plan vacations within driving distance. camp or air bnb instead of hotels. visit nature sites or small, quaint towns, not tourist hotspots.
I want to travel a little bit more overseas. I'm thinking an easy country to enter without needing crazy visa requirements and not a hundred vaccine shots. Anyone have any ideas? I'd love to go for a month but I'm not sure if I'm mentally able to string something like that together. I was thinking about Ecuador. I hear it's cheap and relatively okay. And I hear the dollar goes far. I don't really give a shit about not knowing Spanish, that's what Google translate is for and a couple of laughs between whoever is vending to you and the stupid gringo that I'll be called over and over again. I currently live in a sort of made out campervan. It has its ups and downs. for me the best part about it is the day of the move and then finding a new spot. I like to move a lot more now than I used to. sitting around in the desolation of the American West gets to me a little bit more now than it used to. I just have such a hard time in crowded cities and towns. Just being around the chaos of human ants is agitating.
For us, it was buying a van. Started out with a cheapish used Sprinter (do NOT do that, unless they had impeccable service, they are a service nightmare... even for a mechanic), after enjoying the van travels we splurged on a new Ford Transit... we just flipped 50k miles on it in 4 years, and it's 99% travel only miles. The "conversion" was cheap, maybe $4k total... platform for a queen sized bed (I'm 6'4", need the length and sleep is the most important aspect for me), space under the bed for dogs, gear, food. Some lights, a couple fans (splurged there, cheap were noisy), no solar, no bathroom (well, a bucket for emergencies), no kitchen, nothing complicated.
Skipping 2020, we've done 45 week trips every year since 2016 plus a ton of more local trips (within a days drive). Having a comfortable bed, all the stuff we need to eat well (we don't eat out much, too disappointing), and the ability to drive/park anywhere means we're free to just go anywhere. It's gotten shitty since the plandemic, previously private/unused camping spots became over-run, but it's getting better now.
We tend to do 23 days of "rough camping" (no showers and rarely toilets, dispersed camping as often as possible), and then 12 nights of either nice campground with showers or ABNB. Though sometimes we will string together more campgrounds, we did that while driving the 101 one year (lots of state campgrounds made it easy). Gone are the days of just pulling up to Any campground and being certain you'll get a parking spot though.... and that makes it a little harder to get some momentum to figure things out.
That works for us. Maybe it'll give you an idea.
Travel is consumerism.
Don't. There's no place like home.
Travel insurance
What's the hassle factor? Is it a fight like most insurance, or straightforward like "The retarded airline cancelled/rescheduled my flight, here's $$$ to go buy a last minute ticket on another airline that's not trying to reroute you through four connections on an eff you schedule"?
Never filed a claim so don't know the hassle.
That's what's killing me. I can fight and win spats because I'm legally savvy and assertive, but spending a day or two every effing trip arguing with retards isn't relaxing. If I could pony up a couple hundred bucks per trip to an insurer so I could make one call/email to the effect of "The airline/lodging/etc lied or broke the law, here's the evidence, cut me a check so I can last minute book whatever" I'd do that in a heartbeat. Just to save myself being ready to flip a table for days because I had to explain to some smoothbrain time why fraud is illegal for the nth time.
while your on vacation, destroy the Vatican, topple the crown, snap some pics from inside the Forbidden Temple, and livestream the inside of the Pyramids basically you need to go Indiana Jones
What's the Forbidden Temple?
every capitol city has secret chambers inside a glorious looking building sitting in plain sight the forbidden temple.
Is there some way to make travel not a shitshow and actually enjoyable?
Private jet plane.
this, it was the best
I've heard that air bnb can be superior to hotels.
When it was mostly owners renting out their basement/vacation house/duplex/etc it was fantastic. Now that it's largely a front end for large property management firms who give no shits about anything...it's about a 50% failure rate.
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