Category Archives: Tips/Suggestions

Customary Greetings

05 Thursday Feb 2015

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A fear of many when traveling concerns how to a great someone when in a foreign country, what are the customary greetings regarding someone you are just meetings, someone you know relatively well, or family members. The greeting changes from country to country so if you plan to travel, or do so frequently, so you aren’t uncomfortable get to know the most common customary greetings. I’m most comfortable with what takes place in Canada, France and Mexico, and somewhat with the USA, so I’ll stick to those countries’ customs. Continue reading →

Preparing your year of vacationing

10 Saturday Nov 2012

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If you’ve decided you want to have a more nomadic lifestyle, and spend most of your time during the year on the road, then you better be organized. You’ll be exchanging your past allotted work time for “getting-organized-to-travel” time. There’s a lot involved to set up accommodations, transportation and what to see and do for a full year. Here’s some tools to help you out: Continue reading →

Vacation Ownership Options

02 Friday Nov 2012

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I’ve long been frustrated by the vacation ownership, by its expense and inefficiencies. “Owning your vacations can consist of having a second full-ownership home, like a cabin at the lake or a condo in Mexico.  Or it can involve timeshare or “fractional”, as it seems to be more politically correct to say these days. There’s also destination clubs (usually more the quite affluent) and owning a condo/hotel unit (the rent it while you are not using it. The all have their advantages, but they certainly have their disadvantages as well. Unfortunately you here all about the advantages up front, and only the disadvantages once you’ve owned it for awhile. Continue reading →

Worldwide Cellphone Service

24 Wednesday Oct 2012

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We’ve been trying to work out a cheap, or at least a non-expensive way we can have mobile telephone service throughout the primary countries  in which we travel. With Mexico being our base up until now, we’ve used the service of Telcel (part of TelMex), which is basically a monopoly and why Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world. We pay about $90 dollars a monthfor our basic iPhone service. Where is really gets expensive is if we want to use the phone outside of Mexico. If we tap into using roaming, it is extremely expensive. Telcel offers international packages that you can buy prior to leaving Mexico, of 10, 20 of 50 minutes, but this also is very expensive. And worse, they don’t have an easy way for you to find out what your balance of time is. If you go over your limit, you are basically back to paying full roaming fees. So using Telcel for our service is certainly not optimum. Continue reading →

Nomads now (sort of…)

07 Sunday Oct 2012

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We have moved into a new period in our lives. It’s been in process for some time, but recently has been sped up because of our need to be in Europe more for family reasons and because of the recent sale of a property we have in Vallarta. We are down to one “home” now, a home that we actually own, however it is located in a place where we don’t expect to be for more than 4-6 months of the year. For the rest of the year, we’ll be renting (and visiting relatives!). (Update 4/4/13) Continue reading →

Some Vacation Photo Taking Tips

04 Monday Jun 2012

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  1. Pack as light as possible. Do you really need to be packing the latest Nikon SLR with five lenses around with you? How good are your photos really going to be, or, how much better than a $300 camera that if you lose it or its stolen, its not a problem?
  2. Back up, Back up, Back up. Don’t delete the photos on your camera; that a back-up. Back-up every night to your computer, that’s a back-up. Be on iCloud so you can sync and have your photos also on your computer back home, and in the cloud.
  3. If you have an iPhone, try out the Aps HDR Pro and DMD. With regards to HDR Pro, it works best with about a 50/50 distribution of light, meaning 50% is overexposed and 50% is under exposed. Works best with clouds in the sky, not blue skies. And the bigger, darker the clouds the better. Works well when you have water in front of you to bounce reflections off of, the effect you get in places like Venice. Or on lakes in the later part of the day. They are amazing. Here’s some samples of what they can do.

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  4. Avoid shooting photos during mid-day. The best light is in the morning and at sun-down (the golden hour). Don’t shoot into the sun, unless you really know what you are doing. 
  5. Use the flash to fill in light, especially to get rid of shadows on people’s faces. When shooting people in scenes, I’ll just leave the flash on.