Traveling Solo While You’re Married

by Adrienne Wilson on

Every married couple dreams of the honeymoon after the honeymoon, a life-long of shared adventures and memories made together to be cherished forever and always, but for some couples work schedules, children, and other obstacles stand in the way of this holy travel matrimony. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an interesting piece on how solo travel can place a slight damper on a marriage. One man who took off to Cuba alone apparently didn’t think his wife would mind and while he was away she was contemplating divorce. Other scenarios showed the partner left at home stuck in the rat-race began to resent their globe-trotting counterpart and insecurities rise.

Seems as though this would be a simple thing to work out in a married relationship and it can be so long as each person communicates properly and plans accordingly. From the article you’ll find the answer to solo travel while you’re married doesn’t necessarily involve staying home to watch Discovery Channel type shows on the tube, but can be as simple as keeping jaunts over and out shorter in time span. At the very least each couple should try to make one big trip together each year aside from their solo endeavors.

Good read if you and your honey are finding yourself at the end of two different roads.

SmarterTravel: Best & Worst Travel Destinations for Women

by Adrienne Wilson on

As a woman, traveler, and the type that tends to like parachuting into off-the-beaten track destinations, I long for articles that point out where women should go and where they should exercise extra caution when going. Well, USA Today features a fine piece for the solo women journeying this big bad world on her own with the best and worst places for women to travel. The list, compiled by Jessica Labrencis and RaeJean Stokes of SmarterTravel, doesn’t suggest women should free up and lose all inhibitions in so-called safe places or completely avoid named worst destinations. Instead of rambling on about what the list does suggest let’s take a look at their best and worst and share some of our experiences. (You’ll want to go to their site for all the specifics.)

Best travel destinations for women:

  • Amsterdam
  • Ireland
  • Costa Rica
  • India
  • Vietnam

Worst travel destinations for women:

  • Middle East & Northern Africa
  • The Mediterranean Coast
  • The United States
  • Latin America & the Caribbean
  • States of the former U.S.S.R.

If you ask me the worst place destination list looks to include a heavy number of places. Considering the U.S. has 50 states (some worse than others) and the former U.S.S.R. has some 14 states (including my next destination -Tajikistan) it’s safe to say women have to watch their backs almost everywhere. What’s your take? Ladies?

Junky Travel Sites for Travel Junkies

by Adrienne Wilson on

Junky is the kind of word I’m attracted to, partially because there aren’t too many bad habits I have that are hard to kick. But it’s the type of word when paired with those like travel and vacation becomes highly desired by all and everyone. Example: “He’s such a travel junky. From Omaha to Havana, Cuba, there isn’t a place in between he hasn’t been.” Yeah, travel junkies are a cool breed of folk, so it’s not surprising there are sites like this cuba-junky.com place for those with an insatiable interest in Cuba to head to and start planning their vaca. Check out the impressive photo galleries or basically anything you’d like to know about Cuba here.

Other travel-junky sites include: Dominican Republic, Brazil and Jamaica. I’d say they’re pretty gnarly and worth ten minutes of your time if not more, but I’m a travel junky myself so there you have it!

Hello, Hi, my name is Adrienne and I HEART travel to everywhere, anywhere and yes of course there too. I’m a travel junky. Goodbye.

Stuck In Lebanon

by Adrienne Wilson on

This wasn’t exactly the kind of piece I was looking for when I searched for Lebanon blogs, but it will certainly suffice. What I wanted was real Americans blogging about the events at hand, about being stranded and what the feeling is like when there are little to no exits out of the country. I admit, it’s pretty lame of me to think I’d discover a blog from an average, innocent American citizen just wanting to get to safety (as if blogging is first priority) and that is why I am taking in the words of this Kevin Sites, No Exit piece as an acceptable trade off.

Sites blogs about the Chahines, a family from Dearborn, MI stuck in the war madness between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel. What was a typical annual family vacation to the area became a nightmare. They shuffled from house to house each night trying to escape the violence. The clothing Mr. Chahine left in the truck of a car burned when an Israeli missile struck the parked vehicle. He has been wearing the same clothing seven days in a row. Madness.

If you are looking for pieces on Americans traveling in Lebanon and stranded this is a good one to check out. Just gives you an idea of what it could be like if things went down the wrong way on your own travels. How do you prepare? Can you?

TV From Everywhere

by Erik Olsen on

The Web is an amazing place. I know, that’s a rather absurd statement of the obvious, if not a completely useless platitude. But that is exactly what came to mine when I saw this site called Medinalia on a random click-stroll around media sites. I’ve seen similar sites to this before (I can’t remember where, though), but the thing I lie about this one is that it seems to be very well organized and nicely designed. Essentially what Medinalia does is allow you to watch television channels from countries and cities all over the world. They are listed alphabetically from (yes, Neil) Albania to Yugoslavia (what, no Zimbabwe channels available?!), and the various programs can be viewed by not just country, but also by type (i.e. Christian, Adult) and language (anyone out there eager to catch a little Papiamentu TV?)

I imagine one could spent a fair amount of time checking this stuff out. The only problem on my end seemed to be buffering. Maybe my connection today is slow, but it took a good long time to get some of these channels to play, and even then the experience was often frustratingly bad quality. But it is still a rather amazing grouping of lots of visual media from around the world and, well, the Web IS an amazing place.