NYT: Seeing the world on a budget

Here's an NYT article about Frugal Travel (though it is really rumination about travel itself) that really resonated. Tip hat to my brother Mukund for sending it to me.

Matt Gross, in the NY Times writes:

Six years ago, I had a regular job, in an office. I was there 9 or 10 hours a day, made a decent living and even found the work occasionally interesting. But I was also bored. More than bored — I was restless.

Read the full article.

Stay a little longer

My excuse for not posting here is that I am on the road, traveling the western US. But I decided that I could write quick posts from time to time. So here's one.

When we used to travel before, we used to fly into a country (say in Europe) and try to cover as many places as possible. So typically, we'd fly out of Chicago, land in City A, travel to B, C, and D, come in to city E and fly back to Chicago from there. We'd be switching cities most nights, and would hardly ever stay in one hotel for more than 2 nights. This is the mode of traveling that Lonely Planet derisively calls "sand bagging" but we had to conserve vacation days, didn’t have much choice.

Back home, when we reflected on the trips though, we found that we enjoyed most the ones where we had stayed put and taken our time. I know the quality versus quantity argument is really an old one, but sometimes even obvious things take time to sink in.

So now, finally, we are meandering at a much slower pace. Recently, we spent 2 days in Oklahoma City (a place I had overlooked before) and 2 more in White Sands, NM and both were richly rewarding.