This week’s #rtwchat on Twitter was all about planning your Round the World trip – the challenges and best/worst of it all. And make sure you sign up for Plan Your Round the World Trip in 30 Days – kicking off February 1!
This is part of BootsnAll’s 30 Days of Indie Travel project, a daily blogging challenge with a prompt for every day in November 2011. Check out the prompt at the bottom of this post to find out how you can participate! 2011 was an amazing year of travel for me. I took a small ship cruise to Panama and Costa Rica, spent a week in Portugal, watched friends get married in northern Michigan wine country, visited family in Florida, saw the stunningly beautiful country of Switzerland, fell madly in love with Berlin, traveled to Oregon for BootsnAll’s annual meeting, took a girls weekend trip to Kansas City with my best friend, and explored coastal California. So what does 2012 hold? At this point, I really don’t know. My husband was laid off from his job in late October, throwing our plans into the air. With no idea what our financial situation will look like, or even where we’ll be calling home in the next few months, we’re hesitant to make commitments. In June, we celebrate our five year wedding anniversary, for which we planned to renew our vows in the south of France. We’re holding out hope we can still make it happen. If life returns to normal by then, I also hope to plan a big trip in the fall (perhaps [...]
Fall is officially here, and while many people in the Northern Hemisphere are lamenting the passing of the summer season and it’s accompanying beach weather, I’m thrilled to be moving on to my very favorite season of the year. Fall in Chicago is that brief window of time when the temperature is just right – neither too hot and sticky nor freezing and miserable – when I savor the last days of the outdoor farmer’s markets and the few remaining beer gardens, when I can wear knee-high boots with tights and a dress, or throw on a light coat and scarf to run errands and then come home to curl up with a blanket on the couch. For me, fall weather is heavenly right here, but I still like to travel to experience this magical season in other destinations as well. And I’m not alone; many people plan their fall travels around the best experiences of the season – fall foliage, cider mills, harvest festivals, and the Halloween and Thanksgiving holidays. If that’s you, here are a few ideas on where to go this fall. Visiting France in fall means being there for the vendanges, or harvests. Throughout France’s many wine regions, towns and wineries hold special events and harvest celebrations, and at some you can even participate in the [...]
About a week ago, most of the BootsnAll team headed to Vancouver, BC for the TBEX (Travel Blog Exchange) conference. One of our car discussions, enroute from Portland, was about BootsnAll’s BHAG — Big Hairy Audacious Goal. While we are working on refining our goals and dreams this year, this is the BHAG we are currently tossing around: 10 stamps on every passport in every world citizen’s back pocket. While at the TBEX conference, we handed out postcards asking bloggers to share their dreams – one life goal, one travel goal, and one blogging/connecting goal. Since we’ve gotten a few requests post-conference, we thought we’d just share the postcard with the rest of the BootsnAll community. So feel free to share your goals in the comments or download a pdf of the postcard if you want to keep it to yourself. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some of the goals and BHAGs that TBEX bloggers and travelers from the BootsnAll community have shared with us. So if you haven’t shared your BHAG with us, we’d love to hear it! What’s your BHAG?
This week’s #rtwchat on Twitter was all about planning your Round the World trip – the challenges and best/worst of it all. And make sure you sign up for Plan Your Round the World Trip in 30 Days – kicking off February 1! 
This is part of BootsnAll’s 30 Days of Indie Travel project, a daily blogging challenge with a prompt for every day in November 2011. Check out the prompt at the bottom of this post to find out how you can participate! 2011 was an amazing year of travel for me. I took a small ship cruise to Panama and Costa Rica, spent a week in Portugal, watched friends get married in northern Michigan wine country, visited family in Florida, saw the stunningly beautiful country of Switzerland, fell madly in love with Berlin, traveled to Oregon for BootsnAll’s annual meeting, took a girls weekend trip to Kansas City with my best friend, and explored coastal California. So what does 2012 hold? At this point, I really don’t know. My husband was laid off from his job in late October, throwing our plans into the air. With no idea what our financial situation will look like, or even where we’ll be calling home in the next few months, we’re hesitant to make commitments. In June, we celebrate our five year wedding anniversary, for which we planned to renew our vows in the south of France. We’re holding out hope we can still make it happen. If life returns to normal by then, I also hope to plan a big trip in the fall (perhaps [...] 
Fall is officially here, and while many people in the Northern Hemisphere are lamenting the passing of the summer season and it’s accompanying beach weather, I’m thrilled to be moving on to my very favorite season of the year. Fall in Chicago is that brief window of time when the temperature is just right – neither too hot and sticky nor freezing and miserable – when I savor the last days of the outdoor farmer’s markets and the few remaining beer gardens, when I can wear knee-high boots with tights and a dress, or throw on a light coat and scarf to run errands and then come home to curl up with a blanket on the couch. For me, fall weather is heavenly right here, but I still like to travel to experience this magical season in other destinations as well. And I’m not alone; many people plan their fall travels around the best experiences of the season – fall foliage, cider mills, harvest festivals, and the Halloween and Thanksgiving holidays. If that’s you, here are a few ideas on where to go this fall. Visiting France in fall means being there for the vendanges, or harvests. Throughout France’s many wine regions, towns and wineries hold special events and harvest celebrations, and at some you can even participate in the [...] 
About a week ago, most of the BootsnAll team headed to Vancouver, BC for the TBEX (Travel Blog Exchange) conference. One of our car discussions, enroute from Portland, was about BootsnAll’s BHAG — Big Hairy Audacious Goal. While we are working on refining our goals and dreams this year, this is the BHAG we are currently tossing around: 10 stamps on every passport in every world citizen’s back pocket. While at the TBEX conference, we handed out postcards asking bloggers to share their dreams – one life goal, one travel goal, and one blogging/connecting goal. Since we’ve gotten a few requests post-conference, we thought we’d just share the postcard with the rest of the BootsnAll community. So feel free to share your goals in the comments or download a pdf of the postcard if you want to keep it to yourself. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some of the goals and BHAGs that TBEX bloggers and travelers from the BootsnAll community have shared with us. So if you haven’t shared your BHAG with us, we’d love to hear it! What’s your BHAG?