Entries from November 2006 ↓

I wish today was tomorrow so I could post that post I’ve been working on… it’s frustrating that I cant. Oh well, it will be worth the wait.

I compiled 480 email addresses (from chain emails I have recived) so I can spam randoms about tomorrow’s post. I’ve turned into one of the people I hate – but it’s for the good of the world. You wait… you’ll see. It’s ethical spamming, I swear.

This weekend I get to fulfill 2 adventures you have sent me on:

1. I take ownership of my Grandma’s Car this Saturday, and you told me to keep it for a while before I sell it: so I shall.

2. I have to dig that hole, with “hand tools”.

Fun stuff! Submissions are now open for Italy and Spain as well!

Choose my adventures:

• Around Victoria, BC
• Ireland
• Italy
• Spain

Or you can edit the Travel Wiki.

And as always, feel free to contact me. I love email, and always respond.

I was watching The Descent (the goriest movie I have ever seen) the other day, and I was terrified. Not by the creepy bat-humans, and not by the blood and dismemberment, but by the intense crave crawling… The filmmakers did a fantastic job creating a feeling of claustrophobia, and have seriously dissuaded me from wanting to go spelunking. So that’s why I decided to do some Google research on it, ha ha – I’m not one to turn down an adventure, even if it terrifies me.

Speleology is the ology for caves. Caving/Spelunking is the extreme sport of cave exploration. Here’s a wikipedia article on the sport. It seems very intense… and I found a group of cavers from Vancouver Island.

Caving requires some level of experience, so if someone out there wants me to consider embarking on this adventure in the future (or eventually climbing Mount Everest?), you might want to suggest sending me on an indoor rock climbing adventure as a start?

I watched the Devil Wears Prada this week, and during the scene in Paris I got really excited… I’m going to be there in 9 months! Remember that you can makes suggestions for my adventure with the wiki - you can edit my travel itinerary anytime you like.

The country that got the second most votes is the Republic of Ireland, so tomorrow I’ll start collecting ideas for that.

I posted some new letters on “The Tale of a Landlord and his Tenants.” Enjoy!

In my first year at University I made an effort to join many on campus clubs. Surprisingly, the most enjoyable was the Photo Club. I went on all sorts of adventures with them, but my most memorable was my geocaching extravaganza.

The principle behind this GPS adventure is relatively simple – it’s a treasure hunt. People hide “Caches” of goodies all over the world, and post their Latitude and Longitude coordinates on the Internet. Other people use their Global Positioning System Receiver to track down the location. Once they find it, the adventurers take something out of the cache and put something new in it. Sometimes there are themes – movies / western / etc.. Other times it’s a garage sale-esque conglomeration. Regardless of what you find, hiking blindly guided only by a hand held GPS device is absurdly fun, and if you ever have the opportunity to embark on one of these adventures, I recommend it.

A good site that features many of these locations is http://www.geocaching.com/. To find out more, check out this wikipedia article.

I used to have a section on this website called The Tale of a Landlord and his Tenants. It was a series of letters between a landlord and, you guessed it, his tenants. I thought they were hilarious and decided it was necessary to share them with the world. I cannot tell you where I get them from (as I receive then anonymously), but I can say the characters in the letters are real people – there are newspaper articles that go along with them confirming many of the details. The names have been changed, but everything else has remains intact… even the spelling mistakes.

The reason I took them off of this site was because only 4 people were reading them. Two of those four people have emailed me asking for them to be put back up, and I thought to myself “why not?”

Expect some new letters posted in the next few days. I will periodically post more as I am fed them.

Remember to suggest adventures for my trip to Ottawa. Voting will start tomorrow. Also, don’t forget adventures for France. You can suggest them the old fashioned way, or check out the new Travel Wiki.

Thank you for your feedback! It seems that almost all of you are in line with the original plan for this site and are in favor of decision making in real time. I plan on posting questions about where to go next and what to do while I’m on the go, and check the results several hours later (or the next day). That was my intention with this site, and I am happy we are on the same page.

It was suggested to me that I create a wiki so everyone has access to modify and edit my travel itinerary. This will be a broad document with many ideas for adventures. When I arrive in the countries on the list, I will post questions based on this document and have you vote on what I do. Of course you will always have the opportunity to make new suggestions. The travel itinerary will serve as a guide, and we will get more specific from there.

I gave myself two tasks on Monday.

1. create the wiki (more specifically: find an open source one and upload it)

2. create an icon for the website.

The first objective was surprisingly painless. The first version of my wiki is online, and I encourage you to check it out… and edit it!

The second objective was surprisingly difficult, and I still haven’t finished it. There seems to be problems uploading a transparent icon, but I will have to work on it later as it is getting late. I hope you appreciate the dragon-banana, ha ha ha. If you don’t like the icon, make a suggestion and we will vote on a new one!

As always, if you have any ideas, feedback, suggestions, or adventures, please contact me!

You directed me to Europe, and you have decided that my first stop is going to be France. Now let’s get specific. What should I do once I get there? (What cities should I go to, what places should I visit, etc.).

The poll I will have up for the next few days will be about how you want decisions to be made on this site. How much of the trip do you want to be preplanned? Would it be best to have a specific itinerary planned out in advance, or would you prefer to make decisions in real time while I’m on my adventures? Or would some mix of the two be ideal?

Do you have any ideas to make this site better? I really would appreciate your feedback. And remember that I am going to Ottawa next week, so don’t forget to leave some suggestions. We will be voting on them at the end of the week.

Here’s a link to the Dragon Halloween Video.

Couchsurfing.com is a fantastic resource I intend to use on my travels. It’s sort of like eBay, except instead of auctioning away the garbage you have lying around your house, you lend out your couch to travelers who are in your area. Or you seek out couches for your travels all over the world. They have a feedback and verification program to reduce the risk of awkward situations, which is certainly a necessary component.

It’s a community driven site and I’m really excited about using it. If you ever plan going backpacking, I strongly suggest you check out the site.

It looks like I’m getting a faux-hawk. Since “More Shaggy” came pretty close, I’m not going to go for the tired and cliché ugly faux-hawk. I’m going to go for the cool one:

The side bar poll I have seems to work pretty well, but the plugin for surveys seems to be a bit glitchy, so I have set up a separate voting system. Click here to submit suggestions for future adventures! Tomorrow we will start planning the Europe leg of the trip!

I remember in grade three my class celebrated “Hundreds Day” where we completed various tasks that had to do with the number 100. Homework that night was coming up with a list of 100 things we wanted to accomplish in our life, and I remember putting “travel to every country in the world” as number 1.

There is a man named Charles Veley who accomplished that and has taken extreme traveling to the next level. Before you click on the link, I thought I would warn you that there is a loud song playing the background of the site. Anyway. As of today, he has visited “609, or 90% of the 673 countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically separated island groups, and major states and provinces of the world.” There complete list of those places is here.

I think his accomplishment is remarkable and I am envious of his travels. I had hopes to follow in his footsteps, but then I found out his adventures have cost nearly $2,000,000. Ha ha, maybe someday.

I need some submissions for adventures. Anything really, as long as I can afford it on my student budget. And don’t forget to vote on my haircut. I’ve scheduled a tentative appointment for Wednesday at 3:00.

[survey_fly]