The boyish voice of a Myanmar rapper crooned out of the car radio as the car jumped and jangled down the road. The taxi’s control panel for the radio flashed a psychedelic, rhythmic pattern of colors on the ring around the dial, the flashing lights alternated in rapid fire as I wondered if the near constant bumps and thumps were potholes on the road, or rather the base pumping out of the speakers near my head.
I glanced over at my young taxi driver, watched as his thumbs tapped the steering …

And so it is that I prep once again to leave the United States. My bags are slumped beside me, a crisply new book (Gun, Germs, and Steel) in my backpack waiting for my endless airport layovers and my anal-retentively neat morning checklist ready to see me on my way with all my power cords, bags, books, toothbrush and water bottles in tow.
Can I just say, I’m seriously psyched.
It’s hard to describe how right this feels. You’d think that leaving is old-hat now, I’ve done my fair-share of goodbyes over …

My recent whirlwind tour of the US with my job at Geeks Without Bounds gave me pause recently when I thought about all I have learned in the past six weeks. I marvel at the fact that I had never even heard of hacker and maker spaces less than six weeks ago and now I have visited 13 of these alternative communities in 11differenct US cities.
Hacker and maker spaces are pockets of intense community and they share a common interest, normally in the realm of technology and computers. And though …

Travel Memories Monday:
A Faceless Anonymity

The stunning anonymity of this giant face in Florence, Italy’s Boboli Gardens strikes me even today – a year later and only in a photo this time around. This is one of the few pieces of art that I’m inexplicably drawn to – I’m not an art buff in the least but I turned a corner after well over an hour of just puttering through massive hedged gardens and there it was.
Bizarre.
Huge.
Beautiful.
A strong stone face with pearlized green streaks running through the cracks. If I could …

One full hour after starting our project we finally had the first layer of concrete blocks nestled next to each other, absolutely perfectly level and arranged in a large rectangular shape. Mitul and Grace, also volunteers from the Pop Wuj language school in Guatemala, carefully scrapped at the wet red clay while I was nearby hefting up each and every concrete block into tubs of pond water, allowing each block to soak for 10 minutes before taking it to Mitul and Grace. These concrete blocks were the first step toward …

Two years ago, nearly to the month, I stumbled across a blog that, quite literally, changed my life.
They dubbed themselves “The Lost Girls” and they were three women who quit their jobs in NYC to travel around the world together for an entire year…and what’s more, they documented the entire trip on their blog several years before other women travel bloggers were doing the same.
It was revolutionary to me. Women could do this? Like actually take off from the US for a whole year to travel?
Their blog came at precisely …

It’s the peat. Ireland just has this certain something that makes the country feel incredibly unique; a something that I couldn’t quite identify for the first three weeks I spent in the country.
I’ve concluded that if Leprechauns, fairies and the such exist, then surely they all congregate in Ireland’s “Wild West.” From Galway City I drove through hours of brown-speckled hills weakly lit with the few and tiny bits of sunshine able to wrestle from behind gray rain clouds and drove into the heart Connemara.
And just for the record, …

The is the first guest post on A Little Adrift and it couldn’t be a better way kick it off. Dave and Deb, perhaps better known as ThePlanetD.com, have a lot of respect heaped their way from me for their biking adventure across the length of Africa in the Tour d’Afrique. They haven’t stopped there and have taken part in adventure travels all over the globe and are only going to add to those adventures next month as they leave Canada and their day jobs behind and plan to travel …