Travel Blog

I’m such a gadget junky and have gadgets laying all over the place that another piece of equipment I forgot I had was a Sony MiniDV Digital Camcorder pictured above. The Sony DCR-TRV22 is a great digital camcorder with a 2.5″ LCD screen, color viewfinder, 120x digital zoom, and memory stick capability. I’ve owned this camcorder for a few years now, and haven’t used it as much as I should be using it. There’s no better time than now to put the camcorder to use. I think it will be a great addition to my travel equipment, and offer some great multimedia streaming videos of my travel adventures. The big thing on the web nowadays is online videos, so I might as well keep up with the times!

I’ll be adding a section in the “About” page of this blog that lists all my travel equipment with facts about each one since it seems like as this project moves ahead I might end up adding to my collection of wonderful gadgets regularly. I think new readers will be interested to know what type of equipment I use also, and keeping all the information in the “About” page will be much easier than having it scattered around in various blog posts.

Some of you might be wondering how is it that I have a chance to travel to different destinations throughout the year. Don’t I have a family? Don’t I have a job to make a living? Don’t I have any responsibilities?

The answer is “No” to the first two questions, and “Somewhat” to the last question. I’m able to travel because I am a single 29 year old man with no wife or kids. Ever since I was young I never really was into the long-term relationship thing, and I always had trouble settling down. I’m a really free spirited person that gets bored fairly quickly when things in my life get monotonous. As far as a job goes, I use to work for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company after graduating from college. I got my degree in Information Technology and worked as a Network Administrator for 7 years. A few years into working 9 to 5 jobs I realized that type of work wasn’t for me. At the time, I was generating some side income on the Internet, and decide I would try to make it full-time by working online. I left my 9 to 5 job about two years ago to fulfill my dream of working online for a living. It only took a few months to find out that it was very possible to make it! Since then, I have been able to structure my lifestyle around becoming completely mobile, and being able to work anywhere in the world from a computer. I’ve set things up in ways that make it able for me to not be stuck in one place, like having all my mail forwarded to wherever I’m located in the world by a private company that accepts my mail for me. Pretty neat huh?

Whenever people ask me what I do, and I try to explain it to them they always end up having a confused look on their face, so whenever I get asked the question I just tell people I work with computers. Anyway, I thought up the “Traveling Project” because of my free-spirited personality that I mentioned earlier. To me there is no better job than to be able to travel around the world and blog about it! It keeps my life interesting and there definitely is no more monotony in my life!

As promised in my last post, here are some pictures I took on the island of Guam. Guam is located in the South Pacific Ocean and is a territory of the United States. The island is located almost directly on the equator and has a hot, humid tropical climate. In a future post, I’ll share more pictures of Guam, as well as write a travel review about the island on a later post; this post is just being used as an example to show readers the quality of my photography.

I took some of the better quality photos I could find to post here. I tried looking for my Hawaii photos, but couldn’t find them. They might be on one of my external hard drives that are hidden deep in the darkest corner of my closet somewhere, but these images should suffice for readers to get an idea of the quality to expect from my photography during my travel adventures. I added some captions using Photoshop:

I thought it would be a good idea to talk about my photography experience and equipment so readers know what to expect when I post pictures for this project. Actually, after finishing up this post I have some sample photos laying around of the beautiful tropical islands of Hawaii and Guam. I’ll dig them up and post some of the pictures in my next post.

I’ve been using the Canon PowerShot A570 IS as my camera of choice ever since I started getting into photography, which was only about a year ago. If I can remember correctly, I purchased the camera for about $175.00 online. The Canon PowerShot A570 IS isn’t an SLR camera, but it does have manual mode which I do use to shoot my pictures. Using the predefined or automatic settings just doesn’t create great pictures when compared to snapping photos in manual mode. I actually love this camera and think it shoots photos for Internet use comparable to the more expensive cameras that are in the $1,000+ price range.

As far as my photography experience, I’ve been doing travel and scenic type photos for about a year now, and I feel I have a pretty good eye for taking awesome outdoor scenic pictures. We’ll let you, the readers, decide though when I post some of my photos in my next blog post. Within the next few months I actually plan on purchasing a second, higher-end Canon SLR digital camera and maybe some equipment so I can use the camera underwater, and a lens or two! I guess you can say I’ll be a Canon lover once I purchase some Canon lenses.

I do have some Photoshop experience, and I usually do enhance the colors of my photos so it makes them pop a lot more, but that is basically the only type of photo editing I will ever do to a photo.  When editing photos I still use Adobe Photoshop 7.0; yes I’m too cheap to upgrade, and lazy to learn the newer Photoshop versions when the version I currently use does the job just fine.

So there you have it, I use very basic photography equipment, and I in no way consider myself a professional photographer, but I do think I take some damn good photos and you’ll be able to decide for yourself when I post some photos in my next blog post!

If you’ve been looking at my “Scratch Pad” Page you probably noticed that many of the sites and links being noted on the page are of the Philippines. It is a good possibility that Manila is going to be my first travel destination of choice for this project! The main reason being I always wanted to go back after visiting there when I was still very young; I think I was 13 years old when I visited Manila. Secondly, the total cost of the trip is very affordable, and it is a good starter travel location for the project. The total cost would be around $1,500 maybe even a little less for everything including the airline ticket, 5 day hotel stay, and a personal tour guide – with a few hundred bucks to spare for living expenses.  Once I do a little more research and have a complete itinerary planned for the trip I’ll make another post in the “Travel Journal” category.  Keep in mind, I’m also researching other destinations so Manila as a destination isn’t completely in the bag yet; it’s possible I can change my mind and select another destination while doing research.

While setting up Google Adsense on the blog I saw an advertisement titled “53 Places to Go in 2008″! Interested in the ad in hopes of getting some new ideas for future places I could travel too, I decided to click on the Adsense ad to see what places were listed. Out of the 53 places listed there were quite a few that really interested me including Laos, Vietnam, and Italy; but to be honest, many of the places I never really heard about or had the slightest inkling of ever visiting in my lifetime.

Since this travel blog is just starting out and I haven’t traveled anywhere to post pictures and write about, I decided it would be a good idea to do some research on some of the places listed in the article and make some review posts about some of the various travel destinations! Hopefully, these future posts will help jump start the project into full-speed, provide some interesting articles for readers, and give me some ideas of where I would like to travel! Here’s the full list of 53 Places to go in 2008:

1. Laos
2. Lisbon
3. Tunisia
4. Mauritius
5. Mid-Beach, Miami
6. South Beach, Miami
7. Maldives
8. Death Valley
9. Courchevel (French skiing village)
10. Libya
11. Hvar (tiny village in Croatia)
12. Puerto Vallarta
13. Sylt (Germany)
14. Prague
15. Quito (Ecuador)
16. Liverpool
17. Munich
18. Iran
19. Tuscany
20. Anguilla
21. Bogota (Fourth-largest city in South America)
22. Playa Blanca, Panama
23. Alexandria
24. Mazatlan (Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast)
25. St. Lucia
26. Oslo
27. Buenos Aires
28. Rimini, Italy
29. Malawi (tiny African country)
30. Roatan (Honduran island)
31. Mozambique
32. Kuwait City
33. Verbier (Swiss ski village)
34. Lombok (Indonesian island east of Bali)
35. Northwest Passage
36. Easter Island
37. Virgin Gorda
38. Namibia
39. San Francisco
40. Detroit
41. Itacare, Brazil
42. Kilimanjaro (Africa’s highest mountain)
43. Algeria
44. San Diego
45. Malaga (port city on the southern coast of Spain)
46. Puerto Plata (beach resort on the Dominican Republic’s north coast)
47. London
48. Vietnam
49. Essaouira (Moroccan port city)
50. Las Vegas
51. Barossa Valley, Australia
52. Tokaj, Hungary
53. New York

The actual article by the NY Times can be seen here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/travel/09where.html

I’d like to welcome you to “Traveling Project” for my first post! The official start date of this project was on April 19, 2008. I registered the domain name, installed Wordpress, and found a free Wordpress travel theme online which I really liked all in that same day! Pretty good to get things started right?

If your reading this post and it’s your first time here I suggest you begin by reading the “About Me” and “About Traveling Project” sections at the top of the blog, followed by reading more detailed information about this project by going to the “About” Page. Finally check out the “Sponsor This Project” Page, and if you like this project you can help support it by advertising on this blog or making a monetary contribution.

I’m really excited about getting this project started, and I realize in order for it to be successful I have to make it one of the most interesting and unique travel blogs so my readers keep coming back to support me! For this reason, you’ll be sure to find posts about various travel topics such as:

1. My personal travel experiences when I visit new places
2. Unique facts about various places around the world
3. The top places to visit in the world
4. Travel deals for hotels, airline tickets, cruises, etc.
5. Lots of high-quality and stunning photos of places I visit
6. and much, much more…

In addition to all these great travel topics, I have many more things planned which I will be writing about as I complete the “About” Page over the course of the next few days, so readers can get an idea of what to expect from this project!