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What, we ask you, screams summer vacation more than a road trip?
Now, we admit that we’re predisposed to think of road trips as American – but no matter where the concept of a road trip came from, it’s applicable to places all over the globe today. I’ve spent time scouring a map of northern Scotland for the smallest (and windiest) road between two points while exploring the whisky trail, staring out the bus window at the stunningly green landscape (and trying to – quite literally – count sheep) in New Zealand, and marveling at the incongruity of terrain that looked like Oregon (only with way more ostriches) en route from Cape Town to Wilderness in South Africa. The only requirements of a great road trip are roads, a car, and time.
>> This week on BootsnAll you’ll read about how you can have foreign culture experiences without leaving the country, and how a road trip through the U.S. gets you to the heart of so many elements of indie travel.
Week 19 of the Indie Travel Challenge 2012 is all about road trips.
While the United States may have some of the best excuses for long drives, we’re happy to go on a road trip anywhere that has a selection of bizarre roadside attractions to keep us intrigued and a steady supply of good take-along snacks. We just love the slower pace of road trips, no matter where we are. Seeing life from a moving car gives us more time to reflect on the passage of miles, and it has the added perk of allowing us to stop whenever we feel like it to survey the view or check out the world’s largest ball of twine.
For week 19 of the Indie Travel Challenge, we’d like you to design the perfect road trip. Take into account the following questions: Who’s with you in the car? (And no, it doesn’t have to be someone you know.) What kind of car are you driving? What snacks are in the cooler? What music is playing? And, most importantly, where are you?
The Indie Travel Challenge is a year-long blogging project. Every Monday, we’ll post a new prompt, question, or challenge that bloggers can respond to via text, photos, or video. Respond on your own blog, and link back to BootsnAll so we can find and highlight the best submissions.
Check out the Indie Travel Challenge landing page for all information related to the event. You can see the week’s daily prompt, follow the hashtag on Twitter, share your posts, and check out submissions from around the world.
Read more about road trips:
photo by Patxi Izkue
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As the founders and staff at BootsnAll have grown up over the years, so have our ideas about indie travel. Back in 1998, for instance, a young and single Sean Keener wasn’t thinking about how having kids someday might impact his travel plans. These days, he’s acutely aware of how many people think their traveling days are over once they reproduce – and he hasn’t let that stop him and his growing family from still hitting the road. In fact, they just got back from spending 4.5 months in New Zealand, and Sean’s son’s first trip was to New York at the ripe age of six weeks.
We’ve recently featured a couple of stories (here and here) by kick-ass traveling families who are forcing people to re-think their assumptions about traveling with kids, and we’re expanding the theme a bit this week. You’ll read about why it’s important to raise kids with indie travel in mind. You’ll read excellent tips to make traveling with kids easier, which should leave you with pretty much no excuses not to get your family on the road. And in case you need more inspiration to not put off your trip any longer, you’ll also read about how to go from dreaming to traveling in just four weeks.
Week 18 of the Indie Travel Challenge 2012 is about family travel, too.
Now, before those of you without kids tune out, thinking this week’s prompt doesn’t apply to you, let me assure you that it does. You may not have munchkins of your own (yet), but you once were a small person, and part of a family, yes? Well, that’s what we’d like you to focus on this week.
For week 18 of the Indie Travel Challenge, pick any one of these questions (or as many as you like!) to answer in your post. What is your earliest childhood memory of traveling with your family? Did you take regular family vacations? Did your family encourage travel? Did any of those family trips inspire your adult life as a traveler?
The Indie Travel Challenge is a year-long blogging project. Every Monday, we’ll post a new prompt, question, or challenge that bloggers can respond to via text, photos, or video. Respond on your own blog, and link back to BootsnAll so we can find and highlight the best submissions.
Check out the Indie Travel Challenge landing page for all information related to the event. You can see the week’s daily prompt, follow the hashtag on Twitter, share your posts, and check out submissions from around the world.
Read more about family travel:
photo by Chefdruck
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As we started the Indie Travel Take Down Tournament this year – our first attempt to wrangle the countries of the world into a kind of March Madness bracket of indie travel awesomeness – we were predicting which places would rank highly with travelers. New Zealand, as many of you can probably guess, was a deserved #1 seed and (we thought) a shoe-in for the top slot overall.
And then Portugal came along to upset New Zealand in the finals.
Tournaments like this are always going to have surprises, which is part of the fun, and of course the result doesn’t diminish New Zealand as a kick-ass indie travel destination at all. In fact, we love the country so much we’re highlighting it this week on BootsnAll. You’ll get to read about the ABCs of traveling in New Zealand (and since there are a few letters missing from this alphabet, we invite you to suggest appropriate candidates for U, X, Y, and Z), 7 things that make New Zealand so awesome for travelers, and a festival in New Zealand that celebrates local food (nevermind that it’s of the buggy variety).
Week 17 of the Indie Travel Challenge 2012 is all about New Zealand.
Some of you have already blogged about New Zealand as part of the Indie Travel Challenge, and we can’t blame you – as anyone who’s been there can tell you, it practically screams indie travel. If you haven’t already written about New Zealand, this is your golden opportunity. And if you have, we’d like to challenge you to write about it in a new way.
If you haven’t been to New Zealand (or you haven’t already written about it for the Indie Travel Challenge):
Imagine you’ve just been handed a round-trip ticket to Auckland. You’ve got a grand total of three months to spend there. You can travel as much as you like within the country, hopping between islands whenever you like, but you can’t leave New Zealand. Tell us what you’d do with three months in New Zealand – whether you’d base yourself in one place or travel constantly, what activities you’d make sure to do, and what you’d skip.
If you have been to New Zealand (or you’ve already written about it):
For a small country, New Zealand has lots to offer travelers – including two distinct islands. Imagine you have to convince someone to stay on just ONE island for the duration of their one-month stay in New Zealand. Make your case – North Island or South Island?
The Indie Travel Challenge is a year-long blogging project. Every Monday, we’ll post a new prompt, question, or challenge that bloggers can respond to via text, photos, or video. Respond on your own blog, and link back to BootsnAll so we can find and highlight the best submissions.
Check out the Indie Travel Challenge landing page for all information related to the event. You can see the week’s daily prompt, follow the hashtag on Twitter, share your posts, and check out submissions from around the world.
Read more about traveling in New Zealand:
photo by PhilipC
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At first blush, one might assume that hunters and fishermen would be on the opposite side of the environmental argument from organizations whose mission is preserve our natural world. In fact, hunters and fishermen are often some of the most staunch environmentalists, because their livelihood depends on a stable ecosystem.
The same can be said for travelers, who – despite our penchant for hopping into gas-guzzling cars and planes to explore the far reaches of the earth – end up being environmentally aware simply because if we don’t do our part to preserve the planet, it won’t be here for us to explore. It’s a selfish line of reasoning, there’s no denying that, but if the outcome is good for the environment then I think that’s just fine.
Where am I going with this? I’m getting to this week’s Indie Travel Challenge, which is a challenge – not just a blogging prompt – about giving back.
>> And don’t miss this week’s travel transformation story, “Why You Should Forgo the American Dream and Let Travel Transform Your Life“
Week 16 of the Indie Travel Challenge 2012 is about voluntourism.
Many of us take trips that are relatively brief, and we’ve got them planned from morning ’til night, with hardly any room for rest, let alone volunteering. But volunteering while you travel – so-called “voluntourism” – is easier than you might think. Whether you focus an entire trip around a volunteer project or you’ve only got a half-day during your long weekend getaway, every little bit helps. It may be a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason – chances are you really will get more out of giving back than the people who you’re working to help.
This week, we’re challenging you to make plans to give back. You don’t have to do it this week, or this month, but find a way to give back to the earth or to the local community (even your own) sometime this year – and tell us about what you plan to do. Share your best ideas for caring for the earth and her people, including things you already do when you travel or at home.
The Indie Travel Challenge is a year-long blogging project. Every Monday, we’ll post a new prompt, question, or challenge that bloggers can respond to via text, photos, or video. Respond on your own blog, and link back to BootsnAll so we can find and highlight the best submissions.
Check out the Indie Travel Challenge landing page for all information related to the event. You can see the week’s daily prompt, follow the hashtag on Twitter, share your posts, and check out submissions from around the world.
Read more about volutourism:
photo by treesftf
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At BootsnAll, one of the things we love about travel is that there are many brands of getting out and seeing the world. It’s not one size fits all, and everyone can travel in a way that suits their personality. We do, however, have preferences for certain kinds of travel – and traveling by checklist isn’t one of them.
We may make life lists and have travel goals, but – as we highlighted in the Indie Travel Manifesto – we value possibilities over a static to-do list. That’s one of the reasons why we like hearing tales about how people’s lives have been changed by travel – it’s almost never checking an item off a to-do list that brings about profound change. It’s often the smaller moments, the ones you don’t plan for, that may have such an impact on you that you don’t even realize it until much later.
So this week on BootsnAll, we’re focusing on the transformational power of travel.
Jennifer Miller talks about her grandmother’s death spurring her on in her quest to travel long-term with her family, and some of the highs and lows they’ve experienced since setting out on their journey. The phrase “leap of faith” comes up often. And every person who has contributed to our “How I Travel” series has talked about moments in childhood that inspired travel in later life.
Week 15 of the Indie Travel Challenge 2012 is all about travel transformations.
Saying that travel can change a person’s life can sound rather metaphysical – but it can also be quite practical. It can be something as simple as wandering the streets of Paris on your first solo overseas trip, utterly lost and too afraid to ask for help, when the lightbulb goes off over your head that you can duck into any Metro station and – just like that – be back on track, meaning there’s no such thing as being lost, although it may take you a little longer to get from Point A to Point B sometimes. (And yes, that’s exactly what happened to me in 1992, and it remains a seminal moment in my travel life.)
How has travel changed your life? Can you pinpoint a single moment – a day, an hour, a split second – when you knew that things had changed? How did that change impact your life, both on your travels and at home?
The Indie Travel Challenge is a year-long blogging project. Every Monday, we’ll post a new prompt, question, or challenge that bloggers can respond to via text, photos, or video. Respond on your own blog, and link back to BootsnAll so we can find and highlight the best submissions.
Check out the Indie Travel Challenge landing page for all information related to the event. You can see the week’s daily prompt, follow the hashtag on Twitter, share your posts, and check out submissions from around the world.
Read more about transformational travel:
photo by Trekking Rinjani
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