Axelrod Get Away!

Design Your Ideal Trip, Travel with Ease, and Reclaim Your Freedom
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2548-8
Verlag: Lioncrest Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 284 Seiten

Planning a trip doesn't have to be hard, and taking that trip doesn't have to be stressful. Regardless of work commitments, family obligations, or finances, your travel dreams can become realities. Get Away! provides the confidence and step-by-step guidance you need to design a transformative travel experience, perfectly tailored to your preferences. Let expert world traveler David Axelrod equip you with the essential tools, checklists, and mindset to choose your destination with purpose, craft an airtight itinerary, book your flights with finesse, and kick pre-trip anxiety to the airport curb. Learn how to maximize your travel time and savor all the wonders you set out in search of and more. Return home invigorated, with clarity, perspective, and enduring memories. Don't waste any more time planning a trip that doesn't pan out or postponing taking one at all. Get Away! is your ultimate ticket to the world. Read it, and any travel experience you desire can be yours.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Axelrod, David

Leseproben

Introduction When I dropped out of law school six weeks into my first semester, I didn’t have a clue what I would do next. I have nothing against the legal profession. I just don’t belong in it. So I made it my mission to reclaim my freedom and become who I’ve always been: an inimitable creative devoted to travel. I’ve always been a traveler. The bug bit early, thanks to my wander-­loving parents. When I first visited Hong Kong, it was still a British colony. I spent school breaks in Kenya, Morocco, and Vietnam and teenage summers on homestays in Cuba and Chile. I saw Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall of China before I graduated college. I have now visited over fifty countries and all seven continents for leisure and on assignment as a travel writer and photographer. I’ve covered everything from the bizarre extravagance of Dubai to the charming quagmire that is Newfoundland. On my favorite gig as an adventure documentarian, a major paint conglomerate made me their social media spokesman and tasked me with inventing an original paint palette. (Long story short, you can now buy a five-­gallon bucket of Mermaid Tears at Home Depot.) I’ve always been a storyteller. Travel nurtured the knack. Without sharing true stories about my adventures (and misadventures), I felt lonely and frustrated. I wanted friends to understand not just that I went somewhere but that going there broadened my perspective. If I could show them how, I could broaden their perspective by proxy.
Stories turned my travel experiences into gifts that I could give to others, rather than hoarding for myself. Telling them now feels even better than living them. I’ve always been an optimist. I named my travel brand 2STRAWS because the metaphor represents everything I love about exploration and life itself—the drinking-­in and sharing of all the beauty and wonder that earth has to offer. Two straws (100 percent compostable) stand tall, in a delectable but not-­too-­sugary beverage, for the good life we all deserve. Go on, have a sip. I have reclaimed my freedom, but I won’t be satisfied until you reclaim yours, too. You had it as a child, but like water, it’s hard to hold. Society did its societal thing to you and dried up the freedom well. Not to fret. We are on the precipice of a travel renaissance, and I refuse to leap into enlightenment alone. I’m passing on my travel enthusiasm, knowledge, and narratives in hopes of showing you the rich variety of experiences available to you and convincing you of travel’s transformative power. The book in your hands is the gift I’ve always wanted to give. My greatest wish is that I can keep one reader from succumbing to fear, guide one seeker down the path of experiential education, or give one person who feels trapped the key to unlock their cuffs. Sound Familiar? You wish you traveled more, but there are too many obstacles in the way. You’re inspired to pursue a new adventure but don’t. You want to be there, but you don’t want to get there. Sadly, you can’t teleport. Your funds are limited. Your job grants you only a few weeks of vacation time every year. How could you possibly guarantee a favorable return on your travel investment? The stress of just thinking about planning a bucket-­list trip—let alone actually planning it—is dizzying. You don’t even have a real bucket list, just an amorphous collection of unfulfilled dreams, “hot” destinations, trendy beaches and hotels. It’s going to take forever to figure it all out, and there are so many options to sift through and compare—who has the time? It would be so much easier to stay home. Factor in the unhealed scar of your previous travel disaster story (everybody’s got one), and it becomes even harder to justify the expenditure. Booking tickets, packing, navigating airports, flying with Rona residue on every seat—why bother? The entire travel industry seems to be conspiring to trick you into spending more, trap you in binding agreements, penalize you for breaking them, and herd you like cattle toward a tour, town, terminal, seat, station, or situation you never wanted anything to do with. And then your tectonic plates start to shift. The seed of inspiration awakens a fluttering desire inside of you. In your mind, the place becomes a panacea to all of your woes. You dive into light research. Perhaps you get serious and buy a guidebook. You browse geotags on Instagram, saving lists of the best restaurants, activities, and photo spots. More inspiration! Right on cue, doubt and anxiety enter stage left. How will you get there? How will you afford it? Who will you go with? How will you tell your boss? Coronavirus! Pushing through the overwhelm, you search for flights, trying to gauge the financial burden. Are you looking in the wrong place? Are you missing out on better deals? Do the dates you’re searching for even work for you? Is this feasible? You buy the cheapest tickets you can. Flying from NYC to Madrid, you just signed up for an eight-­hour layover in Istanbul to save fifty bucks. As you attempt to plan your dream trip, delusions of grandeur cloud your vision. You throw practical considerations to the curb. You have no method, only a madness to escape. Instead of figuring out where you’ll sleep on the third night of your trip, you book a camel ride. Hurried and incomplete planning poisons your trip. After three brutal flights, you skid into your destination, filthy, hungry, and tired. Factor in the jet lag, and it will take four days for you to feel like yourself again. By then, your trip will be halfway over. Unanticipated costs and delays mount. You want a new scarf but buy a Buddha statue. You think it will validate your budding mindfulness practice. It doubles the weight of your daypack. No worries. You’re learning how to relinquish attachment. That’s what travel is about. Now utterly unattached to the outcome of your trip, you discard all discipline and rationality. Apathy and recklessness reign. On your last night, toasting to the good life, you stay out late to “live it up.” Your nine-­hour flight home (the first of three) gives you about as much legroom as the back seat of a coupe. Norwegian Air is serving pasty roly-­polies in a tin tray. They claim it’s gnocchi. Water? That’ll be six dollars. You don’t take the trip; the trip takes you. You pay the price in disappointment and a sad confession: the reality of the place didn’t live up to the picture you had of it. It wasn’t your fault, though. At least you have some photos to prove you were there. They’re blurry and crooked, but you have a new profile pic in there somewhere. When your friends ask you, “How was your trip?” you recite your polite but convenient lie, “Good!” Scarred by the disaster of the whole debacle and embarrassed by your own folly, you don’t travel again for years. Congratulations, you will never take one of those trips again. The Premise In partnership with the US Travel Association, the Harvard Business Review surveyed 5,461 adult Americans working more than thirty-­five hours per week to demystify what makes a successful travel experience. The study concluded that “one of the key predictors of vacation ROI is the amount of stress caused by not planning ahead.” There will always be elements of traveling that cannot be predicted. But the real disasters are the preventable ones—missed connections due to faulty planning, underestimations of how long the ride will take, overestimations of what’s included in the tour package, terrible sequencing of events, and utter lack of purpose. Travel planning is like financial planning, but the primary goal is maximizing your time, not your money. With expert planning, you can maximize both. You can travel with confidence and ease. You don’t have to fly by the seat of your pants. You just need to learn how to do it—what to hunt for, what to watch for, and how to reap the dividends of the time, money, and energy you invest. A well-­planned trip will never go out of style. It integrates into, rather than interrupts, your life. The destination and details may change year to year, but you’ll always have to make the same fundamental decisions: Where are you going? Why are you going? Who are you going with? When’s the trip? What’s the budget? How will you get there? How will you get around once you’re there? Where will you eat and sleep? Why will the trip be unforgettable? It sounds simple enough at this macro level. It’s when hundreds of microscopic decisions start stacking up that would-­be travelers become discouraged and quit. Not on my watch. The Promise This book will simplify the travel process and reframe trip planning as a pleasurable enterprise with enormous, everlasting rewards. You will learn how to answer the hardest but most crucial question: Why do you want to travel? Only after you have identified your trip’s purpose will you begin to plan it. You’ll learn how to design an airtight itinerary that safeguards your travel investment and precludes post-­trip regret. You’ll extract at least as much joy in designing it as you do in taking it. You’ll learn that a little extra effort goes a long way. You’ll...