The Internet DID say all this stuff was great…

My favorite part of trip is planning for it, and I’m not even embarassed to say that. I’m in Budapest right now, and I LOVE this paprika-drenched city, but I’m also having a ball fiddling with our Italy itinerary and eyeballing hostels in Japan. 

And none other than the Gray Lady agrees with me. This New York Times article makes the convincing point that the best part of vacation is looking forward to it. 

Here are my favorite blogs and websites for endless hours of happy research. Some are fairly obvious, some more obscure, but they are all invaluable to me. 

Travel Bloggers

I will read any random person’s blog if they give me some scraps of information about wherever I’m going, but these are my go-tos: awesome writers, chock full of information, that I return to again and again.

Practical Wanderlust: MY ABSOLUTE FAVE. I first found Lia and Jeremy’s site searching for travel pants. Lia had an excellent post on the topic, and I ended up buying and loving 2 out of her 3 picks. I’m wearing the black Aviator jeans right now! Sidenote: I was going to buy all three, but right before I hit the “submit order” button I had a sneaking suspicion, went to my closet and yup….I already owned those Prana pants. Yes. That’s what an REI addiction gets you, folks.

ANYWAY, I read the post on pants, then clicked on another one, and before I knew it I had spent a few hours laughing myself silly and nodding along to their descriptions of adventures and misadventures on their own year-long trip. Ben had to come upstairs to find out why I was in peals of giggles. Not only is this website hysterically fun AND soul-stirring to read, but they have amazing packing lists, guides to specific countries, itineraries, and more. Super helpful for any travel, but especially South America.

Hippie in Heels: This is a great blog for travel in India. I found her posts helpful, informative, and real. She addresses a lot of misconceptions and common fears for people who are going to India, and has a TON of content about specific cities.

Along Dusty Roads: This is a super gorgeous website by a British couple who have traveled extensively. Their photography is GOALS, and I love their location-specific guides. They inspired us to try a Moroccan road-trip! Really good writing, specific tips, excellent recommendations…what more could I want?

The Broke Backpacker: This guy has awesome hostel guides where he breaks down the best hostels in cities by TYPE. As in “Best Party Hostel in Thailand”….so I CAN AVOID IT LIKE THE BUBONIC PLAGUE. Lots of good information and he covers a huge array of destinations. Thanks, dude!

The Thrifty Nomads: this couple specializes in budget travel, which we truly appreciate. They have good packing lists and general tips, as well as budget guides for specific locations.

Websites

The New York Times Travel Section. I read this section religiously, when I would probably be served better by paying more attention to the finance or world news portion. Or even improving my crossword skills. But there are so many great articles, practical tips, and thought pieces about travel that I keep getting sucked in. 

• I really like the “36 Hours” feature (it is rare that they don’t have one for a city we are visiting) like this one for Budapest. One of our absolute favorite experiences we’ve had so far was going to Boutiq Bar, which we read about in the “36 Hours” guide. We would have never stumbled on that on our own, and those cocktails were mind-blowingly good.
• The “52 Places To Go in 2018” is just fun to read and helped us when we were trying to figure out where to go back in the early planning stages. PLUS it gives Baltimore a deserved shout-out this year! Go Baltimore! 
• I also like following the “52 Places” traveler series, which is new this year, and I like her writing so much I can put aside my crippling jealousy at the fact that this cool lady gets to travel the world on the New York Times dime and write about it. I wish I had seen her Prague article while we were there!
• Finally, the “Frugal Traveler” series is always great, and he has great budget travel articles. 

Wirecutter: On the one hand, this website has kind of ruined my life because if it’s not recommended by Wirecutter, I don’t want to buy it. On the other hand, our travel clothesline (among many, many other purchases) was the one they recommended, and that thing IS BOMB. The little details really do matter: in this case, a braided cord that I can tuck my freshly-washed laundry into instead of using hooks or clips. If Wirecutter hadn’t told me that, I’d just be a schmuck with a deficient travel clothesline. Which I promise is more serious than it sounds. The worst part is that they have sections for all types of products, not just travel, so there goes my free will for the rest of my life. 

Hostelworld: Apparently people who are not 20 use hostels. WE SHALL SEE. However, some destinations are a deadly combination of fabulously expensive + I absolutely have to go there which ends up with us staying in hostels. This includes Rome, everywhere in Japan, and a few other spots. So I used Hostelworld! This is dominant website for booking hostels, and it has a ton of great features. You can filter away (I’ve only booked places that have a 9+ score), look at pictures, read reviews and even spot some from people in your age bracket, and choose a type of room. A lot of hostels have private rooms, which is a great option–although we will be bunking it in some places. You can also pay a little extra when booking to get free cancellations, which I have used liberally after zealously booking some cheap place to maximize our budget (“it’s just a PLACE TO SLEEP, I’ve CAMPED, right!?”) and then freaking out two days later. 

AirBnb: Obviously, we use a ton of Air BnBs. In fact, the majority of our accommodations will be apartments or rooms via the app. We also partially funded this trip by being Air BnB hosts ourselves. For now, the prices are amazing, the amenities are really beneficial to long term travelers (washing machine! Kitchen!), and the places are the cutest. I know Air BnB is problematic in terms of driving up prices for residents, over-tourism in residential areas, etc. I can only speak from my personal experience: Air BnB allowed two public school teachers to travel the world, so for now, I’m all for it. I do check before using Air BnB if it is legal in that city or has any restrictions (for example, in a lot of cities, renting an entire apartment is not allowed but renting a room is fine). I always use the Superhost filter, only book places with flexible cancellation policies, and check the reviews carefully. So far, I’ve LOVED all of our Air BnBs! 

Booking.com: This is the only website I use for booking hotels. It has the best filters, tons of reviews, and a nice little dashboard and app to keep track of all of the places we are staying. One thing that’s really important about Booking is that you MUST MUST MUST click on the “Reviews” tab to get the REAL DEAL.

The reviews on the side tab only show the positive things people wrote, and during the review process you are prompted to write positive aspects of your stay. Check out what happens when you look at the Hotel Katowice, a truly god-awful place we stayed at in Poland that I wrote a review for.

Skyscanner.com: I love this website for pricing out flights, especially if I don’t have a specific date or location. Unlike say, Google flights, you can search by country and/or by month. For example, I knew we wanted to fly from Japan to Hawaii, but didn’t have a specific city to leave from or a specific date. Before I found this site, I would search a ton of different airports for the best deals. Now I don’t have to! Skyscanner is how I found $126 from Osaka to Honolulu! Boom! 

The Man In Seat 61: This website is SUCH a gem for train travel in Europe! I was absolutely lost when it came to train travel on the Continent. I thought it was expensive, and the websites for individual countries and their train systems are notoriously confusing. I thought we were doomed to airplanes and smelly Flixbusses. Then I found this website! He meticulously breaks down how to buy tickets for any combinations of departures and arrivals, and helps find cheap train tickets. For example, using this website I learned we could get from Budapest to Zagreb for 9 Euros, and got step-by-step directions for using the Hungarian Train website. LOVE this guy. He is doing the world of confused Americans a service.

Google My Maps: Oh, we are LOVING this feature. It is so organized, tidy, is available at your fingertips once you get there via the Google Maps app, and best of all, color-codeable. If you aren’t using this yet to mark specific restaurants, sites, bars, etc….are you really living? There is a bit of a learning curve (what’s a layer?), but there are a ton of tutorials on the internet to lead you to custom map bliss. We make a map for every destination, and have a ball doing it. On thing that’s tricky is that when you try to access your custom map on your phone, you have to tap Menu–>My places and BEHOLD, all of your little icons magically appear. Took me a while to figure that one out. Yup.

Rick Steves: THIS. MAN. We love him so much. My adoration goes way back. I remember my parents renting his VHS tapes from the library and watching with them as a wide-eyed youngster who did not yet have autonomy to take a year off from employment and credit card to book vacations with. The man who ROCKS that money belt has only gotten better with age…actually, does he age? Obviously, I fan girl hard. We watch all of his TV episodes (available for free through his website, because he’s cool like that), his book Europe Through The Back Door is an invaluable guide to European travel (how else would I know to be a paranoid freak in train stations!?) AND he has a great website. I particularly like his Triangles of Doom feature, where he ranks particular sites or cities as either MUST DO or meh. Brutal! That’s what we need! We can’t do everything!

All Things Google: Sheets. Docs. Folders. Hyperlinks. I think the amount of items generated by this trip must be well over one hundred. We have our Master Budget Sheet, Trip At A Glance sheet, Travel Master Plan (with links to each destinations individual planning doc), our Travel Manifesto….it goes on and on and on and on. It’s ridiculous. But the fact of the matter is, we can easily share documents and organize this leviathan of a vacation to a minute level, aka MY HAPPY PLACE.

The Points Guy: I knew we should be using our credit card points to book travel and get slick deals, but I had no idea how. It seemed like the whole world was doing all of this cool stuff basically for free and we were plodding along paying for stuff. Then, I got schooled by this insanely detailed, acronym-laden website for points enthusiasts. Now I know I need to transfer my points to travel partners to maximize my benefit instead of using the Chase Ultimate Rewards Portal. I found this super confusing but when I finally figured it out I felt like Benjamin Franklin with that kite. THANK YOU, INTERNET!