Travel

My apologies, dear followers, for putting this here. I hate to use my platforms to write about things like this, but we've just been through the most ridiculous car rental experience of my life and by putting this online, I hope that it will help others when deciding who to rent their cars from. The short tl;dr version of our little odyssey: For a photo tour I rented a car from Enterprise rent-a-car in Ireland. The car (and several follow-ups) had issues and we needed to swap vehicles four times until we finally got one that was safe and not faulty. In the process we lost valuable time that was planned and needed for our photo tour and which annoyed our paying clients. In total it was a bit of a disaster, but Enterprise finally delivered a working vehicle and is trying to make up fo...

Traveling always bears the risk of getting stuck somewhere for longer than anticipated, missing a connection flight or getting in some other form of trouble. If you have a ship going at a designated time and no way to catch up, planning a day or two of buffer time to get there is advised. If that ship takes off from one of the most remote ports in the world, then doubly so. So we arrived in Longyearbyen, Svalbard two days early and we had to make use of the time. Which we did. Monika is now trying to find space in her luggage to bring back that husky puppy.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPq-nc6nXfM This afternoon we will board the s/v Noorderlicht and sail the coast of Svalbard for 12 days. We will go on land whenever possible and capture beautiful photos of ice, snow and a lot...

For some people travel causes a lot of anxiety. What if you forget to pack something? What if you miss a flight? Many what-ifs.. even with me. For example I have a habit of double-triple-quadruple checking if I have my passport. Over the years I probably made almost every mistake there is when it comes to travel. But I've come up with a list of things (and stuck to it) that have one goal: peace of mind. Make a travel checklist Biggest one first. Sit down for 20 minutes and in your mind, go through different situations on your journey and think of what you will definitely need. And what you can do without. Use any simple tool at your disposal to capture these points. I use the reminders app on the Mac and iOS because they sync nicely. My list contains things like: toiletries, ea...