The Rabbit Hole

Question: How does a girl who falls - no, actually, she jumps, eyes open, down a rabbit hole, plummeting into chaos, come out the other end unchanged?
The answer? She doesn't.

This quote comes from Little Black Book, a chick flick I watched once in high school and again this week on Netflix. It's a movie that has represented my life in so many ways as of late, but regarding travel, this quote says SO much! 

No matter how seasoned anyone is as a traveler, visiting a new place and becoming immersed in a new culture for hours, days, or even months tosses a person into a sort of chaos, a realm of the unknown. There are different levels of preparedness for tackling this sort of chaos, and in a way I thrive off of making sense of the chaos of visiting new places. But this element of uncertainty that is present with any form of travel is a large part of what I believe makes travel so alluring. There is always risk associated with traveling, but with risks come rewards. Not all travel experiences are full of fun and excitement, but all are great adventures in the end. 

There is no way that anyone can come away from those experiences unchanged. Sometimes a trip will only change you a little, but more often than not travel has the power to affect people in profound ways. A lot of people like to say travel helped them learn a lot about themselves. I think that is a great way to learn from your experiences, but seeing the effect of the travel industry on a variety of places I love having grown up in Hawaii and visited family in Thailand over the years, I try not to look at travel in a way that seems so selfish, for lack of a better word. From my perspective, travel and tourism is about the interaction between the locals and the tourists, and both groups come away changed in different ways. So sure, I always learn little things about myself from the trips I have taken, but mostly I love learning more about my place in this world.

Jumping off a (short) cliff on Maunawili Falls at home on Oahu, Summer 2009

Turning 26: The Next Travel Frontier

I'll be turning 26 in a couple weeks, and 26 is a big age in the realm of budget travel. Once I turn 26, I will no longer be eligible for the more common Young Adult/Youth discounts on tickets for museums, train tickets, and other attractions throughout Europe and most of the rest of the world. This saddens me since I was really hoping to do a huge backpacking trip through Europe some time before 26 to take advantage of these deals. But it is what it is, and as I get older, I will turn my travel goals toward the next big age in budget travel: 30. Once I turn 30, I will no longer be eligible for a handful of amazing Working Holiday Visas that exist in magical countries like New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. Many countries offer U.S. citizens (and others) a one or two year visa for work and play if you apply before you are 30 years old. That gives me four years to plan and execute a working holiday year in at least one fun country.

The biggest road block toward accomplishing this in my life is that is difficult to leave a job like mine. I have a very liberal paid-time-off setup, and I really enjoy my job. It's the next best thing to traveling the world. I get to work with maps and plans, and on nights and weekends I get to travel for fun. And within a year and a half, I will qualify to take the American Institute of Certified Planners exam to become a certified city planner. Having that AICP certification is like passing the bar exam for urban planning, and being so close to that goal, I'm not sure that I want to leave just yet. 


So although I don't yet know how it will work out, I have four years to find some way to take advantage of one of those working holiday visas before I turn the big 3-0. I can't wait to make it happen!

Picture from my 25th birthday last year when I was in Savannah, GA for the
National Preservation Conference. I love it when work and travel go together!

Travel Update!

I've been off the blogosphere for a few months since I've been traveling a ton lately! Between catching up at work and catching up on my sleep, I haven't had much time for anything else. But such is the travel life. In order to make travel a priority in my life lately, I have sacrificed the time to do a lot of other things, including working on this blog and sleeping. And when you travel as much as I do, it really gets difficult to balance a full time office job and this fun travel life. It's worth every second of it though! :)

Just to catch y'all up on where I've been since around the time of my last post, here is a map of my travels since July:

If you want to hear about any particular destinations, let me know and I'll cover it in a post! It would help to have a trip to start with :) I can't decide which to show off first!

How I Plan a Trip: Materials from my July Travel Salon

Thank you to everyone who made my July Travel Salon/Workshop a success yesterday! For those of you who could not make it, you should be able to watch a video of the livestream by clicking here. Fair warning: this is not edited so the recording is the full workshop. Also, this is not the most flattering angle for me, so please don't judge :P (I did this immediately following a long 12 hour work day).

As I mentioned at the end of the workshop, I am posting the content of the handout (2 pages) that I went over at this workshop here. I discussed my process for planning a trip and made this outline of things you might be interested in knowing about how I do things.

If you have any questions at all, do not hesitate to contact me! You can leave a comment here, on my Facebook Page, or feel free to email me at tippestravels@gmail.com.

My Favorite Free Travel Experiences

Free things are always the best! And over the years, being the frugal gal that I am, I have found quite a myriad of ways to have free and cheap things to do when traveling. Here is a list of some of my favorite FREE experiences I've had throughout my travels (aside from having fun wandering a city, of course). There are conditions to getting free things a lot of time though, so just be aware of that.

• The Louvre - The Louvre Museum is such an icon of both Paris and Europe! Representing the history of French government and royalty in it's location and the progression of art throughout the world, you can't go to Paris and not visit the Louvre. I almost didn't make it until, while on an amazing bike tour of the city, my awesome tour guide told us that on Friday nights after 6pm, the Louvre is absolutely free for anyone under 26 years old. In fact, this is exactly what their website says:
  
  
  On Friday evenings from 6 p.m. to 9:45 p.m., admission to the permanent collections
  is free for under-26s regardless of nationality (upon presentation of ID).
  There is also free entry on the first Sunday of each month, but the Free Friday Nights is a better deal if you qualify just because it is WAY less crowded this way.

• The Prado - The Prado Museum is one of my favorite museums of all time! They had a very cool exhibit featuring Picasso when I was there. Who knew I would love his early work? Anyway, there is a list of people who get in free at any time, which includes students 18-25 years old, anyone under 18, and journalists! It always pays to check if you qualify for something like this. 

• Chase Visa Lounge & A Chef Morimoto Dinner - When I was a spectator at the 2012 London Olympics, anyone with a Chase Visa card could enter a special VIP Lounge on Pall Mall. This lounge had a TON of free perks like free food, free drinks (European Fanta for me, but they also had alcoholic drinks for free), free calls to the US, free WiFi, free Olympic pins and gear, and best of all, if you signed up ahead of time there were free meet and greets with various American Olympians and free dinners cooked by Chef Morimoto. THE Iron Chef, Chef Morimoto! Free! BEST sushi and steak and everything else I have ever had! I even had a fun chat with him about Hawaii, where I am from, and how he has a restaurant there. This is probably my all-time favorite free experience so far :)
  
• Sundance Chase Sapphire Preferred Lounge - Chase is just an amazing bank, and if you ever find yourself at the Sundance Film Festival every January in Park City, Utah, you will be rewarded. The Chase Sapphire Preferred card is the official card of the festival, so if you happen to own one, you can gain access to their special dinner events and film parties, which usually have some sort of celebrity in attendance. Last year I went to a party for a James Franco film called I Am Michael. It was really neat.

• Sundance Cut-the-Line Pass - The best perk about having a Chase Sapphire Preferred card at Sundance is that when they sell a limited amount of tickets set aside for people who wait in line for day-of shows each morning, you get to cut the line. People like up for hours before the ticket office opens each morning, but with the card, you can show up a half hour or so before and still have decent access to whatever is available. I got to see my favorite actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in his HitRecord On TV premiere show this way! <3 I was literally 3 feet from him!

• Addis Ababa Layover Entry Visa and Hotel - One great tip that takes a little research is to see if an airline you are flying offers any layover perks. Usually you can find free perks when you are flying on an international airline where you have a layover in their home base. For instance, I was flying on Ethiopian Airlines between Rome and Bangkok transiting Addis Ababa for 23 hours on a United Airlines award ticket a couple of years ago. Because I was arrive and departing from Ethiopia on their national airline, they offered a program where if you have a layover over 8 hours long, the airline will pay for your Visa (about a $20 value), a hotel, and transportation to and from the hotel. I got a great nap and was able to do a small tour of Addis this way. All for free! Turkish Airways and some other airlines offer a similar program. It just takes a little research before you go, but it's totally worth it since most passengers don't take advantage of these programs due to a lack of information about them.

• Calgary Stampede Value Days - There are one or two days each year during the famed Calgary Stampede where they offer free admission under a variety of conditions. This year, I just so happened to decide to go to a FIFA World Cup game in Alberta at the same time, so I looked at their website under the discount section and saw that on the same weekend I was there, they offered free admission to anyone who entered before 9am. That's a $17 value! Because of this, I got to try a lobster corndog (yum!), ride a ride on the midway, and explored the grounds for a while. Definitely a bucket list item checked off for free! But now I want to go back :)

• Family Connections: Thailand Temples - One good way to get free stuff when you travel is to know if you can get discounts based on where you or your family is from. When I go to Thailand, because my mom is originally from there, I get free (or very cheap) entry to the major tourist sites throughout the country. A big one is the Grand Palace in Bangkok. It's usually around $20USD worth of Baht to enter, but as a Luk Krung (half child), I get in for free! Similarly, my roommate was born in Buenos Aires and in South America, she is considered to be South American even though she was raised in Utah. So when we visited Iguazu Falls, she got a VERY discounted entry fee. Again, with a little research, you could save a lot of money this way.

• National Parks - If you are a more outdoorsy person, you should also take advantage of the Free Entrance Days at the National Parks (which I wrote about in January here). There are 9 days a year on which the NPS offers free admission to everyone. Even though I bought a National Parks Pass this year, I ended up being at a major National Park on three of those days so far (Arches, Yellowstone, and Mount Rushmore). In the colder months, this is even better because there are hardly any crowds to deal with.

• Bargain! - Don't be afraid to bargain in certain situations. This can be a good way to get free things as well. When I visited Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands with a couple of friends, there was only one ferry each way per day to and from St. Thomas, and our ferry got there over 2 hours late because they turned around to pick up some late cruise ship passengers. This was very frustrating because we already had only a limited time on the island due to the fixed ferry schedule, so I talked to the ferry operator and they paid for our taxi ride to and from The Baths, one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited! This saved us roughly $40 in roundtrip transportation. But we definitely deserved it!

There are a handful of other free activities that I haven't done yet such as some of these listed in this Huffington Post article. There are also some free activities that can be pricey when you add in other factors such as parking (i.e. visiting State Parks like Niagara Falls or the Beach in California). It just takes a little research and you can find a lot of neat, hidden opportunities to save money.

Rio 2016 Olympics Ticket Update

So I finally heard from CoSport, the only authorized ticket reseller for any Olympic tickets for residents of the United States, several days ago notifying the public that since they had cancelled their open ticket sales last month, they will be conducting a lottery round for individual tickets to make things more fair. Here is the explanation as detailed in the public email:

This means there is still time for you to request tickets! How the lottery works is each person may request up to 48 individual tickets (not events) based on what CoSport currently has available. Unfortunately, this does not include any Football matches, but there are many other exciting events available! In fact, most other events are available. You add the tickets you potentially want to your cart up until June 10th, then on June 15th, you can log in to CoSport and see if any of your requests were approved via the lottery. You can then choose whether you actually want to purchase the tickets or not. This is great because you may want to go to two or more events that occur at the same time or you may have only been approved for events with a large amount of dates in between where you didn't get tickets, so you are not locked in to any specific match if you don't want to go for the entire two weeks, which would be quite expensive!

I am not exactly sure what anyone's chances are since I was able to purchase tickets during the first-come-first-served phases of both the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Olympics, but it's worth a shot! Here is the current official schedule for this lottery process:

CoSport was also kind enough to provide a short list of tips for entering the ticket lottery in their email as well:

So if you are at all interested in going to the Rio games next summer, go ahead and make your ticket request on CoSport asap! You have until 4pm EST (so 2pm MST in Utah) to do this. I am crossing my fingers that I'll be able to get a few events approved so I can take my lovely parents on this adventure with me for the first time. Good luck to all you who choose to enter! :)

The 2016 Rio Olympics

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to be a spectator at the 2012 London Olympics. It was an amazing experience, and I definitely plan on going to the summer olympics in Rio next year. Here's how I managed to put a trip together last time in light of Individual Tickets going on sale (to Americans) on May 19th at 10am EST.

Tickets

My Sochi Tickets

The biggest obstacle everyone has to attending the Olympics is getting tickets. In 2011, somehow I stumbled across this website, Cosport, which happens to be the only authorized ticket reseller for the Olympics in the United States. This means that the only legal way for any person with a U.S. address to get tickets to the Rio Olympics is through them. If I remember correctly, I actually found out about them through an LA Times article. Either way, I discovered CoSport a few days before they opened a round of Individual Ticket sales. They had a ton of availability for most sports at relatively affordable prices. I found a friend to come with me and I ended up getting tickets to see events in Basketball, Field Hockey, Beach Volleyball, Gymnastics, and Soccer/Football. There were some Tennis and Swimming tickets available, but I couldn't afford to buy absolutely everything I wanted to see. I also got tickets to the 2014 Sochi Olympics last year through CoSport, but I ended up being unable to get to Russia at that time.

When you purchase tickets, you don't know what countries are playing yet, so there is a little bit of chance that goes into that. I actually got lucky enough to watch "Team GB" play in every single event except Beach Volleyball, which I ended up watching Team USA play in. It's always great to root for the home team. The best surprise was being able to see Team GB's very first soccer match of the games in Wembley Stadium. I ended up with amazing seats on the ground level, maybe 20 rows or so from the field at one of the corner sections. I only paid $60 for that seat, and it was an amazing experience to be surrounded by loyal, drunken people from the UK singing fight songs as their team played the UAE. There was even a SWAT style team that came out onto the field when the UAE scored a point. And even Prince William was there. It was great!

The view from my seats at Wembley :)

To top it all off, each ticket included a free day pass for the London Tube. Free transit! So I never had to pay for a single transit ride minus the initial leg to go pick up my tickets. I can't say if Rio will offer a similar free transit program, but they do have a pretty neat bus system so it would be amazing if that was made available again.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in getting tickets to the Rio Olympics, I would urge you to create a CoSport account as soon as you can and set a reminder in your phone to be online and logged in before 10am Eastern Standard Time with an idea of what you actually want tickets to. There is a Competition Schedule on their homepage so you can pick specific dates and events you want to aim for. It even includes pricing schedules. And this is also a friendly reminder that RUGBY will debut in Rio as an Olympic sport for the first time! I will definitely be trying to score some Rugby tickets this time. Rugby and Swimming.

Free Stuff
One important thing to know that makes the Olympics affordable is that there are a TON of sponsors at the Olympics and there are even more companies that want to advertise there as well. This equates to there being a ton of free stuff available for spectators if you know where to look. My favorite perk in this category was being able to enter the Chase VIP Lounge on Pall Mall. All you needed for entry was any Chase Visa card in your name and you could enter with up to 6 guests. In the lounge, Chase offered free Chase Olympic pins, free baseball caps and bags, free food and drink (including European Fanta if you don't drink alcohol!), free calls to the US, free internet, and free unique experiences that you could sign up for. One of those experiences was to have dinner cooked by Chef Morimoto. Yes, THE Iron Chef. I got to have dinner cooked by him and his crew on two separate occasions that week I was there. Best sushi of my life! They also had some meet and greets with various American Olympians on a sign up basis, but the food was more important to me :)

Hanging out with none other than Chef Morimoto! He was excited that I was from Hawaii :)

Flights
Another big obstacle to seeing the Olympics was getting an affordable flight there. London is already a pretty pricey destination in July, so of course demand would push up prices even higher during the Olympic period. My friend purchased her ticket there for around $1500; however, I had some miles saved up on Delta Airlines (which I would not recommend now that they have completely changed their mileage program) and was able to fly to London for 90,000 miles and tax which added up to around $130 roundtrip. A typical off-peak mileage award ticket to Europe is 60,000 miles, but 90,000 miles was pretty standard to go from anywhere in the US to anywhere in Europe in the middle of July. And since I was graduating from my master's program that fall, my parents donated their miles to my cause. That was the best graduation present my parents could have ever given me!

Anyway, my point is that if you know what dates you want to be there and if you can get tickets next week during the first round of open ticket sales, start looking for plane tickets to avoid a high surcharge when demand starts to increase as the games get closer. Airlines typically begin selling tickets 11 months ahead of time, so in August, start looking for tickets whether you are paying with cash or miles. I would highly recommend using miles, and as an added bonus, flights out of Brazil do not collect certain taxes, so if you wanted to add on a flight to Europe from Brazil this might be a good time to do so! Rio also isn't very far from South Africa, one of my favorite places! And there are a number of low cost carriers that fly within South America if you are interested in making a bigger trip out of it. I loved my time in Rio, and I would love to visit Buenos Aires the next time I head down that way. Iguacu Falls is also worth a stop in my opinion. There are a million options! You could even fly into a city not too far from Rio which may be cheaper, then find a bus or low cost airline to get in to Rio. I imagine Sao Paulo might even be a much cheaper option and it's not too far away.

Our campsite

Accommodations
The last major consideration if you want to try to attend the Olympics is accommodations. Hotels and even hostels will jack up their prices due to demand at the time of the Olympics. If you can, finding a friend to stay with would save you a fortune. I ended up spending a part of my time in London with my cousin who lives in Oxfordshire. Oxford isn't super close to London though, so for three nights, my travel buddy and I stayed at a place called "Camp in London" which was literally a campsite one Tube stop over from the Olympic Park where mostly volunteers stayed. It was only 10 pounds per person per night to stay there since we had our own tent. That made it super affordable to stay in the city near the events. It really was amazing. And when else can you safely camp in a big city like London? I am not sure if Rio will be doing something similar, or if it will be as safe even if they do, but this kind of Olympic sponsored affordable accommodation is something to keep an eye out for.

I hope this info helps anyone who might consider going to the Olympics next year! And remember, the first round of Individual Ticket Sales begin next week Tuesday, May 19th, at 10am EST.