Last year we started a foundation, making an initial investment of $100,000 and pledging to support “Scholarships for Real Life,” a program to enable people to pursue a dream of their own while also addressing a problem that affects others. In this short series, we’ll highlight our initial grantees. *** “My life sometimes has been…
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I’ve been a fan of Shannon O’Donnell for several years. The posts on her site are always well thought out, and she’s also known for her work on international volunteering
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The story of San Francisco’s most unexpected half-marathoner. “I really don’t want too much. I just want to get up and stay healthy and enjoy this moment.” ###
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I first heard about Jedd & Michelle through a blog submission... but then I got the chance to work with them at WDS this summer. They were two of our most reliable and hard-working ambassadors (volunteers), and I loved hearing their story of serving abroad in Jamaica
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I met Pam Mandel at an event in Seattle. I was interested in how she’d made travel not just part of her life, but also part of her lifestyle. "I'm a free-range human," she said.
Read More"Do you ever see those people who sit around and bitch about something that happened 20, 30 years ago? I could have sued, but I didn’t want to bother with that ... I’m going to concentrate on getting back to nirvana"
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Back home in Seattle, I wanted different kinds of stories, problems, discoveries and connections than my 9-5 was giving me. So I quit my job and moved abroad. Three years later, I’m living in Thailand and currently planning my next move.
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Travel always seemed like the ultimate expression of my innate desire to learn and experience something new. I always knew we got biased information about global cultures, and I dreamed of cutting through that.
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This is a travel hacking case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.) From Portland to Singapore—and probably a few other places—I’ve hung out with Marv and Jo on multiple continents. They’ve been a big part of our community for many years, and have been actively traveling for most of that time. Tell us about yourselves.…
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Last week, Roger Poulin completed a journey. He became the first recorded person who is both blind and deaf to hike the entire 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail.
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This is a reader story. (Read others or tell us yours.) There’s never a good time to leave a good job, but yet people still do so. Some of them leave for a new career, and others head off on a different kind of journey. I’ve known Jon Mueller for years, beginning from an event…
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This is a travel hacking case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.) When I put out the call for travel hacking stories, I received a flood of responses. One of the first to cross my desk was from 21-year-old Hao Tran, a recent graduate. Introduce yourself. I didn’t travel internationally growing up. During the summer…
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I first met Jes way back in Minneapolis. She was one of the first readers of AONC! A couple years later, I saw her in New York with her fiancé Josh. Since then, Jes and Josh got married and took off on the road—for a year-long honeymoon paid for almost entirely with points and miles.
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When I met the young and ambitious Nate Damm in Portland, Maine (AKA "East Coast Portland") in September 2010, he told me about his plan to walk across America.
Wow. Really? The whole country?
It sounded incredible ... so incredible that I couldn't really get my head around it. At the time, I was just beginning my own cross-country journey, visiting all 50 states during the Unconventional Book Tour. I thought that trip was an adventurous one, but at least I didn't have to WALK everywhere.
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Greetings from the Atlanta airport, where I’m preparing this post before heading home after a 13-stop leg of the Unconventional Book Tour. In writing the AONC book, I wanted to highlight the stories of other people who have forged their own unconventional lives. Everyone mentioned below was included in the book, already in its fourth…
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