The Best Comments Of The Month: January 2009
Every insightful comment you leave on a post enhances foXnoMad more than I could with even the best travel article. I appreciate every comment, hope you’ll leave more, and encourage you to do so if you never have.
In case you don’t get a chance to follow the latest comments in the sidebar, or read through a viewer, here are some of the best comments of the month.
- Kim recommends having your friend’s extra car in your driveway to protect your home when you’re traveling.
- Erica is too guilty of showing up at her gate at the last minute. I, like her, have resolved to be (more) on time after missing my first flight ever last month.
- My picture of palak paneer from Bangalore looks like “molokeyya” to Yasser, I’m still dying to know, what is that?
- Tough economic times are a blessing in disguise forcing us not to forget the world around us according to Taylor. I agree, a tight budget can make for a more creative traveler.
- Andy gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
There have been some great conversations among the comments this month, thank you all who left your mark this month on a post. If you’re shy and haven’t left a comment yet, check out some of the most recent comments and join your favorite discussion. We’d all love to hear from you.
[photo by: Doug Sparks]
Dog Tricks You Need To Learn If You Want To Travel Without Your Pooch
Traveling with your dog is a difficult undertaking but leaving her behind isn’t easy either. One of the 4 things frequent travelers have to consider before getting a dog is the added planning that goes into traveling with and without your pooch. It’s important to establish a strong base of pet sitters and make your dog a pleasure to watch.
Whether or not you’re planning on getting a dog or already have one, there are a few tricks to getting your dog’s arrangements taken care of well in advanced of your next trip.
- Pet Sit For A Friend – You don’t need a dog to help out another friend who may need a dog sitter for the weekend. Offer your services to your buddies who have dogs and be ready to help out when you can. Not only can you ask them to return the favor later on, you’ll gain experience taking care of, walking, and disciplining a dog before you have your own to handle.
- Introduce Him To Your Family, Early – If you’ve got the luxury of family near by, bring your dog over right away to meet them. Introducing your pet to your family early on bonds them (and her) to each other, making it easier to ask them to pet sit for you. (It works even better if the dog is a puppy.)
- Set A Routine – It doesn’t have to be down to the minute, but your dog needs a daily routine of walking, eating, etc. Not doing so makes it difficult to leave him anywhere – and you don’t want your friends and family rejecting you after their first pet sitting experience.
Wine Tasting At J. Lohr – San Jose, California
January 28, 2009 by Anil P.
Filed under Food, Travel Journal
Located in downtown San Jose in a quiet residential area is the J.Lohr tasting room. Approximately the 15th largest wine seller in the United States they offer free weekday tastings. The daily event, from 10am to 5pm, is a great quick stop for any trip in the San Jose area. Up on my way from the beaches of Santa Cruz recently, I decided to pay J. Lohr for my first ever wine tasting.
Despite the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, there were only about 15 people in the tasting room, a nice sized crowd for the space. I walked right in to a small shop at the entrance of the tasting room and made my way up to the bar. One of the J. Lohr employees came up to me promptly with a wine list and explained to me that anyone who visits during a regular weekday tasting is entitled to 6 complimentary tastes of either red or white wine, or a combination of the two.
The glasses are filled generously, a little less than half full, and I drank 6 of them – an assortment of their red wine selection. Most of the J. Lohr wines are grown in Paso Robles, although there is a small vineyard right behind the tasting room in San Jose. The best red wine I had at J. Lohr, the Cypress Hills Shiraz, is also their best value. ($4 a bottle but you have to get a minimum of 6. They can wrap it in an airline approved packaging or ship it within the US.)
You are not obligated to buy a bottle once you’re done tasting so once you’re done you can simply walk out the door. This felt weird to me personally so I picked up a bottle of the Cypress Hills Merlot, my second favorite (that I could afford.) In all, the entire experience will take you at most an hour, cost you nothing, and keep you close to public transportation and the rest of San Jose.
You can find more about J. Lohr and their daily tastings at their website, JLohr.com. I’ve also posted some of my pictures from inside below.
4 Things Frequent Travelers Need To Consider Before Getting A Dog
There are a number of things that anyone who is considering adopting or purchasing a dog has to commit to beforehand. As a traveler there are a number of added concerns and situations you need to recognize in order to determine if a dog is right for you. Over the last few months after adopting a puppy (the wrinkly guy on the right) I’ve got a better understanding of the added items travelers need to add to their ‘pre-dog checklist’.
1. You Travel More Than You Think
The more we travel, the more travelers tend to underestimate how much they travel. Take the previous year, for example, and count how many days you were actually not home. Multiply it by one and a half and that’s the amount of time you’ll need to find someone to watch your furry friend.
In some ways it’s easier for those of you who are always on the road to get around moving all the time with your canine. Dogs are driven to migrate by instinct and if you can avoid air travel they’ll love hitchhiking around with you.
2. Your Travel Budget Will Take A Hit
Traveling is a luxury, not a necessity, dog food and rabies vaccinations aren’t. Expect that some of the money you’ve previously been spending on vacations, adventures, and even quick trips out of town will go to your dog. That might mean canceling a trip here and there or staying in one place longer. If you can’t deal with this, don’t get a dog.
3. You’re Planning For Two Now
Every trip you will take for the entire lifespan of your dog (varies between 9-15 year) will double or triple the amount of planning you’ll have to do beforehand. A dog can’t help you with this, so it’s more effort than making plans for a family or group of friends.
Consider that you’ll have to:
The Setting Sun Of Santa Cruz
January 26, 2009 by Anil P.
Filed under Pictures and Video, Travel Journal
I was able to get some time at the beach during a recent trip to California. I wasn’t able to stay long in Santa Cruz, but from what I can tell it definitely looks like a party town. The houses lining the beach were packed with barbecuers, students, and permanent beach bums.
Post Highlights: [1/24/2009]
Post Highlights are a selection of the best and most popular posts from the past two weeks updated every other Saturday. Another great way to get the best of foXnoMad is to subscribe to my RSS feed (what is RSS?).
Le Jardin – Oberoi Hotel, Bangalore
I was lucky enough to enjoy some food at the Le Jardin Restaurant inside of the Oberoi hotel in Bangalore recently.
6 Ways To Keep Your Travel Blog Interesting
Writing about traveling on a blog isn’t like writing an essay, but more of a newspaper article. Instead of making a 1 week trip to Cancun an epic novel, turn it into an eyewitness report so that anyone will want to read it.
Tony Wheeler (one of the founders of Lonely Planet Publications) visited some of the most ‘dangerous’ countries in the world and wrote about them in his book Bad Lands.
Essential Software Tools For Digital Nomads
Here are my recommended (and all free) essential
software tools to get you connected, backed up, and leaving software licenses a distant memory.
foXnoMad Features: Recent Comments
Every Friday over the next three months I’d like to introduce you to a feature of foXnoMad. Helping you make the most out of every post, connect with your fellow travelers, and travel smarter.
Catch up with the latest comments and join ongoing conversations on foXnoMad posts with the recent comments. Many of you who are subscribed to foXnoMad’s RSS feed or email updates may not have noticed the display of the 6 last user comments in the sidebar on the right of foxnomad.com as shown below.
You can follow along some of the most active conversations and add your own thoughts to these posts below.
- 6 Ways To Keep Your Personal Travel Blog Interesting (6 Comments)
- Travel Resolutions Your Should Consider For 2009 (6 Comments)
- How To Protect Your Home When You Travel (8 Comments)
Your comments help add insight to posts, generate conversations and bring up new ideas, and are a great way to keep in touch with me. They are all appreciated (except spam)!
Essential Software Tools For Digital Nomads
Travelers earning a living on the road need to equip themselves with a number of essential software tools. Moving out from behind the desk in a cubicle to consulting from a beach in Indonesia requires you to handle more network and administrative tasks that a manager or IT department would normally take care of.
Here are my recommended (and all free) essential software tools to get you connected, backed up, and leaving software licenses a distant memory.
Getting Online
Finding a stable and free Internet connection is paramount to getting remote work done.
- NetStumbler – When you don’t have access to an open wireless connection Netstumbler can help you detect hidden SSIDs which may not be encrypted. (Many can usually be found at bus stations and airports.)
- Wireshark – This network analyzer can not only detect wireless networks around you, but also (with some configuration) help you crack WEP and WPA encryption passwords.
If there are no connections available near you, try bumming a Wi-Fi signal on the road by checking for known open access points with WiFinder or WeFi before you lose a reliable connection.
Keeping In Touch
Set up your virtual office like you never left.
- Skype – Allows you to call other Skype users, with video as well as send chats for free. For low rates you can also call landlines or cell phones across the world. SkypeIn is a pay service (about $18 for 3 months) you can use to set up a telephone number that’s forwarded to your Skype account so your clients can get in touch with you without paying long distance fees.
- Meebo – Combine all of your instant messaging accounts like MSN and AOL with the online service Meebo. Similar to Meebo, but downloaded and run from your desktop is Trillian. Both encrypt your messages which can protect you from legal consequences, depending on the local laws.
What Obama Needs To Do To Improve The Travel Industry But Won’t (Directly)
This post was originally to be published yesterday (1/20/2009) but I was traveling all day and not able to catch an Internet connection between flights. Here it is, a day late.
Barack Obama is being sworn in as the US president today and hopes are across the country that his administration will be able to fix many of the woes facing the United States. The few of you who responded to my poll last week believe that Obama will improve the travel industry, at least a little. His administration will have the opportunity to remediate a number of problems facing the global travel industry – except that the Obama administration is unlikely to do so directly.
As I predicted earlier in the month, 2009 is not going to be a good year for travelers. A number of ailments in the industry could very well become life-threatening affecting both US and international travelers. Here’s what the Obama administration needs to do, and why it probably won’t.
1. Overhaul the Outdated Air Traffic Control System
Upgrading the 30-40 year old air traffic control infrastructure is both costly and unglamorous. At an estimated $40 billion dollars updating the mostly manual system of guiding, tracking, and organizing landing patterns at airports to a computerized models (like much of Western Europe) is both expensive and time consuming. Currently the federal government is planning a roll out to GPS-based systems over the next two decades.
Yes he can?
Such a change would allow air traffic control systems to keep planes closer together in flight patterns and use gravity and existing wind conditions to land planes with less engine power, potentially saving 40% of the fuel used to land a jetliner. The best reason for upgrading the air traffic control system however, is safety. Numerous close calls are reported every year due to overloaded air traffic control personnel and many more go unreported. It will take a disaster to push the public to call for a change – until then it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
2. Reviving The US Travel Industry
Despite the international travel boom, the US is in the middle of a bust. Visa restrictions and passport requirements (i.e. from Canada) make it more difficult for foreign nationals to visit the US – so they are choosing to go elsewhere. Recent changes in the visa waiver program don’t help either. Not reciprocating visa waivers of closely allied counties hurts the US economy at a time when Europeans should be flocking to the States taking advantage of the weak dollar.
Axis Of Evil Tour Guide
January 19, 2009 by Anil P.
Filed under Pictures and Video
Tony Wheeler (one of the founders of Lonely Planet Publications) visited some of the most ‘dangerous’ countries in the world and wrote about them in his book Bad Lands.
Three of the places Wheeler visited (Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea) are on my list of 4 unlikely travel destinations 10 years from now. If you can’t wait that long, book your next flight to these 8 places you should visit but might be scared to.
My name is Anil, a traveler and travel enthusiast. I created foXnoMad to connect with other travelers, discover their world, and share what I’ve learned about mine.
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