Yes, I used to “binge travel.”

You know what it’s like, or know people who do this – cramming 7 cities into 7 days, checking things off their unrelenting itineraries, taking thousands of photos as they go.

Even worse – no, don’t say it! – the Cruise, where in addition to mortifying excesses of food available at all hours, passengers are herded off the ship for mere hours in a new port. Sure, binge travelers can rattle of the list of countries they’ve visited like accomplishments on a resume, but have they really experienced ANY place they’ve visited?

We do the opposite of this now, trading superficial mass market blather for exquisite depth of enlightenment. It costs less, takes less time to plan, is less stressful, brings unimaginable rewards, and is conducive to deep connection with your fellow travelers instead of bickering over a missed deadline. Expectations are few, and insights are many. Sure, sometimes it’s boring, but I’d rather be bored than stressed, and boredom is an opportunity to be creative.

People have asked me how to go about doing slow travel, so I put together a few tips:

Do nothing in particular

This is slow travel at its most basic level. You’re not doing nothing, just nothing in particular. Go about your day with one or two intentions for things you might like to do, but without any expectation of actually getting to them. You may actually get to your planned activity, but it’s ok if you don’t. By the way, this works amazingly well with young kids, who are experts at following the flow of the day without any particular plan.

Throw out your must-see to-do list

I have to admit, I love lists. So of course I always make a list of all the cool things we can do when we get to our location. We do end up doing one or two of the things on it, but I end up throwing it out after that. We usually find more interesting things to do that aren’t in the guidebooks. But we also end up wanting to unwind and just not do much. If you’re in a beautiful location to be in, do you really need to be so busy? Simple things like stopping to watch the sunset can be magical.

Slow down, literally

Fast travel is just too hard on my body. Not to mention that travel accidents (especially by car) are the most common cause of death. So we slow down and use our feet. Sometimes we take two hours to walk one mile, and it becomes almost meditative. We live 2-3 months in a place, rather than 1-2 weeks, and we inevitably notice new and different things. As an added bonus, we almost never get sick. You can’t say that about cruise travel, where sickness seems to be part of the package, either on board or when you get home and have to recover from your vacation.

Be open to surprises in everyday moments

This is where things get even more magical. We’ve had our crises, to be sure, but also some amazing moments that we couldn’t have planned, and that we might have missed if we were rushing by. One winter day, wandering through San Francisco (before we moved down here), our daughter was cold and we didn’t have a jacket for her. Lo and behold, in the middle of crossing a downtown intersection, a man in a business suit comes up to us with a child’s winter coat in his hand. He offers it to us, saying he was cleaning out his garage and promised to give the coat to the first child he saw.

A few years later, in Washington DC, a slow saunter back from the White House to our hotel had us out after dark, and we caught our first glimpse of fireflies! We even captured one to see how it worked, and then released it, but it was an incredible moment. And in Hawaii last year, we were walking back from the beach and stumbled across a free kids’ hula show, which captivated our daughters. When the performance was over, two of the girls came off stage and gave their leis to our girls. They were thrilled.

Slow travel and being open to surprises is intertwined tightly with our unschooling practice, but that’s a story for another post.

Here are some links to other resources you may find useful:

The Slow Movement
The Institute of Not Doing Much
Vagabonding
SoulTravelers3

Do you slow travel, or want to? Have you had any wonderful moments traveling? Add them to the comments below. Happy travels!

Photo by jurvetson

Yesterday, on the 4th of July, I turned 35. This is how long it has been since I emerged from my mother, the common way we measure age.

Of course, it might be more accurate to say I’m 35 years and 9 months old, if you consider when I really started off as an individual – a fertilized egg. That happened around September 27, 1974. Setting aside the inevitable discomfort of imagining your parents having sex, the cells I was made of – the egg and sperm – are actually older than this. The oocyte my mother contributed lived in her body for 27 years before it was fertilized by my father’s sperm cell, which was only about 76 days (2.5 months) old – that’s how long it takes a sperm cell to be made.

Considering the vast majority of the volume of a newly fertilized cell comes from the egg, most of “me” at the time of conception had already been living since my mother was born, 0r 1946. That’s the year the egg cell that was to go on to make me was created. But of course, that egg cell came from another living cell, and so on. If you follow the chain all the way back, you see that in a sense, parts of me have been “alive” for about 3.8 billion years.

Now, you might say, wait a minute! None of the material in the cell that was alive 3.8 billion (or even 1,000 years ago) remains in my body. So I can’t really say I’m that old.

OK. Then how old am I? In a paper in Cell (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16009139?dopt=Abstract), Spalding et al looked at carbon-14 levels in genomic DNA to measure how long ago various cell types were “born”. They found that intestinal cells live an average of 11 years (15.9 years if you ignore epithelial cells, which only live about 5 days). Skeletal muscle lives about 15.1 years and some brain cells are with you from birth, while others have only been around since you were 10 years old. It seems the average age of a cell in your body is no more than about 7 to 10 years (http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2005-08/1123273958.Bc.r.html).

If you’re an adult and consider your age to be how old your cells are, then you’re in a constant state of being, on average, 7-10 years old. Your molecules are probably much younger than this – they are frequently recycled. The atoms that make up your molecules are constantly entering your body as food, water and oxygen, and leaving as waste and carbon dioxide, so most of them have been in your body considerably less than 7 years. But the atoms themselves are almost as old as the universe itself. Many were created when the first stars exploded as supernovas, billions of years ago.

Another way of measuring how old I am is to ask how long it will be until I die. Even that number is fuzzy. If I were living 100,000 years ago, or even as recently as the early 20th century, I’d probably already be dead. Online calculators that factor in my healthy lifestyle estimate that I may live to be 95 or more – that would give me another 60 years.

But these estimates ignore the exponential advances in regenerative medicine and nanotechnology. Remember the point about cells living about 7 years? As you age, cells accumulate mutations, or stop being able to divide (mainly to protect you from getting cancer). But your DNA doesn’t really get old – it has barely changed in a million years. As we get better at replacing our cells, we may be able to keep that 7 year batch constantly fresh, essentially stopping aging. Many probably underestimate how close we may be to achieving indefinite lifespans.

And so, while I do feel some discomfort at the thought of “already” being 35 – the milestone seemed to arrive so quickly – I’m also finding that the number is becoming less meaningful or relevant each year. Our age will always measure how long we’ve been on earth, but over time it will say less and less about how much longer we are likely to live.

Yes, we’re doing it again. 3 months this time!

I posted to Facebook that we were spending the winter in Hawaii again, and got this comment:

I love the minimalist approach. But how does one deal with the high cost of travel to Hawaii? Honolulu is also very expensive, right? how do you deal with that when you have kids? Can you please share this? It will be useful for people like me who would love to do this!

Here’s my reply – the top 10 tips for how we spend the winter in Hawaii, with kids, without breaking the bank:

1. Be frugal. We live well below budget while we’re in California, so we save up money for the flights. It takes discipline, but the freedom is worth it.

2. Pay one rent. We rent a small apartment (1 br) on both sides, giving up the lease when we move so we’re never paying double rent – and rent in Honolulu is about the same as in Silicon Valley, so our living expenses are actually about the same.

3. Find cost tradeoffs. The one thing that’s much more expensive in Hawaii is food, but that’s compensated for by the fact that life is so much simpler there – here we pay for kids’ activities, entertainment, transportation etc, while there you just walk to the beach every day for free fun that never gets boring for the kids (or the adults).

4. Hang loose. When we’re in Hawaii, we don’t pay for all the over-priced touristy stuff, but instead live more like locals.

5. Find work that’s portable. We focus on building up work/revenue while we’re in California that is compatible with extended time away – things that we can work on remotely for now, with the goal of moving towards increasingly passive income.

6. Pounce on sales. We keep an eye on flight prices, scooping up deep discount sales that are often available months in advance of when we leave.

7. Self-store your stuff. We store our California belongings in a small self-storage place while we’re gone (we don’t own anything that doesn’t fit in our car, so moving costs are negligible), and we rent a furnished place in Hawaii. Also, each time we put our stuff in storage, it’s a great excuse to give away the inevitable accumulation of things that happens over 9 months, so we stay super lean.

8. Use your feet. We choose places to live on both sides where you can walk almost anywhere, and bus/train if you need to, so while we’re in Hawaii we don’t have a car (and we’re thinking of giving up our car in California too, actually)

9. Be curious. We expect hiccups on either side, but it’s all part of the adventure – we also homeschool our kids, so there aren’t any ties to school schedules, and they get to experience with us how a person goes about finding shelter, food, and community in a new place. Important life skills!

10. It’s ok to be different. I say if you want to do something, just do it, and the world around you will move to accommodate you. People feel sorry for us that we live in a 1 br apartment with 2 kids, but we feel like it’s the greatest thing in the world – we’re all so connected, and we get to live wherever we want!

I hope that answers the question and inspires whoever is reading this to live life your way.

This is us in Hawaii.

We were there for 2 months last winter, and all we took was one carry-on bag each, plus one bag for electronics and plane snacks. Daniel and I had backpacks, the girls had small kids’ suitcases on wheels. We wore our warmest outfits and comfiest walking shoes on the plane to save space and keep toasty.

Here’s what we packed:

1. Adult bags

1 pair of sandals, 5 t-shirts, 3 shorts/skirts, 1 bathing suit, 2 sundresses (my bag, not Daniel’s), 7 underwear, no socks, basic toiletries and medicines, ID, credit cards, keys, $80 cash, 1 book, 1 writing journal, sunscreen, sunglasses, can opener.

2. Kid bags

2 pairs of sandals, 3 t-shirts, 3 shorts/skirts, 5 sundresses, 1 bathing suit, 7 underwear, no socks, 1 favorite toy, 1 book, 1 writing journal, sunglasses.

3. Electronics/plane bag

2 laptops, iPhone, iPod Touch, chargers, earbuds, Daniel’s cell phone, digital SLR camera (though we mostly used the iPhone camera), Clif Builder Bars, almonds, raisins, tamari-seaweed rice cakes, turkey jerky, empty stainless steel water bottle to refill after security, coloring books and markers, Kanoodle game, Set game.

And that’s it!

The girls each got to buy one new activity on our trip – a painting set and a paper doll set were their choices. We left some clothes that they had grown out of behind, and a book we had finished reading, to make room for bringing back our new things. No souvenirs other than our pictures, memories, and the aloha spirit.

We’re considering a longer traveling stint this winter, still with only carry-ons. After all, almost anywhere you go, people need to eat, buy clothes, brush their teeth, etc, so chances are you’ll be able to find anything you need when you get there.

What are some other essentials you pack when you travel?

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Related posts

vagabonding

eating for $36 a month

Out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need, we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts.

The freedom to go vagabonding has never been determined by income level; it’s found through simplicity – the conscious decision of how to use what income you have.

Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home – and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

“Seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

Plus three of my all-time favorites from Henry David Thoreau:

One spends the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.

We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

Thanks, Rolf and Henry, for your example and inspiration!

Need to plan an office retreat or executive meting? Why not have it at another company’s office? Save the cost of hotels and conference centers, reuse existing space, and learn from how other companies work. Here’s the Wall Street Journal article on how sharing office space is becoming cool.

Here are the 5 books that inspired Daniel and I to live with radically less and be happier!

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Living in the woods gave him amazing insights on a simple life.

2. Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
Spend where you get value and only where you get value.

3. Fight Club (OK, this one’s a movie)
The stuff you own ends up owning you.

4. Adbusters (magazine)
Inspired us with Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week

5. The Happy Minimalist by Peter Lawrence
A detailed account of how to live with almost no stuff.

BONUS for keeners: Chuang-Tzu translated by Burton Watson
Taoist tales and philosophy.

What books inspire you?

Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute summarizes in this 19-minute-TED-talk how the global energy crisis can be solved by less waste.

If you live in California or Nevada, LINK+ is a network of libraries that lets you get any book from any library, free and delivered to your local branch. Here’s the list of participating libraries.

Andrew Hyde used to live on $36 a month for food, quite comfortably. Here’s how he did it, and thanks to Lolo for the beautiful picture.