I got a panicked call today from a friend stuck in Mexico City. She had been delayed by customs and missed her connecting flight by just a few minutes. She was told that she would have to spend the night there and pay for a new ticket to get to Cabo the next day if she wanted to travel. She was crying and ready to return to Houston because the only thing she...
I look at travel deals every day. I can’t help but skim through Sherman’s and Travelzoo like a millionaire perusing the stock market. I suppose there’s as a lot of similarities to stocks as I see different places go on sale at the same time every year. It’s supply and demand and everyone wants to travel in the...
It’s not every day that I get to drive around with Jack Hanna. When I picked him up at the airport Saturday morning, he was wearing his trademarked safari garb and his jungle hat that he’s worn on David Letterman at least 100 times. His animal shows have been playing on TV since I was a kid and I was thrilled to talk to him about my adventures around the...
One of the biggest hurdles for inexperienced travelers is the concept of foreign money. In the USA, our culture is so ethnocentric that when we see currency that isn’t green and doesn’t have a famous historical figure that we know and love, we just don’t see the value of it. The only time we see money that is a different color or size than what we...
Imagine a place where most people don’t use the Internet; A country where ATMs don’t accept your credit cards; A destination where everyone uses money that’s different than the money you’re using. Welcome to Cuba! At this moment, I’m relaxing after a long day of walking around Havana and it’s amazing and frustrating, beautiful and not-so-beautiful all at the same...
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I was picking up my bags in the Santiago, Chile airport when I first heard the news. The terminal was buzzing about a big celebrity who was going to be flying in at any moment. The celebrity was Ricky Martin. I had heard of Ricky Martin from seeing his posters around Latin America,but this was before he became an icon in the US. I wasn’t exactly sure what he...
I performed as a professional clown for 25 years at the height of clown popularity, way back in the caveman days before people started calling clowns “creepy” and associating them with Pennywise from “It”. My character Yummy the clown had a big following as well as a T-shirts and a website with a funny bio. Yummy the...
It was in a jungle lodge in the middle of Queensland, Australia when my life changed forever. The trickle of electricity allocated for the night had expired, the darkness was impenetrable and there was not much to do except go to sleep or talk to the other backpacker who was sharing my hut. We rambled on about our adventures, although I...
Myanmar used to be a dirty word in the travel business. Until two years ago, travel to the western neighbor of Thailand was strongly discouraged by most countries as well as the government of Myanmar itself. The regime has been accused of human violation rights and one of the worst repressive governments through modern history. The good news is that things are...