I travel fast. When I am on a trip, unless a more relaxed beach-type of vacation, I create itineraries to see as much as possible in the limited amount of time I have off. In a perfect world, I’d have as much time as I wanted to travel, and be able to get to know the ins and outs of every street, town, city, and country I visit. But the world’s not perfect, and as I don’t list “Travel Blogger” on my professional resume, I am only able to travel in the time my professional life allows.
Here’s an example of a single day in the life of one of our whirlwind trips:
We started the day in Pristina.
From there, we traveled to Pec, to visit the Patriarchy of the Serb Orthodox Church.
We walked around the town of Pec, admiring the views toward Montenegro.
Then were able to visit a Kulla in the Isniq area.
We arrived in Prizren, Kosovo’s second city, midday, and hiked up to its mountain fortress.
Get out of our shots, kids!
And ended the day with a beautiful view over Kosovo’s most scenic town.
Travel bloggers across the web are unanimous in their praise of slow travel – the act of taking time to truly get to know every place one visits. And I agree. I am not here to bash slow travel. But I am of the majority of the population for whom slow travel is not a logistical possibility – I have a family to support, and a job that requires me to be in an office for around 50 hours a week. The key here, also, is to understand that I wouldn’t change that. I enjoy my work and the lifestyle it affords me and my family. David and I wouldn’t be able to travel in the way I like to travel without it. But it does make true slow travel a non-option for us. And while we’d love to spend a week exploring a single place, our life’s travel ambitions (especially those for the short term) make a week getting to know the ins and outs of a single place impossible. Read more
We went to Saaremaa with the best intentions. We had a list of things to see and a finite amount of time to see them. We were also coming from a long day of driving, and sightseeing, on the Estonian mainland. The day we left Saaremaa, we had a similiarly long day of driving ahead of us, and a similarly long day of sightseeing. And somehow, amidst the general craziness of the two stacked days of traveling, Saaremaa got lost in the fold.
I am not a slow traveler, and yet I am an advocate of slow travel. My travel style is necessitated by the amount of time I am able to travel yearly (15-20 days, generally) while still keeping my corporate job. And because I am generally an ambitious traveler, I try to pack as much into my vacation days as possible. It’s an unfortunate circumstance that will be remedied whenever I get out of the corporate rat race. I think I have about ten years left in me before I make that change.Read more
It may be unfair, but when I’m on a beach vacation, I always end up comparing my current location to past vacations I’ve taken. The beach vacations that have defined the way I look at beach vacations are those I’ve taken in Latin America (in Mexico and Nicaragua) and, even more so, Southeast Asia. It was therefore that comparative lens that I had to look through when my husband, David, and I went to the island of Gozo, in Malta.
Sigh – Ko Nang Yuan, Thailand.
Fresh fish on the beach on Little Corn Island, Nicaragua.
It may be that Gozo and its beaches were doomed from the get go. Read more
I proposed to David on Christmas Day, 2014, high in the Caucasus mountains straddling the Russian-Georgian border, next to a fourteenth century church. There were no other people around, but for our chain-smoking driver who had happened to pick us up on one his routines jaunts between Vladikavkaz, the capital of the Russian state of North Ossetia, and Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. These types of crazy adventures have come to define a large part of our relationship, and so it seemed like the perfect place to take the figurative next step in our relationship.
Where David and I got engaged – pretty perfect.
But we are not having a wedding. Not in the traditional sense at least. We racked our brains as to how we should celebrate our marriage, and both came up with the answer that the best way to do so would be to not get all gussied up and rent out an event space for a bunch of people somehow tangentially related to us – but to go on another adventure. We see so many of our peers killing themselves deciding between travel or wedding, travel or wedding, travel or wedding. To us, the choice was incredibly simple.
Weddings today are big business, and while we think it’s great that some people go down the traditional route – with the wedding parties, and table settings, and videographers, etc. etc. etc. – it just isn’t us. We are of modest means, and trying to save for a potential future where I won’t be a corporate wage slave and he’ll be able to run his own enterprise. And to us, the traditional wedding price tag left us with sticker shock.
The mason jars at your wedding are basic, by the way.
I’ve read in different places about the cost of the average American wedding hovers at around $30,000 today. I think about $30,000, and think about a down payment on a house, saving for retirement, hell a year spent on the road around the world – but certainly not a wedding.
This might sound odd, as I am a person who will happily spend $10,000 a year on various travels for the rest of my life, but not that same amount (or really, a small fraction thereof) on a day to commemorate my wedding. I am all about paying for experiences, but don’t feel the need to pay lip service to the fanfare around what society has deemed a wedding to be.
Weddings, to me, have become this strange cultural phenomenon that seem almost inescapable. And I do consider myself lucky that, as a gay man, I am not held to the same ridiculous wedding tropes that apply to straight couples – especially those applying to women. I do feel that weddings are a cultural leftover of a time when men felt the need to enforce some aspect of control over women in their lives (whether that woman is a daughter or a wife), and that lots of the folksy traditions that make up the foundation of a wedding (dad giving away the daughter, etc.) are anachronistic leftovers of a time when women were possessions. Needless to say, I believe women have a harder time navigating the cultural norms around weddings and marriage, and that often times it’s easier to just buy in to the hoopla around weddings than to fight against them.
Brb guys, getting hitched! ✌😃🌈
A post shared by Nick M. ✌🏽❤✈️ (@concreteandkitsch) on
I think it also helps having grown up never thinking marriage was going to be an option for me. I never fantasized about a traditional wedding because it was out of my realm of imagination. And while this may have stoked desire for some in my community, for me it enabled me to write it off altogether. So when it became legal for gays and lesbians to marry in Washington State in 2012, I didn’t immediately start planning my hypothetical wedding. Instead, I recognized the importance of the change in laws, and went on my merry way.
And so when David and I decided to get married, we chose to eschew the typical wedding conventions in favor of something that felt more like us. So far this has meant no registry, no fancy printed invitations, no wedding party, and certainly no tuxes. Instead, to celebrate our union, we’ve gotten matching tattoos that celebrate our love for one another as well as our love for travel, invested a ton of money into landscaping our backyard (and, in all transparency, with a LOT of financial help from my parents), and rubber cemented invitations on the backs of old postcards we have purchased along various travels we’ve taken together.
The mountain is a portrayal of Mt. Kazbegi from a 1980s Soviet Intourist poster of Georgia.
Yeah, we Holly Hobby’d the sh*t out of those invites on the back of postcards I bought at the church where we got engaged. And YES, our wedding website was a tumblr.
So our wedding celebration? We had about fifty people over to our house for a backyard party – not for the wedding ceremony, that happened two weeks ago, with just my family and David’s oldest friend. There were no bridesmaid dresses, no speeches, no DJ. Our big splurge was hiring the quesadilla people from the farmer’s market to come make food for everyone (at $8 a head). And we were privileged enough to be largely funded by my parents for the big day, the total cost for the event wasn’t anywhere close to what most people pay for their wedding venue alone.
The best part about the whole thing is having friends and family who know us well enough to know that a traditional wedding wouldn’t be our style in the first place. They understand that our speed is more jeans and t-shirts, maybe with some rescue dogs thrown in – not so much readings from Corinthians, Vera Wang, and the chicken dance.
The week after is our real splurge – you’ve probably read about it here already – a week and a half in the Baltics and a week in Malta. One week of exploration travel in the former Soviet bloc, and one week to run trails and sun our buns on the remote Mediterranean island of Gozo in Malta. To be completely transparent, our honeymoon, when all is said and done, will cost us around $8,000. And I will be the first person to acknowledge how truly privileged I am to spend such a sum on a two and a half week trip. But I have to say, I can’t imagine the memories there won’t be worth more than a day of stress in stuffy clothes with a bunch of relatives I don’t really care for in the first place.
Long haul air travel can be the biggest obstacle we face when embarking on a big international adventure. When it comes to international travel, there are no “easy” flights for coach travelers – especially when you’re taking trans-oceanic and continental flights from the USA to places in Europe, Asia, or even destinations further afield – like Africa or Australasia.
There is a lot of talk in the travel blogger community that glorifies frugal travel. And I get it – the more cheaply one is able to travel, the more time one is able to spend on the road. Short term travel is more mainstream and often times more expensive. Cheaper travel also allows for slower travel – often times with accommodation getting cheaper the longer one stays in a single place. These strategies are great for the long term traveler. For many travel bloggers, whose bread and butter relies on traveling and writing about new places prolifically and in real time, frugality and finding ways to cut corners on costs is a great strategy for maintaining that lifestyle. I totally get it.
I wouldn’t mind taking things slowly here, on Little Corn Island, Nicaragua.
But that’s not for me. And, I would argue, the majority of people traveling in the world – especially those holding down 9-5’s. For my family and almost all of my peers, life only allows for short term travel – a fact that doesn’t have to be as reviled as it is in the travel blogging community today.
A huge part of my travel philosophy in my 20s was to meet people with the assistance of alcohol, the universal social lubricant – a strategy enjoyed by many travelers, I believe. The thing is, when one is on vacation, one lets loose. It’s like a (somewhat) grown up version of college spring break. On spring break, we (the royal we, of course) would go to an exotic destination, with the direct intent of getting plastered on the beach with likeminded horny post-adolescents. When we age out of that and into more (and I use this term loosely) “sophisticated” adventures, we maybe stroll around the ancient Forum if we’re in Rome, or visit Wat Pho if we’re in Bangkok, and then get plastered with the booze that’s next up from bottom shelf with our mates in the hostel from Europe and Australia.
In September of 2011, I visited Mongolia. My trip came at the tail end of a long summer job at the tail end of my graduate program at the tail end of a long distance relationship. I had been traveling a lot in between Seattle and Seoul, Korea (a former home) to spend time with my then partner. On my third trip of the year, I decided I needed something more – so I started researching flights to other exotic destinations in that general part of the world.
Mongolia had been on my wanderlist for a long time – though let’s face it, not many places aren’t on it…
Istanbul is one of the great cities of the world, no doubt about it. I was awestruck by the city’s beauty from the moment the plane made its initial approach to Ataturk Airport. It was dusk, and the last remnants of the sun were flickering across the Bosphorus, as well as casting shadows of the great mosques all over the city. Aside from its breathtaking beauty, it had easily navigable public transportation, and the people were all incredibly friendly. But since returning from that trip and starting this blog, I have not felt extremely compelled to write about my time there. I have sat down time and time again to try and write a story about my experiences in Istanbul, but have been left bereft of words.
I have the most vivid memories from my childhood of my great aunt, Jeanette, telling me and my sister stories of her travels after World War 2 around the world as a schoolteacher on U.S. military bases. She traveled everywhere (as a single woman in the 50s and 60s) that I dream of going today. As a young child, the stories that made the biggest impact on my life were those of her time in Japan.
It was always hard to not be impressed by Kyoto in the Fall – by https://www.flickr.com/photos/gacks/
