Traveler Speedster Travel Electric Guitar

The Traveler Speedster Electric Guitar sports a modern-retro look and it’s designed for performance with a high-output dual-rail humbucker pickup, a unique roller-style bridge, plus volume and tone controls. The Speedster boasts quality chrome hardware, a rosewood fretboard, and 24-3/4″ scale. Upper armrest detaches for travel. This Traveler electric is great for the rocker on the run. The Traveler Speedster Electric Guitar sports a modern-retro look and it’s designed for performance with a high-output dual-rail humbucker pickup, a unique roller-style bridge, plus volume and tone controls. The Speedster boasts quality chrome hardware, a rosewood fretboard, and 24-3/4″ scale. Upper armrest detaches for travel. This Traveler electric is great for the rocker on the run. The Traveler Speedster Electric Guitar sports a modern-retro look and it’s designed for performance with a high-output dual-rail humbucker pickup, a unique roller-style bridge, plus volume and tone controls. The Speedster boasts quality chrome hardware, a rosewood fretboard, and 24-3/4″ scale. Upper armrest detaches for travel. This Traveler electric is great for the rocker on the run. The Traveler Speedster Electric Guitar sports a modern-retro look and it’s designed for performance with a high-output dual-rail humbucker pickup, a unique roller-style bridge, plus volume and tone controls. The Speedster boasts quality chrome hardware, a rosewood fretboard, and 24-3/4″ scale. Upper armrest detaches for travel. This Traveler electric is great for the rocker on the run.

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Travel planning is a pain in the ass

I’ve been spending a lot time trying to plan out the first two weeks in
Europe. My girlfriend will be traveling with me and I wanted to make sure we had a fairly set schedule to avoid any problems once we’re over there.  It’s easier to know where and when, and the stuff that happens between each destination…you figure out along the way. 

So the plan is London, Dublin, and Paris and maybe Nice…I think. Just coming up with the cities for those two weeks was harder than I expected. Not because we’re picky, it’s more ignorance and having to spend a lot time reading and researching. It can feel like a pain in the ass.

You almost want someone to come up with a plan for you and base it on your trip length and your general interests. I’m finding myself scouring the ‘Net to try and find other people’s itineraries, opinions and recommendations for Europe. I’ve also talked to a few people that have either lived in
Europe for a while or have visited frequently to get their take as well. 

Here are a few sites that I’ve tried:

Destination Guides

Lonely Planet – The website is nothing compared to the guidebooks. The website is pretty much useless for travel planning, maybe helpful for generating ideas. They need to get into the 21^st century and build a web-based subscription model for their content.

TripAdvisor – I love this site. If you are booking a hotel, this site is a must visit. TripAdvisor has built up an extensive set of reviews for hotels from around the world. Best feature is “Candid Photos” – photos of the hotel rooms from people that stayed there, giving you an unbiased look at what you’re really getting.

Yahoo! Travel – Yahoo does a decent job here of providing a high level overview of destinations with their Travel Guides. Yahoo verticals like Travel and Shopping have always had a tough time creating an active community, so the reviews and message boards get a little stale (at time of writing the latest review for Tower of London was from April 2005).

Yahoo’s Trip Planner product seems very promising and addresses the travel planning pain point. Again it requires an active community and right now it’s too shallow to provide any great value.

Message Boards

I’ve discovered quite a few travel message boards on the web through search engines. You usually don’t seem them until after the 3^rd or 4^th page of results because of the over saturation of travel companies that SEO’d the shit out the search engines.  Great thing about message boards (assuming it’s active and well maintained) is that you can ask specific questions to the community and usually get back good answers.

Here’s a few that I used for my trip:

Boots N’ All – Bootsnall.com is a larger site devoted to the independent traveler. I found the message board to be pretty active and got some good advice on travel insurance.

The Thorn Tree - From LonelyPlanet.  Thorn Tree has a decent community of moderated message boards.  Pretty useful if you have questions and I like that they have boards on traveling tips, like traveling with a computer.

Trekinfo.com - Trekinfo.com has a decent message board on trekking in
Nepal. The content can get a little stale and 3 private messages I had sent to member for guide recommendations were not answered (Their posts had told people to private message them for recommended guide contact info).

Some other sites I haven’t really used enough to write about:

Independant Traveler

Frommer’s Message Board 

Guide Books

Lastly the tried and true method for most people. I’ve purchased guidebooks from Lonely Planet and Rough Guides.  I find Lonely Planet to be the best guide books going. Rough Guides are decent as well but as the name implies, not very deep.

Travel Insurance

A lot’s happened on the trip planning front since the last post. First off I just bought some travel insurance from World Nomads. I found these guys off the Lonely Planet website and I figured that if Lonely Planet recommended them, that was a decent endorsement.

However, you don’t have far to find someone that had a bad experience. But I did also find someone that had a good experience with World Nomads as well. And in the end, the guy that had the bad experience (i.e. insurance claim denied) had the ruling overturned by the Internal Dispute Resolution Committee. I assume this committee is part of World Nomads or their underwriters.

Pricing wise it was hard to beat World Nomads. I did some research and found that these guys were by far the cheapest travel insurance company. Their site says attributes the low cost to the fact that they are an online-only insurance company, thus reducing overhead costs. Like Amazon.com and books. On the flip side, it could just as easily be attributed to a very restrictive policy that keeps their risk and that of their underwriters low enough that they can afford those premiums.

However, they still seem reputable enough and the pricing is very attractive. I dropped the $158 for a 3 month policy and donated $2 to the Australian Himalayan Foundation for some good karma.

Upgraded!

When I booked my flights, one stipulation I had for the travel agent was that my return flight home from Bangkok to San Francisco be United and that it was an upgradeable economy seat.

In case you don’t already know this, economy seats have their own classes. When you purchase a seat from an online ticket agency like Expedia or Travelocity you don’t know which class of economy you’re getting. Well certain classes are not upgradeable and if it was the cheapest price, it’s likely the non-upgradeable kind. Something I didn’t know.

Here’s something else I found useful. SeatGuru. You can check out any plane from any airline and find out which are the best seats on the plane. This thing is great!

Anyways, I just got off the phone with United Airlines and successfully upgraded my flight home from Bangkok to business class. I’m seat 13B, upper deck. It cost me 30,000 miles, something that didn’t hurt that much because I had signed up for a United Visa card in May or June that came with a 20,000 mile bonus.

It’ll be my first business class seat on an international flight. These are exciting times indeed.

Immunity

When traveling to far-off places, especially poor, far-off places you need to take certain precautions. Especially with when it comes to your health.

Being born in the US affords you a level of health care well beyond most countries in the world and in the US, the living conditions often mean you’ll never have to worry about diseases that have historically plague mankind for centuries.

It also means that your body probably hasn’t been vaccinated or built up any immunity to these diseases. Without the presence of the disease there’s just not a big need for it.

But once you venture into the 3rd world you are exposed to some of the most notorious maladies on the planet.

Shit that’ll make you shit until to you die.

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I just got back from the Overseas Medical Center in San Francisco. It kind of looks like a sketchy place from the outside, more like a medical clinic for the homeless. But I have to say the staff was very knowledgeable about which immunizations I would need, once I explained where I was going.

Once in the medical office, the nurse, “Quick Draw McGraw” whipped out the needles and proceeded to jab my left arm 4 times in all of 10 seconds. I was all set.

It was also relatively inexpensive considering it was a medical expense. $260.00 for the shots. Here’s what I got:
- Diphtheria Tetanus III – valid for 10 years
- Hepatitis A Vaccine – valid for 1 year, 10 if I go back after 12 months
- Polio Vaccine – 10 years of protection
- Typhoid II Vaccine – 2 years of protection

At the end you get a yellow card that’s kept with your passport and lets customs know which immunizations you have when you enter the country. Some countries require you have your immunizations done before you can enter, so be sure to check out the requirements before heading out. Also be sure to do this at least 2 weeks before you depart.

Update: I added Hepatitis B to my arsenal. I went to visit my regular doctor for a check up and he suggested I get that as well, just for extra safety. In addition he gave me a prescription for an Epi-pen. As a teenager I had a “life threating” allergic reaction to penicillin that caused swelling and hives in my throat. When it happened the doctor at the time gave me a shot of adrenaline to quickly stop the reaction and open up my airways. An Epi-pen is a self administered shot that will do the same thing in case I run into a similar problem out on my own.

My Flights

I’ve finally booked my flights and set my overall itinerary for the trip. I was starting to get a little stressed that I hadn’t already done this part of the trip and it was already getting to be mid-July (leaving beginning of September). It’s good to have this piece figured out, now I can drill into the details of each of the destinations.

Here’s the flight plan:

San Francisco (SFO) to London Heathrow – depart Sept 4th, arrive Sept 5th
Frankfurt, Germany to Kathmandu, Nepal – depart Oct 16th, arrive Oct 17th
Kathmandu, Nepal to Bangkok, Thailand – depart Nov 7th, arrive Nov 7th
Bangkok, Thailand to San Francisco (SFO) – depart Nov 28th, arrive Nov 28th

Kristel is joining me for the first two weeks of the trip. We’ll fly out together to London and she will head back by herself from Paris on Sept 18th. We’ll do the London/Paris tour together.

The Process

I started out by checking out various travel search engines to try and get an idea of what it would cost. I tried the comparison sites: SideStep.com, Kayak.com. I also tried one of the big guys – Expedia.com as well.

For reference check out this list of travel search engines from Search Engine Watch.

At the end I opted to use a travel agent to help book the flights. It was a bit complex doing an international multi-city air ticket but it’s not impossible to do online on your own. However I felt that this was something important enough to warrant expert advice.

I ending up using Airtreks.com, recommended by a friend that worked in the travel space.

Total cost of the flights was about $2900. It could have been about $150 less, but I opted for an upgradeable economy class seat on the Bangkok to San Francisco flight home. My plan is to upgrade to business class for that flight home using some United miles. The total cost compared fairly well with what I was seeing on the online travel booking sites.

I had also considered the “Around the World” ticket that’s offered through the Star Alliance (Wikipedia entry). The advantage of the “Around the World” ticket is the number of connections and the flexibility in departures. However I was convinced by my (biased) travel agent that given my short list of cities, and that flight changes aren’t as easily done on the ATW ticket, the better option was a series of one-way tickets.

Overall the process was pretty straightforward once I started working with a travel agent. I think the pricing is comparable to self-booking and I had the ability to select upgradable seats. Given the experience thus far, I would recommend working with a travel agent for multi-city around the world airfare.

Blog Posting Disclaimer

I’m not a strong writer, especially in this context. When I left my job and decided to take some time off and doing some traveling, I had said to many of my friends that I’d start a blog to chronicle the trip.

Well it’s been three weeks and this is my third post.

Part of me is a bit hesitant to start ablog, especially one I’d share with my friends. It just feels so cheesy. Also in the context of blogs that I know and read, and those blogs of my friends, I know this one can’t hold a candle to the brilliance of those weblogs.

So that said, know that this blog won’t attempt to be anything more than just notes, thoughts and random comments around my trip planning, my actual trip and photos I take along the way.