A Banner Year

Crazy as it may seem, we’re still actively working on posts and photos from the parts of our trip we didn’t get a chance to blog about from the road, and we still want to write some closing thoughts on what it was like traveling around the world for an entire year. Blog entries and photos from Patagonia will be up this week, but in the mean time, we wanted to collect and share all of the banner photos we created and used at the top of this website throughout the year. When we started our trip, our goal was to create a new banner photo for each country we visited. We didn’t quite manage that – noticeably absent are banners from Thailand, Jordan, Israel, and Spain – but we came pretty close to having a banner for each country. The new Banners page captures all of the images we created and makes for a concise overview of our year on the road. Enjoy!

Pano-palooza!

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I thought it might be fun to share some of the panoramic photographs I’ve stitched together over the last seven months. Adobe Photoshop’s Photomerge feature makes this incredibly easy; it hurts my brain thinking about how they automatically match up the photos, align and skew them to fit together, do color correction and white balancing, and all that fancy stuff. However they do it, some of resulting photos are pretty cool. Enjoy!

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The First 100(ish) Days – LM Edition

I began writing this entry (when it was supposed to be our “three month update”) over a month and a half ago, back before I started having daily conversations with my husband about the status of our bowels. That is to say, back when this was a different kind of trip. The trip we are on now, on day #117, is not the same one we were on back then. Not better or worse, just different.

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The First 100(ish) Days – DF Edition

Now that Laura and I have been traveling for almost four months (which is hard for us to believe!), we thought it might be interesting to write a bit about how we’re doing living life on the road — the joys, the challenges, the surprises, and what we may have learned about ourselves and each other. We each have a somewhat different perspective on the trip so far (obviously), so we decided it would be best to subject you to not one, but two “state of the traveling union” blog posts. We flipped a coin, and I won (or lost, I can’t remember), so I’m first up.

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Follow That Blog!

Now that we’ve been at this travel blogging thing for a couple of months, it occurs to me that many of you are probably still checking the blog manually (daily, of course) to see what’s been posted. This works just fine if you’re only checking the Travel Log page, but there are also comments being added all the time (and not always to the most recent blog post), there’s the upcoming Books journal page (available Real Soon Now™), and we’ll add other pages in the future that you might like to follow without having to scour our entire website to see what’s new. Enter RSS feeds.

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Shout-outs From the Road!

When Laura and I worked at Room to Read, one of our favorite traditions was the “shout-out”. At the end of every bi-weekly all-hands meeting, the meeting moderator would open up the floor for people to publicly thank one or more of their co-workers for going above and beyond the call of duty in some way. Usually it involved someone who spent extra time helping them with a project, or someone who took on a particularly tough or unpleasant task and finished it with a smile on their face. It was a great way for people’s extra hard work to be recognized in front of the entire San Francisco team, and it always felt good to get an “attaboy” from a co-worker every once it a while. In that same spirit, Laura and I would like to give a few shout-outs to friends and family members who have, in their own way, helped to make our trip thus far a positive, healthy, and fun experience.

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Travel Tech Talk

A recent comment by Nathan Fisher reminded me that we’re overdue for another exciting installment of Travel Tech Talk with Dustin. [Cue theme music intro] So in honor of Valentine’s Day (in the US, at least), please enjoy this very romantic and riveting geek update!

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A Quick Thank You...

… to everyone who has commented on our blog posts and pictures. We haven’t been able to respond to every comment due to really limited (and ridiculously expensive) internet time, but we absolutely love hearing from friends and family — it makes home feel a little less far away. Keep the emails and comments coming our way!

Love, Lustin

Travel Technology

Just in case you’re wondering how we’re staying connected and documenting our trip, here’s a glimpse of what world travel is like in the modern age…

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There Will Be Blog

Welcome to WanderLustin’ – the travel blog of wandering Lustin! We had every intention of launching this blog before we left home, but our seemingly insurmountable list of pre-trip to-do’s never let us get to it. So here we are, writing from an internet cafe in Auckland, New Zealand, trying to ignore the extremely loud Italian couple next to us who is Skype video chatting with some poor soul in the mother country who surely must be plugging his ears as they shout at him.

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