Chris Guillebeau's Blog, page 50

Top 5 Credit Card Signup Bonuses for Miles and Points: June 2015

Every year I earn well over one million Frequent Flyer miles and points. Although about 250,000 of them come through actual travel, the rest come through travel hacking: the art of seeing the world on a budget.

One of the easiest ways to earn a lot of miles all at once is through credit card signup bonuses. This post contains the best current card offers as of Friday, June 5th. If getting every card from this post, you’d earn more than 175,000 points or miles. Happy travels!

In this edition:...

Don’t Make a Bucket List; Make a List of 100 Dreams

OK, it’s kind of like a bucket list. But it’s a really big one! From Laura Vanderkam:

In 168 Hours, I recommended creating something called a “List of 100 Dreams.” This exercise, which was shared with me by career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine, is a completely unedited list of anything you might want to do or have more of in life. It’s like a bucket list, but most people don’t get all the way to 100 when creating a bucket list. The point is to really think about what you might like.

I also wr...

“Make Your Dream Trip a Reality”: Live Wrap-Up Tomorrow at 9am

Link: Live Broadcast (Friday at 9am Pacific)

Hey everyone! After nearly thirty lessons in our #DreamTrip course, we’re going back to Seattle tomorrow for a live finale and our final lesson.

You can join Stephanie Zito, myself, and a few audience members live at 9am PDT Friday morning and ask questions or tell us about your own Dream Trip.

This has been quite the journey with many of you. And if you haven’t seen any of the course before, don’t worry—we’ll be recapping key points and telling y...

A Traveler Who Loves Coming Home: On the Road with Megan Cain

This is a traveler case study. ( Read others or nominate yourself . )

I love finding people who are able to incorporate travel into their lives without making it their whole life. Here’s how Megan Cain has done just that.

Introduce yourself!

After college, I lived in San Francisco before packing up and moving to a rural, 100-person town in Missouri to live at an eco-village and learn how to garden. I felt a pull towards growing my own food.

My move was a leap of faith that changed my life foreve...

Waking Up at Night with Big Ideas

Long ago, right before I started this blog and began the full-time quest to “go everywhere,” I went through a six-month period of thinking about it. When I say I was thinking about it, I mean it occupied my mental world approximately 80% of the time. I was still working and going to grad school during the day, but my attention lay elsewhere.

Then, at night, I’d go to bed with a notebook on my nightstand. I kept it there because almost every night, I’d wake up feeling excited. I’d have anoth...

6 Discoveries from Near and Far: Volume XLV

I. Around the World

Things I found on long walks in foreign cities, or perhaps when someone posted them on Twitter.

The Forgotten Houseboat Hotels of Kashmir — Photographs from the lost golden era of tourism in Kashmir Historical Photos of New York City from the Public Library — Click on an interesting vintage photo, and the site shows you where it was taken on a New York City map Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling — Emilie’s new TEDx talk on becoming a multipotentialite You Don’t H...

Starwood Card Makes It Easier to Earn 25,000 Point Bonus

Link: Starwood Preferred Guest (Personal)
Link: Starwood Preferred Guest (Business)

Years before I became a full-time traveler and learned to use travel hacking to pay my way around the world, I had only a couple of credit cards. One of those cards was the Starwood Preferred Guest by American Express, and I used it religiously. Years later, I have many other cards, but I continue to use this one every day.

The card just made a big update to make it easier for people to earn the initial sign...

“Make Your Dream Trip a Reality”: Week 5 Recap (Upgrade Your Dream Trip)

Every day for six weeks, we’re teaching people how to “Make Their Dream Trip a Reality.” You can watch each lesson for free on the day it’s broadcast, or you can purchase the whole course and have access anytime.

This was our fifth week (already?!) with the in-studio audience and the thousands of people who participated online.

We’ve come so far! And we’ll be back again after the weekend for our last week where we’ll bring it all together. Here are a few photos from this week:

Goal...

What Remains in the Quest for Literary Permanence

From Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher:

I am always taken aback when students confide in me that beneath their desire to write lies a quest for permanence. It’s odd but touching, I think, that even during this disposable age, while consigning great mountains of refuse to landfills and to atolls of plastic in the Pacific, these young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and m...

“I am capable of more than I imagined”: On the Road with Elizabeth Glanzer

This is a traveler case study. ( Read others or nominate yourself . )

After experiencing many travel misadventures around the world, I love hearing other people’s “silver linings” stories. This one (and other stories, too) comes from Elizabeth Glanzer in Los Angeles.

Introduce yourself!

I’m a therapist and work with teens and young adults whofeel misunderstood and out of place. I study psychoanalysis and neuroscience every chance I get.

Traveling is one of my favorite things to do. For me, it pu...