Quit Your Job and Travel the World: How we did it and you can too!
Dying to hit the road full-time but not quite ready to take the leap? Here are some easy ways to prepare yourself NOW — in your everyday life — for a future of full-time travel.
Some will take time, some you can finish in a few hours, but each will get you a BIG step closer to the day you can call it quits! Continue reading “8 Simple Ways to Prepare Yourself NOW for a Full-Time Traveling Future”
We’ve got something new and exciting scheduled for the next few months on North to South. It’s your chance to get an honest look at the lives of full-time traveling couples.
WHAT: A series of interviews on North to South
WHEN: Starting next week — Monday, July 20th — with a new interview every 1-2 weeks
WITH WHOM: Real couples who quit their jobs to travel the world
FROM WHERE: America — to start — and later we’ll chat with some from other countries.
WHY: To inspire you (our readers), educate you about the full-time travel lifestyle, and provide realistic examples of what “the leap” looks like for real people Continue reading “Announcing North to South’s New Traveling Couples Interview Series”
Do you want the freedom to quit your job and live and travel where you please?
Ian and I did, and after having a serious discussion about the possibility, we planned carefully, saved substantially, and lived frugally to get started. Now we pour our hearts and souls into several online projects, making sure they’re profitable, enjoyable, and diverse enough to keep a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and smiles on our faces.
We’ve already talked in detail about the other steps we took to prepare for our travel life, but the money-making part is what we’ll discuss in this post. If you want to realize a sustainable traveling life for yourself, you need to have a reliable source of income.
Here we’ll talk about three common approaches to making a living while traveling. Continue reading “How to Make Money While You Travel”
Eco Vessel provided me with a Aqua Vessel Ultra Lite filtration water bottle for the purpose of completing a review. You’ll find my complete, unbiased review here in this article — alongside the reasons I wanted to try this bottle myself. All comments I share in this post are my honest opinions of my experiences using the Eco Vessel filtration water bottle. Continue reading “7 Reasons to Try Eco Vessel’s Aqua Vessel Filtration Water Bottle… Plus a REVIEW of My Experience Using It”
I was half asleep. Only half because of the awkward angle at which my head was tilted when I’d closed my eyes. Sleeping in the car has never been my forte. I quickly snapped out of my sleepy state, however, when my brain finally registered the three words that had just exited Ian’s mouth: “the Northern Lights.”
It was an unexpected sight, in Yellowstone National Park, but having severely sub-par cell service the past two days couldn’t even stop us from seeing them. There was no visible green glow or anything, but the eery gray streaks sweeping across the northern sky were visible to the naked eye. I quickly pulled my RX100 out of the glove compartment and clambered over the middle console of our Yaris and into the driver’s seat. Ian was already out of the car with the a7 mounted to his tripod. I opted for the meager warmth our Yaris could offer with its front window rolled down all the way.
My first shots were crap, from a photographer’s perspective, but the colors were absolutely amazing. To start, I’d quickly flipped my dial to ‘M’ and prepped for a 6-second exposure. No tripod. Just handheld. Propped atop the open window frame of the driver’s side door. With some expected star streaking from my unsteady hand in my first few exposures, I made some minor adjustments — adding a 2-second timer, using the tilt screen to more steadily prop my camera up on the window ledge — and was rewarded with better results. My final improvement to my set-up was turning the car’s engine off and setting the e-brake (Ian never does) to keep car movements to an absolute minimum. And I was quite impressed with my results!
This photo was taken on June 22nd with the Sony RX-100 III. Continue to view full photo. Continue reading “Shot of the Week: North to South Sees the Northern Lights (Yellowstone, Wyoming, USA)”
It was cool and sunny in South Dakota when we woke up in our tent this morning. No indication of the craziness that ensued last night, other than the minor bowing to our east-facing tent poles that left our tent slightly askew. And we were among the lucky. Our tent had survived.
Around 8pm the lightning started. It was beautiful. The sun was setting behind a thick wall of clouds, and whenever the distant lightning struck, pink light puffs would appear and pulse throughout the sky.
The campground full, there didn’t seem to be need for alarm. Everyone was continuing on, getting ready for bed as they would if there were no threat nor signs of a storm. It wasn’t until I overheard a neighboring camper collecting his son, telling him “Let’s go. I don’t want to be here when it hits,” that I started to worry. We quickly checked the radar on Ian’s phone, and the image confirmed: it was coming. And it would hit hard. Continue reading “[VIDEO] Shot of the Week: Night Storm Symphony (Badlands National Park, South Dakota, USA)”
The open road. The fresh air. The opportunity to freely blast and belt out your favorite tunes as you explore lands previously unknown… The road trip is an experience everyone should have at least once in their life. And the effort you put into planning yours will greatly impact the memories you make.
If you’re like me and heading out Kerouac-style isn’t the approach you’d prefer — planless, penniless, thieving, and hitchhiking (yikes!) — then you should absolutely start with a list. Continue reading “North to South’s Ultimate Road Trip Planner: Packing List — With Free Download!”
Johnson’s Shut-Ins is a magical place from my childhood… A two-hour drive from home in St. Louis, we only visited a handful of times when I was young. But boy did I remember it. I’ve always loved outings that involved swimming, and of all the places I’ve swam in the world, Johnson’s Shut-Ins takes the cake.
Crystal-clear water flows through, around, and over the rocks at “Nature’s Water Park,” creating tiny pools where tadpoles grow up into frogs… And you can climb right in to experience it firsthand! It’s amazing. It’s also one of few places you can find where it’s fashionably acceptable to wear tennis shoes with a swimsuit. And you need them to climb around the slippery, rocky pools. The Shut-Ins aren’t particularly large, so it was always busy when we’d arrive early morning in my childhood. But mid-afternoon just after Memorial Day weekend, we were pleasantly surprised to have the place almost entirely to ourselves. If you’re looking for a summer day trip from St. Louis or Branson or the Ozarks, go here. You won’t want to miss it.
This photo was taken on May 26th with the Sony RX-100 III. Continue to view full photo and a video from this cool place! Continue reading “Shot of the Week: Nature’s Water Park (Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park, Missouri, USA)”
After crossing the big wide state of Texas in week two, this week started with an epic day of gluttony in the New Orleans French Quarter. We filled our bellies with pralines, boudin and beignets and then turned north so Ian could experience the best baseball in the country and what I think is one of the most unique state parks in the entire U.S.
For the third week in a row, here is a photographic recap of our spring and summer road trip across the U.S. This week we’ve got a balance of city and nature, with lots of delicious food and wonderfully varied weather in between. Continue reading “U.S. Road Trip Re-Cap: Week Three (Louisiana to Missouri)”
There’s a reason Fat Tuesday is so gluttonously celebrated in New Orleans, and it’s this: There is just way too much delicious in this town to truly experience it on a “normal” diet. From Café Du Monde’s mouth-watering beignets to NOLA’s scrumptiously savory crawfish étouffée, N’awlins is the embodiment of indulgence. So I can’t tell you how happy we were that it just so happened to be Saturday when we visited… Continue reading “Cheat Day, N’awlins Style… or Every Delicious Thing Two People Can Possibly Consume in the French Quarter in One Day (Louisiana, USA)”