$hopping on the cheap

St. Josep food market off of La Rambla in Barcelona

I'm all about traveling on a budget. But sometimes it's nice to splurge on a little something for yourself — and there's a lot to be said for the therapeutic value of retail therapy.

You all know what I'm talking about.

Click here to read more about my suggestions of how to shop on the cheap across the pond — my latest contribution to GoJaneNews.com.

Hope you like it!

Branching out

Regent Street in London

I'm branching out! You're looking at — well reading the words of — the newest travel writer for GoJaneNews.com.

Don't worry, Bitten is going strong and I have no plans of slowing my pace here. I love it here. But a girl's gotta get her name out there! So do me a favor and check out my latest piece on Girlfriend Getaways (along with my very own photos). And don't be shy ... let me know what you think.

More to come soon!

Regarding the compromise

Alas, my honey decided that he can't financially justify my planned trip to Ireland.

Yes, I'm disappointed, but such is the life of someone bitten by the travel bug. You can't expect others to fully understand or be able to comply with your craziness, passion, however you want to put it.

Because of my own strapped wallet, I have had to scrap my original plan to see the Irish countryside and instead will be venturing solo to good ol' London in April. Different, yes, but nevertheless exciting, especially since I'll have the opportunity to see and catch up with old friends.

As a traveler, you have to be willing to not only compromise to accommodate the itineraries and interests of others, but you also have to be willing and flexible enough to accommodate unexpected changes that are inevitably going to happen to your own itinerary, no matter how well planned it might be.

My Ireland trip is not canceled — simply postponed indefinitely at the moment. I will go and see the Irish countryside and it will be lovely. Just not this May. And I'm OK with that.

A traveler's compromise

I like to travel. I think we've adequately established that. I spend most of my free time thinking of my next trip, whether it's a weekend trip up to Westchester or a trip across the Atlantic. Planning trips, perfecting itineraries and discovering deals to places I never even thought of visiting until right that moment makes me happy. It's my go-to when I'm particularly anxious or stressed out.

My boyfriend, the wonderful and lovely man that he is, is not in any way whatsoever passionate about travel. Sure, he'll do it (a lot of the time to oblige my travel bug) but he doesn't get excited by it. I'm not even saying to the degree that I do — he's just not all that into it.

Me and my travel buddy, Sheila, showcasing our
"I've seen Mt. Everest" certificates

When we started our relationship a bit more than one (very wonderful, mind you) year ago, we discussed that while he would NEVER want to join me on a trip to, say, India or Southeast Asia, he also would never stop me from going. Lucky for me I have a friend who's a particularly good traveling buddy who's just as crazy as I am about the whole thing. She currently is spending several months trekking through South America. Yes, I'm incredibly jealous.

Anyway, the fact that my man doesn't want to travel to some more out of the ordinary places is OK. I'm just as happy exploring the beauty of Europe and maybe, just maybe, Japan and/or Australia one day. Oh, if only things were that easy.

If you're a travel nut, like me, you know that no matter how dire financial straits might be, you find a way to make it work. (I've even outlined in an earlier post some of the ways that I, personally, am able to travel as much as I do, to the amazement of many of my more well-off friends.) If you're not a travel nut, like my boyfriend, then justifying spending $2,000 on one week of schlepping around Ireland doesn't really sound all that appealing — he'd much rather take that money and spend it on comic books. As he very astutely phrased it, that's where the two of us differ most greatly in our personalities: he would rather spend his money on tangible assets, whereas I am much happier spending it on experiences. 

And therein lies the rub.

Relaxing after snorkeling in Grand Cayman

Another issue is that I am a very active traveler. My philosophy is that if I already spent that much of my hard-earned and not-so-easy-to-come-by money to get to a place, I might as well take full advantage of it and see as much as possible. My boyfriend, like many normal people, prefers to actually relax on his vacations. Perhaps that's why he was less combative about our trip to Grand Cayman than he's being about my very jam-packed itinerary for Ireland.

Luckily, we both love each other enough to compromise, which I hear is what a successful relationship is all about. He has agreed to — perhaps begrudgingly, but I choose to ignore that — go on my trip to Ireland; I have agreed to go to as many book stores as he wants to visit while we're there.

In the future, I'll just have to either plan my vacations with my man locally and around certain comic conventions (see Weekend Getaways: Chicago and Philadelphia), or I'll have to capitalize on his love of boats and plan many more cruise vacations. Not a problem, considering I also enjoy cruises.

It's all about compromise.

Have any tips on how to get some more unwilling parties to comply with your traveling needs?

Finding your own way to get lost

The rush of adrenaline hits your senses. The anticipation of the possibility of discovering something you’ve never seen before, mixed with the anxiety of not knowing what lays around the corner creates a unique rush.

But getting lost while traveling is something that, ironically, requires planning ... and an awareness and concern for your own safety.

The New York Times’ former “Frugal Traveler,” Matt Gross, a few months ago launched a new series dubbed “Getting Lost.” Gross chronicles his attempts to get lost while traveling. His first stop was Morocco, second was Ireland.

“I’ve lately been wondering, how does it feel truly not to know where you are? Are the guidebooks, GPS devices and Internet forums pointing us in the wrong direction? In our efforts to figure out where we’re going, have we lost something more important?

“Hence this new series, ‘Getting Lost,’ in which every few months I will try to lose my way all over the globe, from developing-world megalopolises to European capitals, from American sprawl to Asian archipelagos. (For the moment, I’ll avoid deep wilderness and deserts; I want to survive.) It’s a challenge that requires special preparation — that is, nonpreparation. In the past, I’ve researched destinations to death, zooming deep into Google Maps and uncovering unusual restaurants in the darkest corners of the Web. Now I am avoiding maps. I am shying away from Chowhound and Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum; I will not ask my Facebook friends who they know in Moscow or Addis Ababa.

“I am, in short, trying to break free of the constraints of modern travel, of a culture in which every minute is rigorously planned, and we grade destinations based on how they live up to our expectations. I want to have no expectations. I plan to show up with neither hotel reservation nor guidebook; instead of devising my own itinerary, I will let the place itself guide me, and in doing so, I will, I hope, find myself caught up in moments I never could have imagined,” Gross writes.

Sure it sounds glamorous and exciting — coming to a place without any plans in hand. Aimlessly exploring your surroundings and stumbling upon hidden gems. Yeah it’s great, if the NY Times is paying you big bucks to write about it.

But what about for all of us other travelers who aren’t getting big paychecks to travel. Who simply do it because we love it and who don’t have the kind of cash to throw down for a flight at the last minute or a hotel room that will cost double or triple because we didn’t have a reservation.

Prague was beautiful at the turn of any and every corner

I’m not saying that it’s necessary to plan out every detail of your itinerary. Some of my best travel experiences came by wandering around and letting my instincts guide which way I turned at the next corner. Wandering rather aimlessly through the streets of Prague allowed me to see much more of that beautiful city than I would have had I stuck to the main streets and mapped out every step.

However, that was Prague; not Morocco. Depending on where you’re traveling, safety becomes a greater concern. Well, safety’s always a concern, especially for a female solo traveler, but walking around, say, London after sunset is far less dangerous (depending on what neighborhood you’re in, of course) than generally wandering around Morocco by yourself at night. That sentiment also was expressed in a response letter to Gross’ first “Getting Lost” column.

“In ‘Lost in Tangier,’ Matt Gross romanticizes ‘getting lost’ in Tangier’s medina. He makes the journey seem eminently doable for a solo traveler. He fails to mention that this may be much more difficult for a woman traveling alone. I lived in Morocco for eight months on a Fulbright grant, and traveled quite a bit around the country. In Tangier, like many cities I visited in Morocco, it was not advisable to be out alone at night if you were not a male or accompanied by one. Come-ons aloud and whispered, being followed in cars, the occasional grab: none of these are much fun. Matt Gross, as a man traveling alone, perhaps did not think about any of this as none of it happened to him, or perhaps he did not think to ask any of the women he met,” writes Alma Rachel Heckman of Los Angeles.

Though it's a very famous Dublin landmark, my friends and I
found Temple Bar by simply wandering the street

In his second installment of “Getting Lost,” Gross writes about driving around Ireland. One aspect of his solo travel that he focuses on is the loneliness of it. As a seasoned traveler, Gross has developed exceptional friend-making skills. I have those as well. It’s that inner thing that lets you strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you on the plane, or the bus, or at the bar. That need to connect with another traveler and share your experience with someone as excited to be there as you are.

But there is something to be said about traveling alone. Not being responsible to anyone else or having to go discover something you don’t really care about because the person you’re with wants to see it. But I wrote about that already ...

Getting back to getting lost: “Maybe I was just grazing the surface of Ireland, failing to penetrate to its core, but when the surface is as raw and gorgeous as it is in Kerry, and when you never know when you’ll stumble on a Martine’s or the Calvinists, and when, despite everything that’s happened before, good and bad, you trust the road to take you where it will, sometimes the surface suffices,” Gross writes in “Lost in Ireland.”

Yes, I’m sure that grazing the surface of a country as beautiful as Ireland can be more than enough for someone who can afford to go back time after time. But for someone like me, who needs to take full advantage of every travel opportunity (both due to time and monetary concerns), just grazing the surface often is not enough. Who knows how many more times I’ll be able to go back to a place like Egypt or India, if ever again. For my own, personal travel satisfaction — to alleviate that damn bite as much as possible until it starts itching again — I need to plan out a way to see as much of a city, country and/or continent as I can.

Even Gross, who is trying to get lost on his travels, tacks on to the end of his piece this: “Even if you’re trying to get lost, it’s OK to have some touchstones. And don’t worry, just because you have these addresses doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to find.”

In the end, getting lost in a city can be a blast. You can discover hidden gems that may not be on that map your eyes are glued to otherwise. But remember that your safety comes first. And planning, even if it’s just a basic skeleton of an itinerary, is not necessarily a bad thing. Often, it’s what makes a trip the most worthwhile.