Entries from January 2007 ↓

I thought I would take this opportunity to highlight my travel plans thus far.

On (approximately) August 10th I am boarding a plane to Paris, France. I’ll spend a few days there, sleep on some random couches, explore the city, and put up a post on my website letting you send me anywhere in Europe. Well, any one of the 18 countries on the Euro Rail: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland (Rep.), Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Pretty exciting ‘eh?

After two months of that I am going to hop on a plane to Australia. The first thing I plan to do is buy a van, and then from there give control of my life to you. Where should I drive to? What should I do? It will be up to you – and be tons of fun.

I have incorporated a wiki to this site where I will aggregate my backpacking and adventure travel posts. It will also be a great way for you to make suggestions for my adventures. Check it out!

Cheers!

What happens when you lose your car keys? Can a lock-smith fashion you a new one? Do you have to get a new ignition thing installed? Today I had a panic attack when I could not find my car keys because I did not want to have to discover the answer to my questions.

I had a feeling I left them at my office so I decided to take a walk in the snow (yay climate change) and retrieve them; I love walking in the snow - it’s very peaceful. I took this opportunity to think about the future of this site (and I found my keys!).

Firstly, I have no intention on giving up the “Choose My Adventure” aspect of my blog. I really like the idea and still strongly believe this has potential to be a fun, interactive, and exciting adventure for all of us.

I have decided to develop this site into a resource for backpacking, adventure, and travel. I want to highlight cool places to go, tips and tricks, fellow adventures… give people a reason to come to this site other than to boss me around and read about my lost car keys, ha ha. Why do I think this is a good idea? Because when I did a search for different backpacking and travel resources, I found many of them very confusing and covered in too much advertising - I questioned their impartiality and validity. I’d like to make a service that I would use myself - and I shall.

Since there were no submissions for adventures this weekend, I am going to send myself on one: do some thorough research and start to pull together resources for this blog. Every time I make a post I plan on incorporating it into a wiki so organized and readily available.

Have a great weekend, and I will see you on Monday. If you have any question, ideas, or feedback, please leave a comment!

If you buy Starbucks coffee every day, this little tip might ends up saving you a lot of money. The irony of this scheme is that no matter how much money you inevitably save, Starbucks will still be laughing all the way to the bank.

1. Ask for a Tall coffee of the day, in a Grande cup ($1.75)
2. Ask for a shot of whatever flavour you like ($0.35)
3. Top up the cup with milk, or ask for cold soy milk ($0.00)

For example: a Grande Mocha costs about $4.00 in Canada.

• Ask for a Tall coffee of the day in a Grande cup ($1.75)
• Four pumps of chocolate ($0.35)
• Fill up the cup the rest of the way with milk ($0.00)

  You pay $2.10!

Try it with vanilla, or pumpkin!

Dear Visitor,

Thank you so much for visiting my website. I honestly and sincerely appreciate your time.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about this site and ways to improve it. When I created it, I was really looking forward to the Choose My Adventure aspect of it – excited to do random, fun, and unusual things. Unfortunately, right now it does not seem to be working as well as I had hoped.

Here is what I am going to do about it:

• Make suggesting ideas easier
• Recognize people who suggest ideas
• Collect feedback on ways to improve the site
• Build relationships with other bloggers

I have started to question whether or not the random video blog is a good idea. I really like the idea of using video to document the adventures you send me on, but I am neither Ze Frank, nor Rocketboom. I do not think I should try to re-create what these vlogs already do.

My goal for this site is to create an interactive adventure travel video blog – go where people tell me to, do what they suggest. I hope to meet a community of interested readers who have fun with the site. I also hope for the blog to eventually become a resource for people who are embarking on their own adventures.

I have complete confidence that once August arrives many people will be keen on sending me around to different places. The question I have right now is “what I should do for the six months until then (other than finish university, ha ha)?” I am currently leaning towards researching and becoming an expert on backpacking and adventure travel, blogging about my findings during the week, and doing Choose My Adventure stuff on weekends. People need a reason to come to this site and I am not confident that reading about my life is good enough.

However, what I think is not an island unto itself. Tell me what you think! Your opinion is what really matters. What do you suggest I do? Please email me, or comment on this post. I would really, really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Jeremy David

Video Link

Dear Rocketboom,

Tina Turner’s Private Dancer is arguably one of the best songs in the world.

You don’t look at their faces
and you don’t ask their names
you don’t think of them as human
you don’t think of them at all
you keep your mind on the money
keeping your eyes on the wall. oh.

Sorry.

I remember you were asking people to vote on backgrounds you tried out this cool blue and white mosaic-esque map of the world, and I was wondering if you still had it. I really liked it and was hoping to use it for my vlog.

Cheers,

Jeremy David

This blog seems to be evolving into a personal diary, which is not what I intended when I created it. So before it gets too far out of control, I have decided to go back to the basics and create exactly what I had in mind.

This is a choose your adventure site where you come up with ideas for random things for me to do, vote on them, and I act them out. Simple. Easy. Fun. Since I go to school full time and am paying copious amounts of money to do so, there are some limits to what I can do right now. However, every weekend I will do something and report back to you how it turned out. What will that something be? I have no idea. It’s up to you.

In August school is over forever, and I am going traveling around the world. It was decided that I go to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, so there will be many opportunities for me to embark on crazy adventures while I’m there – crazy adventures that you suggest.

I have decided to start using video blogs. Don’t worry – for those of you who hate video blogs, I am going to post the majority of the content in text beneath the videos.