An intriguing article in the Wall Street Journey last week explored the option, for some folk at least, of selling everything and just traveling. And we're not talking about twenty-somethings - but retirees in the 60's +. Not a cheap option, but not all that expensive either. The couple featured in the article were spending around $7700/month when living in their home in California (and that budget did not include travel). On the road, there monthly expenses ran from $3450 (in Mexico) to $6800 (in London). Does require some source of funds (duh), and pretty good health. And, of course, wanderlust. Sound good?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004131575356160.html
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
More Travel Websites Worth a Look
In preparing "Journey On! Taking Your Travel Experience to the Next Level," I did a lot of research on valuable websites (in case you haven't checked lately, there are a lot of non-valuable websites out there!) and discussed the key ones. The web, of course, represents at its best constant change. The NT Times Frugal Traveler pointed out some of the newer sites that are worth a look in today's NY Times. All sound worthwhile.
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/10-travel-web-sites-worth-bookmarking/?nl=travel&emc=edit_tl_20121013
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/10-travel-web-sites-worth-bookmarking/?nl=travel&emc=edit_tl_20121013
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Audio Slide Shows
Our family took a classic American road trip this past summer - from our Northwest home to Nevada's Great Basin National Parks, then on to Utah and Arizona to visit Cedar Breaks, Zion, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Kodachrome, and Capital Reef parks. Camera in hand, I took more than a few photographs and was overall pleased with the results.
Then comes the question: how best to share the photos with others? One technique is via an audio slide show - in this case, the audio is provided by a music score. I choose what I considered my best photographs from the trip and imported them into Windows Live Movie Maker. The software name notwithstanding, it does slide shows in addition to movies.
Once in Movie Maker, I inserted title slides announcing the next park, an overall title slide and a credit slide at the end. Movie Maker allows you to set various transition modes (how one slide moves on to the next), the timing of each, etc. Fairly simple to learn and use.
Next came the music. Since I wanted to share via YouTube, it was really important to take music copyrights into account. So I went to http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ which has a wonderful selection of mood music to accompany slides shows or even movies. Use of music from the site only required attribution, which I added to the credit slide. The music I choose was just about the right length (under 4 1/2 minutes) for the 40+ photographs, so I clicked the box that automatically set the slide show duration to match the music. And I was done.
The result can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/LYQpD9IxOVY.
Then comes the question: how best to share the photos with others? One technique is via an audio slide show - in this case, the audio is provided by a music score. I choose what I considered my best photographs from the trip and imported them into Windows Live Movie Maker. The software name notwithstanding, it does slide shows in addition to movies.
Once in Movie Maker, I inserted title slides announcing the next park, an overall title slide and a credit slide at the end. Movie Maker allows you to set various transition modes (how one slide moves on to the next), the timing of each, etc. Fairly simple to learn and use.
Next came the music. Since I wanted to share via YouTube, it was really important to take music copyrights into account. So I went to http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ which has a wonderful selection of mood music to accompany slides shows or even movies. Use of music from the site only required attribution, which I added to the credit slide. The music I choose was just about the right length (under 4 1/2 minutes) for the 40+ photographs, so I clicked the box that automatically set the slide show duration to match the music. And I was done.
The result can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/LYQpD9IxOVY.
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