Site Maintenance

I’m fiddling around with the layout and design of Me-go at the moment. Sorry for any inconvenience, carry on!

Me-go Subscribers

Now that my site is back up and I’m currently traveling I’ve finally reinstalled my subscriber list. If you received a confirmation email from my site (via Feedburner) you can confirm and follow my updates by email. If you are no longer interested in receiving email updates feel free to disregard the email. As always, following Me-go on my RSS feed is the easiest option if you use a reader.

Talking Travel at Meet, Plan, Go!

Last night’s Chicago Meet, Plan, Go! was a success! REI’s community room was full and I was surprised at how well-traveled the audience already was. We even had someone who had been to Uzbekistan—I was impressed. Hopefully everyone had a good time and left with a reignited passion for RTW travel. As always, I always welcome questions here and I’m happy to chime in on fellow travelers’ trip ideas.

Jetting on jetBlue

My first leg of jetBlue’s All You Can Jet is finished and it was pretty exciting. Washington D.C. was so amazing that I changed my flight at the last minute to skip Baltimore and stay in D.C. another day. Since my friend was flying out at 6am on an adventure of her own I ended up arriving in New York City at 7am with nearly 13 hours before my flight to Chicago. One-way tickets are my preference on RTW trips and I have to say that it’s much more fun flying this way.

Meet, Plan, Go! in Your City

Meet, Plan, Go! is coming up in a few weeks and out host in Chicago, Lisa Lubin, has been doing some press for the event. Although the Chicago event is pretty full make sure you put your name on the waiting list because things may open up as it gets closer to September 14th. You can see Lisa on WGN TV a few weeks ago talking about Meet, Plan, Go! in the video below.

The video previews the Julia Roberts movie Eat, Pray, Love at the beginning of the clip. The trailers I’ve seen worried me that the film would focus a lot on the character’s time in New York before leaving on her adventure. I haven’t seen Eat, Pray, Love yet but from reports it sounds like the trailer was a good representation of the film and, unfortunately, it focused a lot on what pushed her to travel instead of exploring the adventure as much as it could.

Meet, Plan, Go!

My fellow world-traveler Lisa Lubin was gracious enough to ask me to be a panelist at the Meet, Plan, Go! event in Chicago next month. Our paths first crossed after both being featured in a newspaper article about travel bloggers back in 2007. While I’ve been back in Chicago since the article was written, Lisa has only recently stopped living out of a suitcase.

If you’re in the Chicago area and have been thinking about traveling RTW or on an extended trip like I have join us at REI on September 14th for an evening of travel talk and advice. Although the event is free, there is limited space so make sure you register soon.

Meet, Plan, Go! events are happening across the United States on the same day, check out the main site to see if there’s an event near you.

Finally Fixing up Around Here

Someone of you may have noticed that I’ve been fiddling with the site a bit lately. Its starting to shape up and, although I haven’t designed the visual aspect of Me-go yet, most of the back end work has been done. My RSS feed looks like it might also be working after months of frustration and the gallery is slowly being re-installed and I hope to have everything better than it was last fall.

In the meantime I’ve been spending a lot of time enjoying summertime in Chicago, mostly on my new bicycle. There’s been street festivals, professional eating contests, couchsurfers, themed bike rides and more to talk about. Now that my gallery is back up I feel more incentive to start posting again. Below are a few links I’ve been holding onto.

I love this flash mob in Copenhagen — you can’t help but smile, especially if you watch the entire video:

There’s been a lot of interesting self-produced “around-the-world in a few minutes” videos showing up recently like this one. I could certainly put something together with my cartwheel photos if I had the time and patience:

Le tour du monde en 80 secondes from Romain Pergeaux Portfolio on Vimeo.

Eugene Kuo’s travel photography portfolio has some great shots, including Myanmar and Ethiopia. I had never head of Albert Kahn before seeing a link to a recent BBC documentary and book showcasing the amazing photography he commissioned between 1909-1931. His project to document cultures included 50 countries, before Western globalization left most of the world wearing t-shirts and jeans. I’d like to see a copy of the book in person because only a small portion of the 72,000 are represented on the website and you all know how interested I am in traditional costuming of cultures.

2010 Travel-Themed Movies

There’s a few travel-themed movie trailers I’ve seen recently that have been interesting. Many people have recommended I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love because she travels around the world experiencing life. Although the character lives the life of an ex-pat and not so much that of a traveler, it is a good read. I assumed it would eventually make it to the big screen but I’m a little surprised to see Julia Roberts playing the lead. This trailer focuses a lot on the small part of the book that covers her life before travel. I hope that the film turns out to focus more on the interesting adventures she had on the road.

The second trailer, for Babies, is interesting from a cultural perspective. Comparing the first year of life of a child in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan and The United States would be fascinating, I imagine, because of the similarities and differences.

My favorite bit is at the end when an animal grazing outside a yurt in Mongolia walks up to the door, sticks its head inside and drinks out of the bath tub while the baby watches. It reminds me of the family we stayed with in the Gobi desert who let their baby waddle around the stone-covered desert. He fell down every few minutes but would stand up, not shedding a tear. All of us Westerners, from Europe and the U.S., agreed that a Western baby would have cried over any one of those falls. Growing up in a yurt in Mongolia must toughen a kid up quickly.