What Do You Hope to Get from Traveling

On February 4, 2019 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging, Travel Tips9 Comments

There is a saying that travel is it’s own reward, but there are obviously other reasons for making the decision to travel to different places. Whether for vacation, adventure, a change of scenery, or a trip of a lifetime, people travel to a variety of places every day. For the most part, people are hoping to gain something from their travels, after all it is often quite expensive. We aren’t any different, we also get something in return for traveling to all of the places that we visit. For us, it is learning about the culture, meeting the people, and experimenting with local flavors that are our rewards. We aren’t cultural anthropologists, but we do use many of those concepts when we are on a trip to a foreign country.

We certainly understand the adventure travelers who travel the world looking for different thrills. Whether diving off a reef in the Caribbean, climbing to the top of some of the worlds largest mountains, or trekking through dense forests, there are many different pulse pounding ways to spend your time when traveling. We have definitely had our share of adventures from staying in the Amazon, going down Death Road in Bolivia, climbing to the top of Colorado mountains, white-water rafting, skiing, and ziplining in different jungles. However, for us, it was visiting the indigenous villages and meeting the people that call these places home that have made the most lasting memories.

Learning About the Ancient Temples in Mahabalipuram

No one can blame people who choose to travel for relaxation. There is nothing like sitting on a beach or a mountain resort and not doing much of anything. We take several trips throughout the year and at least one of those is usually just to unwind and let the day-to-day stresses melt away. Just because we are relaxing, though, doesn’t mean that we don’t take time to meet the locals and taste the local foods. Whether in Mexico or on the Spanish Riviera, we like to learn about the people who live near the resorts and make their living by pampering all of the tourists who come to their locations. Often times, many of them have moved from their home towns to earn money and send it back to their families.

Whether traveling to a country where the citizens look similar to yourself or traveling to a place where you stand out amongst the crowds, there is so much to learn from the places that you visit. As much as the world has become smaller with the internet, television, and social media, there is no substitute for spending time in a culture that is different than your own and taking time to understand the people that live there. One of the things that constantly amazes us is when we see tourists in a different country that don’t take time to actually talk to the people who live there, but just wander through taking pictures and acting like it is an exhibit for them to see. In our opinion, those people are missing out on the best part of traveling, absorbing as much about the culture as possible. What is it that drives you to take the time and spend the money to travel to places that are foreign to you?

Time for an Annual Website Review

On January 11, 2019 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging2 Comments

It is important that you take a look at your social media accounts and websites at least on an annual basis. Whether it is your profile photos or information, tag lines, or about pages, information needs to be looked at with a fresh set of eyes on an ongoing basis. Realistically speaking, it is probably worth doing more than just once a year, but that is about the minimum amount of time to let go by and using the start of the new year is an easy way to always remember to get it done.

Whether it is looking at any unintentional clutter on your landing page or making sure that it is easily navigable or looking at the content on your about page and making sure that it is up to date, there are a variety of things that we try to do at this time of year. We are always amazed when we take the time to go to our About page and update it, how much we tend to “set it and forget it”. Since it is often the first place that people visit to learn about who you are, it definitely shouldn’t be such an after thought.

Profile photos are another thing that need to be revisited often and making sure that they are consistent across all of your media sites. Whether you use a photo or something like an avatar, it is important that it isn’t too out of date. Having a photo that is several years old isn’t a true representation of yourself. With that said, it is definitely time for us to update ours as it is a year old at this point. We’re traveling next week, but we expect to get our updates done before the end of the month. Do you have a schedule for updating and refreshing you layout and profile information?

Blogging When Traveling

On December 14, 2018 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging15 Comments

One of the first things that you are told when you start a blog is that you need to create a standard blogging schedule. This is true for a couple of reasons. First it allows people to know when to expect to see content from you, but it also provides you with a schedule to follow to help keep you consistent. It is hard enough following the schedule during normal weeks when work and life provide constant interruptions, but when traveling it is even harder, if not impossible at times. The question we often face during our trip is whether we worry about getting posts out or if we should just go quiet for a few days and deal with it when we get back.

Busy Houston Airport During Our Trip to Panama

There is, of course, a simple answer to this particular dilemma, but it isn’t as easy for us as it might sound. The best solution would be to create posts in advance of our travel plans and then schedule them to publish while we are gone. To do so would double the amount of posts that we need to create in a week. We barely have time to get the posts out that we are already creating, let alone write a bunch of extra ones so that they can be used later. Prior to almost every trip, we make this commitment to get some articles created and ready to go. And every single time we have failed to do so.

The second option, which we do most often, is to be sure that we have what we need to transfer photos and write a quick article with us during our trip. This allows us to take a few minutes at the end of the day to do a quick “here is where we are” post with very little information and a few photographs just to let everyone know what we’re doing and why we aren’t providing more content. The concern is that we don’t whether people appreciate this quick updates or would rather wait to hear about the place where we’re traveling in more detail. Do you find these kind of posts interesting or do you think it would be better if we just waited for our return?