Global Travel Made Simple

Welcome to Global Travel Section

This is the new global travel section from award-winning Canadian author A Dawn. It will focus on just about anything and everything to do with travel. As the title suggests, it aims to focus on traveling simply, as well as safely, to a range of popular destinations as well as a few which are off the beaten track. 

There is an old saying that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. And, while you understand what Robert Louis Stevenson was getting at when he said it (and what the Taoists were getting at when they said “the journey is the reward”) it is not necessarily accurate. Sure, there is a real enjoyment in the anticipation when you are traveling to somewhere you really want to go, but is the anticipation really better than the arrival and the experience when you are there? That surely depends on how artfully the holiday was sold to you. There are many of us who feel that although Stevenson and the Taoists were entitled to their opinion, the arrival and the holiday are the best bits.

Traveling is something that many of us have a real thirst for. The Germans have a word for it: wanderlust. It is a desire to journey, to explore, to experience something of the world away from your home. Not everybody has it. Some call it “itchy feet”, which seems somehow disparaging. Wanting to travel does not mean that one does not love their home – it just means that we want to visit other places too, and see how people do things in another environment. Is it better there? Not necessarily, but it is interesting, and brings a bit of variety to life. You can never have too much variety, surely?

Of course, both the journey and the holiday can sometimes fail to live up to expectations. As much as we enjoy a break from the norm, sometimes that break can come at the expense of things which we value highly or have simply come to expect. Holidays are mis-sold by people who misunderstand your requirements, or they are rated highly by someone whose taste differs from you. There are pitfalls for even the most experienced traveler because, when it comes down to it, we do not have omniscience and sometimes that “charmingly dilapidated” holiday cottage is actually just derelict. Sometimes “local character” is actually a high crime rate. But as often as not, it can just be a matter of taste.

Whatever one is looking for in a holiday, there will be countless Travel Now Simply1places that compete to offer you the ideal break for your needs. If you want to go skiing, for example, there are countless mountain ranges filled with ski resorts. Will you go to the one that is close to home? Will you go to the one with the global reputation for perfect snow and excellent après-ski? Will you go to the less-heralded, less expensive resort that is off the beaten track but has excellent write-ups wherever you look? There are a lot of choices to make.

Choices like these will be covered on this site. As the title suggests, Travel Now Simply aims to give you tips on how you can take a trip wherever you want to go, at short notice and with a minimum of extra considerations. After all, you go on holiday to relax, so you do not want to add unnecessary stress to the issue. We will feature tips on where to go, what to do while there, how to save money and how to travel safely – and much more besides. Whether you find it better to travel in hope, or to arrive, you will find plenty here to satisfy your wanderlust.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Travelnowsimply.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com site. In the future, I plan to write more travel articles on this site . This article originally published on the above website on April 27, 2009.