Category Travel tips
Does this moneybelt make me look fat? How to foil pickpockets and avoid scams while traveling.
Crossing a crowded street in Madrid, I happened to glance at HOB and saw a teen girl unzipping his backpack. The second she saw me notice her, the girl melted into the crowd and disappeared. At a café in Istanbul, a toddler suddenly appeared, and just as I warned “look out!” he had his hands […]
How to get the best customer service from tourist information and visitor services employees: an insider view
One of your most valuable resources as a budget traveler are tourist information centers and the visitor services staff at museums and cultural centers. The employees of these organizations are passionate about where they live and work and they are experts on what tourists need to know. They can reliably provide you with brochures and […]
Picnic at the cathedral: how to picnic in Europe
If you’ve traveled across the ocean to see a great work of architecture, a wonderful way to enhance your visit is to picnic in front of it. Beautiful view? Check. Chance to observe and interact with locals? Check. Cheap? Check, check check. While picnicking is fun for it’s own sake, it’s also practical. You have […]
Pun from fear: coping with fear of flying
Q: What do you call a Roman with a cold? A: Julius Sneezer * Let’s get the obvious out of the way: it’s ironic and super-duper embarrassing for a travel blogger be afraid of flying. I AM TERRIFIED TO FLY. And yet I love to travel, so I fly all the time. My fear of […]
French people are rude and other silly stereotypes
“French people are rude”. “French people are snobby”. “They hate Americans over there.” I hear this frequently, mostly from Americans that haven’t traveled much. Where does this idea come from, that roughly 65 million French people, living out their lives in their hexagon of a country, in between munching on baguettes, are beside themselves in a […]
ibis budget and easyHotel: your cheap chain hotel BFFs
Ambiance is overrated. There are times when sleeping in Granny’s rented spare room and being woken up by the singing of her parakeets is just the ticket. But more often than not, a cheap, generic, chain hotel experience is exactly what you need. Enter ibis budget and easyHotel. We’ve stayed at plenty of ibis […]
A love letter to silk long underwear
When my friend Greg asked me when I was going to write my first travel advice book, I told him I would call it “Shivering Through Europe”. I was only half joking. Since the cheap time to travel is winter, HOB and I have shivered our way through many a lovely European town. What makes […]
In which your budget traveler reveals her expenses: the price of a 10 day trip to France
I’ve heard the muttering : “It must be nice to afford Europe travel” and the insinuations about my entitlement, or even snide asides to my assumed elitism. Let’s get this straight –I am incredibly grateful to be able to travel, and I know it’s out of reach for a lot of people for financial, family […]
Cutural tourism at home–great practice, no jet lag
One of the best ways to be a great traveler is to practice–like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get. Yeah, I know, you don’t have a trust fund or infinite amounts of vacation time, so you can’t just fly over to Europe whenever you feel like it. But you can […]
Public bathrooms in Europe, or how I conquered the Turkish toilet and lived to squat again
My first time was in a rather upmarket restaurant in Paris. I asked for the bathroom and when shown the way I entered what surely was the wrong room, since it was only a porcelain hole in the ground. I ran out, looked at the sign on the door, went back in, and to my […]
Picnic at the Cathedral 