In Bariloche, Argentina, Annie describes a restaurtant called Tarquino: “This place was made completely out of Patagonia Cypress and resembled a hobbit house. Not only was the building made of wood, but there were very large trees that were scattered throughout the restaurant that were growing through the roof. It was a traditionally Patagonian menu. The food was delicious!” Don’t miss the chance to eat Patagonian food in a hobbit hole!

In Bangkok, Thailand, Norm warns about the gem scam, which sounds like something you definitely want to avoid. “I would hate to say that all locals are out to get you in Thailand, because they aren’t. Like in most countries, the bad ones get to you first and the good ones are only likely to run into you if you are in distress. The famous gem scam is very relevent here. Guys standing on the streets looking like pedestrians or standing in front of a tourist sight claiming that it is closed until a later time or that your clothes aren’t sufficient enough to enter are preditors waiting for prey. They then proceed to offer you a ridiculously cheap tuk tul ride to another sight as well as a thailand tourist office to get info on the city and assure you that the driver will bring you back on time to see the sight you are trying to see right now. Apparently if you accept they take you to hell and back stopping at all their buddies “gem” shops while forcing you to buy expensive colored glass that they claim to be a big score stone.”

Finally, in Barcelona, Spain, Zach and Tyler made some amusing comments about the spicy food and the sweet old lady’s house where they stayed. On food: “Know your gut. Can you handle spicy foods? If you can’t, do not try to impress your friends by trying to. You will definitely pay for it later, and you don’t want to be in the middle of a museum or tour when the food finally hits you…” On lodging: “Some Old Lady’s house. The locals sure are friendly! Too bad she didn’t have any pillows…”

What are you waiting for? Start searching, see what you find, and then get out and discover your own adventures on Everlater!

Perhaps this was a rather dramatic reaction (I also wasn’t really enjoying the Engineering school, at all) but it also seems to me that the general lack of encouragement to study abroad that exists in certain departments and colleges across the country represents a critical failure of the US higher education system. In a world that gets smaller every day, shouldn’t study abroad represent an important, if not required, element of any complete college education?

Aside from the whole global village, world-is-flat issue, in my experience there is almost no better way to learn than by traveling. Traveling requires you to make complex plans and fast decisions, think differently, and deal with unfamiliar situations.  You will often need to learn at least a little bit of a new language, try new foods, and experiment with new ways of living life.

Of course, there are ways to travel abroad to the most exotic of locations without exposing yourself to a single lesson-learning moment, and there are ways to challenge your thinking without leaving your home town. The point is simply that travel tends to present people with great potential for learning opportunities, as Gary Arndt describes in his recent article on what he learned while traveling around the world. “Three and a half years and 70 countries later,” he explains, “I’ve gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth.”

The educational value of travel should be considered as a potentially essential component of the US higher education system. In a world of increasing interconnectivity and diversity, having some experience and understanding of another culture and a different language is an important element of being able to interact with and relate to other citizens of the world.

Americans in particular could certainly use some encouragement to travel: although sources vary, the number of Americans who hold passports seems to be somewhere around 20 percent, which has almost certainly increased dramatically since the new requirement to have one to visit Mexico and Canada took effect. There are a number of reasons why Americans may travel less than others, as Gary Arndt describes:

“Americans don’t travel overseas as much as Brits, Dutch, Germans, Canadians or Scandinavians. There are some good reasons for this (big country, short vacation time) and bad ones (fear and ignorance). We don’t have a gap year culture like they have in the UK and we don’t tend to take vacations longer than a week.”

While it’s certainly true that factors like geography and employment policies are hard to change, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something about changing other factors that could increase travel. Promoting college study abroad programs would be a great way to begin shifting the American approach to travel while simultaneously improving the quality of our higher education system. Depending on the program and the college, study abroad can even be cheaper than a regular semester at school, with many of the more affordable programs offering great insight into a very different way of living.

Check out a recent study abroad trip to Spain, record your own experiences on Everlater, and share your thoughts on traveling and learning with us in the comments here or on Facebook!

All You Can Jet is designed for the traveler who thinks that red-eyes are a great chance for a good night’s sleep, that 12 hours is plenty of time to get to know what a city is like, and that the person with the most destinations wins. These are the folks who believe that they really can visit every major metropolis and most of the other interesting parts of the world before they die - they’re already halfway through the list and they’re not even 40 years old yet (maybe close, but who’s counting?) These are the true travel junkies, and these are their stories.

For Andrew Hyde, traveling all over the country with All You Can Jet is just the beginning. After that he’s going to South America, Africa, India, Nepal, SE Asia, China, Australia and New Zealand - or at least that’s the general idea. Some of you might want to point out that he’s skipping Europe entirely, but what you would have failed to recognize is that Andrew had probably already seen everything in Europe, twice, by the time he was 13.

Although in contrast to Andrew, Ben Hughes is simply sticking to the US, he has taken such a systematic approach to his itinerary that he appears to be at least as serious about travel as Andrew is. “To help pack in as much travel as possible I first collected an inventory of JetBlue routes to the west coast and back through JFK and Boston - to my knowledge JetBlue doesn’t have a published recent timetable. From there I optimized the trip based on several factors:

* Maximum red-eye flights - it’s a free night’s sleep!
* Arrange for 2 day stays over the two days I can’t fly: Friday and Sunday.
* Stay more than one day in: Seattle, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.
* Arrive in west coast cities as early as possible for a full day’s visit.
* If at all possible connect through JFK over Boston since there is wifi and I prefer T5 over Boston’s crappy Logan airport.
* I’m moving to San Diego in November so would like at least some time there to look at apartments, etc.

With these optimizations in mind I’ve come up with the following (tentative) itinerary:

To get an idea of what these trips will look like once these intrepid travelers actually complete the journey, check out Ryan Wanger’s All You Can Jet trip from last year, which received thousands of views from people interested in finding out just how exhausted he was after starting in Colorado and then jetting back and forth across the country to different cities on both coasts.

Who will jet more this year than Ryan did last year? Check out some of the other cool 2010 All You Can Jet trips on Everlater here, and here, and also here, here, and here.

Are you doing an All You Can Jet trip too? Travel blog your trip on Everlater, share it in the comments here on the blog, and post it to your friends on Facebook!

On the one hand, flight attendants do have a hard job in the sense that they often have to deal with rude and exhausted customers who don’t seem to realize that the person serving them their tiny $6 cocktail is probably pretty tired too. Steven Slater has been hailed by many in the service industry as an overnight hero, championing the cause of the beleaguered employee who has had to happily endure one too many insults at the hands of demanding and self-absorbed customers. Having worked in the service industry myself, I was able to instinctively sympathize with this perspective.

On the other hand, my Southwest attendant got a standing ovation just for reading the safety instruction manual in a funny accent. At the end of the flight, he made a joke about the amazing gentleman at the front of the plane who was about to turn 92 years old - so please, he said, wish our pilot a happy birthday on your way out. The pilot, who looked to be closer to 32 than 92, really did come out to say hello to everyone as we shuffled off the airplane, and we all grinned at both him and our funny flight attendant, thanking them profusely for an excellent flight. We had actually landed a little late, but nobody seemed to notice. We were so easy to please that for a joke and a funny accent, we were practically ready to stay on board for the next leg of the trip, wherever they were flying.

Flight attendants may not have the best job in the world, but there are certainly ways to make it fun enough that instead of getting hit over the head with carry on luggage, they get applauded. I don’t know if my funny flight attendant uses the same jokes every time, or sometimes doesn’t have the energy to joke at all, but I do know that after my trip to the Cape I’d much rather fly Southwest than JetBlue… although I definitely wish I’d gotten ahold of one of those All You Can Jet passes! Stay tuned to the blog for an All You Can Jet feature on Everlater coming soon, and happy travels!

The answer to this question probably depends a lot on where you’re going and what you want to do when you get there. For example, when I was out trekking around in Patagonia, speaking Spanish came in very handy for finding rides, getting advice on hikes and routes, and asking about where to stay and eat. I also happened to know a mountain guide who helped me climb up some pretty big volcanoes, but if I hadn’t already known him I could have asked around in Spanish to find someone else.

In contrast, when I visited my friend in Prague, I really just wanted to experience the culture, and she was the perfect tour guide for getting to know the true character of the area. As the exotically unfamiliar sound of Czech flowed past me, we went to bars and drank 25 cent liters of beer, wandered through the fields near her grandma’s house picking berries and swimming in the river, and hitched rides between castles and cities around the country. Her grandpa even made me try pickled sausage, which I politely pretended to enjoy, prompting him to offer me several more that I was unable to finish.

Generally, for trips that involve more constant travel across larger distances doing something active like trekking or riding a bike, knowing the language may be more useful, while for more cultural experiences focused on a particular city or region, knowing a local will probably provide more context. No matter where you’re going or what you’re doing, it’s always a good idea to learn at least a few key phrases - and of course, record your trip on Everlater so your friends can see what you did and plan their own trip!

Happy travels,

Beth

This is a guest post from Joel Wishkovsky, founder of Nudgems.com, fun greetings from independent artists & musicians.

The best part of traveling to Central America is that no matter where you go, you are likely to be off the beaten track.  There is so much that its quite overwhelming and a lot of people ask me for advice when making plans.  Here are the 9 places I most often recommend:

1. Playa Santa Teresa (Costa Rica): This little surfing village is only accessible by unpaved roads and offers super cool hostels, great party scene and world class surfing.  It’s a popular destination for people trying to find themselves, you are sure to meet some interesting people.
2. Parque National Corcovado (Costa Rica): This national park’s severe remoteness keeps all but the truly committed from visiting.  It is therefore one of the most beautiful places in the country.  I prefer the coastal crossing into the park because it’s more adventurous and you’ll see more animals.  Take care in finding a boat guide that does not smell like alcohol and try to leave at a time that does not have you doing river crossings at high-tide.
3. Casco Viejo by public bus(Panama City, Panama):  The vast majority of Panama City is new, cosmopolitan and well groomed.  The old town, however, has had issues with squatters and has not yet been fully renovated.  Try to lose yourself in the old streets and picture Panama city before the canal and American influence.  The best way to get there and see the rest of the city is by local bus.  You can’t miss them since they are 1960s American school buses decked out with Jesus figurines and crazy colors.  They are all privately owned and so they compete for your business.  This means they will cut each other off, speed, and otherwise jockey for your attention.  Try not to leave Panama without riding a bus.
4. Isla Cebaco (Panama): One of my favorite places in all of Central America is a tiny island with few residents, no running water and is only accessible by tiny fishing boat.  It’s a great place to spend a few days camping, fishing and surfing.  It was here, surfing on a remote beach with my friend that we decided to quit our jobs and launch a startup.  To get here, go to Playa Mariato and look for a fisherman willing to take you to the island in exchange for a tank of gasoline, be patient as they don’t use watches or care about time.
5. San Blas (Panama): This chain of 350 tiny islands is one of the world’s truly amazing places.  It is remote, inhabited by fiercely independent Kuna Indians and requires significant effort to reach.  Once you reach the eastern shores of Panama, either by a 3 hour 4×4 drive from Panama City or by small charter flight, you’ll want to hire a local to ferry you to the islands.  He’ll pick you up in the mornings, take you to snorkeling spots or to uninhabited beaches and arrange a time to pick you up.  Expect them to be grossly late whenever they say they’ll come for you, if you have flights to catch plan at least a full day of leeway.
6. Isla Ometepe (Nicaragua): One of the gems of Nicaragua are twin volcanic islands in the middle of Lake Nicaragua.  They are accessible by Ferry and there are plenty of cheap taxis on the islands to take you around.  Not many Americans make it here and therefore life is cheap, fairly authentic and the beaches are natural.  If you have some time, try to take a tour of the island’s rainforests and waterfalls by horseback.
7. Granada at dusk (Nicaragua): This Spanish colonial town is what you may expect when you think about Central America and unfortunately it is packed with tourists during the day.  Luckily most of the tour groups seem to head out of town to nearby resorts or back to the capital at nightfall.  With it’s lantern lit streets, cobblestone roads and authentic feel this is a great place to wander at dusk.  It’s still Nicaragua, so be aware of your surroundings but I felt more safe here than in any other town in Central America.
8. Amapala (Honduras): This tiny island was one of the first cities in Honduras and served as its main port for many years.  It was so prominent, that it’s unique port facilities are featured on the country’s currency.  Hardly any foreigners come here, so it’s completely authentic and extremely cheap.  They have a number of resorts on the island intended for Hondurans with beautiful black sand beaches, nightly salsa dancing and extremely cheap beer.  To make the trip, head to La Flor and negotiate space on a small cargo boat headed to the island, don’t be shy about sitting on the fishing gear or snuggling with the canned goods.  If you like off the beaten track, this is you place.
9. Comayagua (Honduras): This was the original Honduran capital.  It is a beautiful town bursting with colonial authenticity, art and culture.  Like Granada, this town offers you the ability to stroll it’s streets and imagine what life was like in colonial times. The best part is that in this town things have not changed much since those days, certainly not the pace of life.  I don’t typically endorse museums in Central America, but the history museum here has some truly awesome stories to tell about the country and is hosted in a beautiful Spanish fort.

If you’ve been to Central America, share your travel stories and photos with us your friends and family and with us at Everlater.  If you are going, we hope to follow along!

Then find the “Grab the embed code” button.

Copy and paste that code into any blog post (or any other web page), and you get a full map of your trip and a sampling of 5 photos. You can even navigate around the map and click into specific locations. Here is what my trip The Great Tagalong looks like when embedded into the latest post on my blog:

(click for a larger version)

We’d love to hear from those of you that plan to use this embeddable travel journal on your blog. Get in touch, or post a link to your blog in the comments below so we can see how it turned out! (Thanks again to super developer / intern / board gamer Zac Clark who has more fun widgets up his sleeve)

Clicking it takes you here:

If you have already connected your Facebook account with your Everlater account, just follow the instructions here: http://apps.facebook.com/everlater/ (this link might ask you to allow access to the Everlater app - you’ll of course click “Yes”!)

It’s just three steps! Your friends can click through into any of your trips to comment, see your photos, read your stories, and interact with your trip map. Props to our summer intern Zac Clark (@spyyddir) who built this (all by himself).

• Get your book, in one click
• 11×13 inch hardcover book
• Beautiful image-wrapped cover
• Up to 440 pages
• No software to download (runs in your browser without Flash)
• Fast, simple, & easy drag and drop editing (only if you want to make changes)
• Starting at just $49.99

I’ve already made a few books myself, and it’s truly the fastest, easiest way to get your own travel photobook. Upon seeing the books, my friends and family have been amazed - even captivated. Several have excitedly started describing photos they want to put in their own book!

If you already have a great trip on Everlater, your book is one click away. If you don’t, we hope that the Everlater Bookstore is a great incentive to record and share one of your recent travel experiences.

Want to know more? Check out the Everlater Bookstore video, photos of printed books, and the Bookstore FAQ.