in our feed. So we expanded it. Thank you for your patience, Like I have said many times, we are still learning.

So there is our week in review

It was another exciting couple of weeks for The Planet D. On Thursday we have 2 guest posts coming out. Velvet Escape and Cheap O Air have invited us to write for their blogs and we have happily given two very different posts that I hope you will like. We have had our site accepted into the BlogSherpa Community of Lonely Planet and we are excited to have some of our favorite posts featured on the Lonely Planets website.

Thanks to Trisha at Travel Writers Exchange for inviting us to write a guest post about  Adding Video to your Travel blog.  It was an interesting topic to explore and we even discovered a few ideas to make our video blog more efficient. We will be adding a lot more video to our blog as we go along especially when we leave for India, Nepal and China.

Thank you Alan from The 9 to 5 Alternative and to John At JetSetCitizen for inviting us to be interviewed on your sites.  Both of your sets of questions were insightful, interesting and completely different from each other.  While answering your questions, we discovered  a lot about ourselves. Sometimes all it takes is a person asking the right questions to make you really set some concrete goals about where you are and where you want to be.

As I said in an earlier post, the travel community is one of the most supportive communities that I have had the pleasure of being a part of.   If we can all thrive, survive and succeed together than we all win! I have never seen people promote, suggest and help others out as much as I have witnessed in the past 2 months.  And I look forward to growing and learning over the next few years with everyone.

All of the blogs that we have guest posted on so far are travel sites that I admire have something interesting to say.  It is an honor to Dave and I to be welcomed by these inspiring people. We have another guest post coming up soon which we are working on now, and we are reading and reviewing a travel book as we speak.

Will be posting that review in late July or Early August to coincide with the release date. In the meantime, we have some great posts lined up, I was up all night with a wave of material floating in my brain and I can’t wait for the coming days so I can post these fun posts. Keep the feedback coming, I turned my comments off accidentally and I feel that I have scared a few people off.  I miss my comments:) We are learning this as we go and hopefully you will all learn along with us.

We both thoroughly believe in sharing information about what we have learned, what we have tried, what is working and what is not working with our travel blog. It is a roller coaster ride that I hope you will stick around and share with us right up until we leave for our travels through Asia and beyond!

I was feeling pretty bad yesterday when I looked at my last post Scuba Diving in Honduras and saw that my comments were closed.  I thought to myself “that is odd.”

And then I went back to my last three posts and saw that they were also closed.  Silly me, I didn’t know how that happened.  It ended up being a result of having a fatal error in our WordPress custom fields.  A very easy fix, but I’m not very technically savvy. Dave takes care of all of the code and I write the posts,  It has worked well.  However, he has been working on the movie Scott Pilgrim Verses the World for the past few weeks and has been very busy. So I have been left struggling through the little things.

It has been a good learning curve for me though. I have relied on Dave way too much when it comes to adding a new plugin, changing the layout etc. It is a little embarrassing.  I came across a notice stating that we had a fatal error regarding memory size when I added a new post.  Instead of trying to figure out how to fix it, I just went back to an old draft that I never ended up using and I cut and pasted a new article in.

Being me, I didn’t double check any of my settings and posted away happy in my own little world.

I was starting to feel a little bad. I can’t help it, I am sensitive. No comments were coming in and I always at least get a comment or two from some of my friends and readers.

So, I just wanted to write a little post and let you know that you can now leave comments and say hi.  Thank you for your patience, I am going to have this internet stuff figured out soon, I promise.  Or, Dave will be done his movie soon and all will be well.

Last week our photos were finalists in the Matador Networks Photo Contest. The Travel Therapy Photo Contest.

Dave Submitted a photo of long tail boats in Thailands Ko Lipe. It was definitely an island that we found relaxing and as the contest asked…a place for travel therapy.

Dave’s post read…While traveling South East Asia things can get pretty hectic. Touts will hassle you, the traffic will test your nerves and the noise can drive you crazy. In Thailand’s far south on the Malaysian border the small island of Ko Lipe will take you away from it all, where you can relax on the beach and enjoy the serenity.”

Long Tail boats at Ko Lipe

A photo that I submitted from Zanzibar was featured as well. We found Zanzibar to be an island paradise and could spend days just hanging out and relaxing.

The post that I sent with my photo was…“After cycling 4000 km and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro there is no better place to relax than Nungwi, Zanzibar. Turquoise waters, fresh seafood and sandy beaches that reach far out to sea at low tide will wash your blues away and rejuvenate you for the road ahead. Here is my photo of zen.”

Keith from Velvet Escape won for his photo of a Balinese Sunset. Congratulations Keith!

You can check out his winning photo and his caption  HERE

You can also go to the Matador website to see the other finalists and gain inspiration on where to relax next.

Thank you Matador for showing our photos and thank you for posting such great travel articles all over your network.

Almost 2 months ago, Dave and I started blogging in earnest again. During the Tour d’Afrique we didn’t know a lot about how to keep a website going and just shared our experiences with friends and family.  Since coming back to the world of blogging, we have learned a lot and met amazing people.  Other travelers and bloggers have been very supportive and giving and we feel that we are making great friends that will last for years to come.

We have thoroughly enjoyed reading about other peoples travels and we are inspired every day by the way these wandering nomads are living their lives.

Today we awoke to find that Amy at The Q Family Adventures has given us One Lovely Blog Award.  What a wonderful surprise. We absolutely love reading her blog about their travels from Thailand to Disney Land with their children.  She writes fun and informative posts that keep me coming back every day.

Now that we have received this honor, we want to share some of our favorite blogs with our readers. We have seen the award on a few other sites that we follow, so we are going to try not to repeat them and spread the love around.  Here are the guidelines that we received along with the award. It is great to share with you, some of our favorites; and by checking out lists at the Q Family and other sites, we are finding new and amazing blogs to read ourselves.

How to pay it forward if you have received one:
1) Accept the award, post it on your blog, together with the name of the person who has granted the award and link back.
2) Then pass the award to 15 other blogs that you enjoy.
3) Remember to contact the blogger to let them know about the award.

These are some of our recent favorites and some old friends.

Travels With Two Another great blog about traveling as a couple

I BackPack Canada An informative site about backpacking through this great country of Canada

Dream a Little Dream Follow Deidre and Scott as they prepare for their first trip around the world starting this month!

OttsWorld An American Expat trying to Navigate the streets of HoChiMinh by motorcycle

JetSetCitizen A one year plan to start a new career and move to a new country

TravelWithFunLilliy Great photos from Turkey, with the added bonus of learning a new languat with the Turkish Word of the day.

The Travel Expert Live in Guatemala and Costa Rica. Informative sight about Central America.

ClearlyEnlight HouseSitting and a one year move to Bulgaria

Skylab From the Founder of Art of BackPacking A travel around the world, first stop China.

Pulpology Mark and Sonia’s Intercontinental Absurdities

Velvet Escape Keiths Travels are his Velvet Escapes.

LifeCruiser A Swedish Couple traveling the world and sharing their life in Sweden as well.

Traveling the Green Way Your guide to traveling green and helping the planet

Guy and Girl Travels,   Married, With Miles Love out to other travel couples.

The 9 to 5 Alternative Interviews, news and travel around the world

From everything that I have read over the past two months, we should not being changing our website design.  Readers get used to a certain layout of your blog and they like consistency.  However, Dave and I did exactly that yesterday and I think it is a change for the better.  It is still a work in progress, we have to add some photos and video, figure out how to place our ads better by resizing them and fitting them into the sidebar, (really, the sidebar needs to be fixed all around) we have to rework our headings and categories.  But, I think that now it is far more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

We didn’t want to shut our site down for a few days while we iron out the kinks since we are just starting to gain momentum, so I hope that you will bare with us while we refine that small stuff.

Unfortunately, when we first started blogging, we didn’t know the rules to running a website.  We picked a theme that seemed easy to use and easy to navigate and never thought much about it again.  We were just told that people like to follow the Tour d’Afrique, so it is a good idea to keep an online blog. It worked out great and we loved blogging while in Africa.  We were getting huge hits everyday because we had a lot of publicity, we were writing for The Toronto Star and cyclists from around the globe were interested in the TDA. It also helped that Dave and I were performing very well in the race.

Unfortunately when we came back from Africa, we fell into the trap of what most new bloggers fall into and we stopped writing because we weren’t traveling anymore.  Instead we worked on developing our slideshow media presentations, we worked on pitching our travel show and we had gone back to work to save up our money for the next big trip at the end of this year. It was a productive time, but in retrospect, we should have kept up our website documenting our progress of becoming full time adventurers.

When we left for Africa, we knew that we wanted to become professional full time travelers.  We were tired of coming home every year from months of traveling and trying to fit back into our lives. We decided to do this bike race as a way to gain publicity to pitch a travel show. It all worked out just fine. We signed with a producer etc… but TV shows take a while to get off the ground and we don’t want to sit around for too long. We are Canada’s Adventure Couple after all, so we need to be off on an adventure soon!  So while our producer and distributor work on the logistics of making a product out of Canada’s Adventure Couple, we decided to take our travels into our own hands.

In early April, and we decided to get back to the blog.  We have a lot to share from our 10 years of travel and adventure.  Plus, it is fun to share preparations for our next trip, information on how are blog career is coming along and what adventures we will be up to in the meantime.

It has been a whirlwind two months. We have learned an incredible amount about travel blogging in a short time from successful bloggers such as Nomadic Matt, Ottsworld, The Travel Expert and Everything Everywhere.  We have been studying and reading everything we can on gaining viewership, networking and providing interesting content.  We have even added some ads to our blog, but we really need to do a lot more research on that aspect.

Things are coming together nicely and we are slowly drawing readers back to our site.  The travel community is so supportive and we are having a great time learning and being inspired by everyone.  We have enjoyed reading Wild Junket and Travel Fun with Lilliy and we even joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t even know what twitter was all about a month ago and now I am on it daily! Velvet Escape, TomTravel2 and JetSetCitizen have been very supportive and we have met great new friends in the past couple of weeks like Clearly Enlight IBackPackCanada, the QFamily and Barons Life. There are more of you out there that have been supportive and helpful and I am sorry if I didn’t mention you yet, but I will make sure to mention everyone in future posts.

So, if you have any suggestions on how to make this website better, easier to read, more interesting or if things need to be changed, we would greatly appreciate any feedback. Thanks for your patience while we revamp this site.  It will be much farther along in a couple of days.