Bill Wiatrak is a travel author, entertainer and video producer of travel content. He is visiting every country in the world.
I’ve been traveling through China for the last 2 weeks. It’s a fascinating country with amazing archaeological treasures, breathtaking scenery and pandas. Yes, pandas. Although I’ve been here half a dozen times, I find travel here to be some of the most challenging in the world. It can be extremely frustrating because of language barriers and customs that westerners...
The Indianapolis 500 has always been on my bucket list as a thing I’d like to do someday, but like most items on my list, I knew next to nothing about it. I figured, given its name and my uncanny deduction abilities, it was probably in Indianapolis. I had no idea that the “500” referred to the number of miles that the racers must drive to win the...
I’m going to Mongolia. In a couple of weeks I’m hopping on a plane to fly to LA at the crack of dawn and lingering for 12 hours in California before I catch a flight to Shanghai. A couple days later I’ll jump on the Maglev high speed train and travel 800 miles to Beijing. From there I’ll catch another flight to the border of China and hire a taxi to...
I just saw the most beautiful lake in the world. Of all the pretty places I’ve seen around the globe, this was the one: the shining star; the photo you just can’t wait to put on Instagram. Lake Moraine is 20 minutes away from it’s sister lake, Lake Louise and the two bodies of water collectively are among the most photographed places on the planet...
I was wading through a sea of cowboy hats. There was a smell of wafting flavors of barbecue and fried corn dogs in the air. As I passed the giant bronze cattle statues, it seemed for a moment that I might have accidentally wandered into the Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show, but this event wasn’t even in the same country. Texas rodeos don’t have poutine. I was at the...
Some of my friends think that I live the Life of Reilly when it comes to travel. They see my Instagram photos and read the highlights of my adventures and because I focus on my positive experiences, it might seem that everything goes according to plan. Nope. In fact, I probably have more travel setbacks than the average person because I am traveling all the time...
It was the perfect day. Lake Huron looked more like the Caribbean than a Great Lake and the sky was an impossible shade of blue. As I stepped off the ferry, I could immediately sense Mackinac island was something special. This was not how I had imagined Michigan. Truthfully, none of Michigan seemed to be what I was expecting. We had driven from Detroit airport to the...
Do you believe in trolls? Not the cartoon characters from the recent Dreamworks movie or the mythological figures your Norwegian grandfather warned you about. I’m talking about Alux (or Aluxob if there’s more than one); Mexican trolls.Impish little beings who vandalize things and play tricks on humans. They are usually dressed in traditional Mayan...
“Life is like a box of chocolates” echoed through my head as I navigated my way around the small square where Forrest Gump sat on his famous park bench in the 1994 blockbuster film of the same name. The park bench isn’t there of course, but there’s plenty of beautiful filming locations from other movies, lovely gardens and antebellum architecture to keep visitors...
You’ve no doubt heard people talk about the seven wonders of the world and wondered what exactly they are or where they are. The truth is that the original seven wonders of the world (established by the Greeks) don’t exist anymore except for one: the Pyramids of Giza. The Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Temple of Artemus and Diane, the Tomb of...