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Wellness Wednesday for December 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I used to enjoy traveling A LOT before corona. Had a couple very long duration scarcely planned backpacking/hitchhiking trips far from home and by far the best things I have ever done in my life. Corona restrictions and later "life" got in the way a bit but I want to start again. I had some nice niche sources especially for Latin America for finding interesting places and events which aren't too touristy, or simply people who have interesting travel blogs/vlogs and can inspire (like the legendary Honda c90 world travelling guy or Bald and Bankrupt etc). Now I am struggling to find anything like that for Europe and Middle East.

Google became hot garbage for this and YouTube not much better either. Anything I come across is very commercialized and highly edited. But I know for sure there must be still blogs or youtubers or books or forums out there for people like me. Any tips??

I have done tons of month+ long trips through Europe, and the best resources for me have been:

Rick Steves books

Historical knowledge about eg. the salt trade or rome or moorish spain

traditional pilgrimage roads

Google maps images for particular locations.

Seeing cool stuff out the window of a train or plane and going back to see it in detail.

Finally: Just checking what is easy, direct, and cheap for point to point travel.

As an example: I knew I wanted to tour around southern spain 'cause of the history, see the mosque cathedral at Cordoba for example. I read the rick steve books about interesting shit and added some to my list, then I used google maps to check out parks/points of interest near where I was staying, and found as an example the Torcal de Antequera (a really cool mountain park near a really cool town) and the Cueva de la Pileta (one of the only caves with stone age cave paintings you can still actually visit). Then I find the cheapest flights in and out, and use those to pick my start and end destinations.

Likewise, the trip before I flew into Budapest to see the the city, saw that I could easily get to Zagreb to see that city, Saw that plitvice should be a natural wonder of the world and is quick to reach from zagreb, saw that the Skocjan caves were close to Plitvice, saw that I could catch a quick train from skocjan to Ljubljana and then to lake bled and from their to Vienna to see the city and fly home.

The Train ride to Vienna was so spectacular, I did another trip this year to see the alps, and decided to tour around various towns and large cities associated with the salt trade (Salzburg, Innsbruck, Munich, Garmisch, Reutte, etc.); which was also amazing. Bavarians are super catholic, super nice, and have incredible beer and sausages. Strong recommend.

So, shit like that. Alternately, I just pick a traditional pilgrimage road and do sections of that.