A Month In Venice

Well I am finally back to writing my travel blog after traveling this week to West Palm Beach, Florida. Being away without a computer was a big step for me as I love to carry my laptop with me at all times so that if the inspiration should hit me I could put together the killer travel article.

However being away had me thinking that many novice travelers do not know how easy it is to set up a mobile office. I mean in this world you can work from anywhere and others are starting to prove this point. One of the initial reasons I went into software development as a career was because I would not be limited to where I worked. I will try to give you a brief outline of the steps necessary in order to free yourself from  your home and become truly mobile.

The first and most important step is to create a free email account on one of the major providers such as Yahoo, Google or Hotmail. In fact with many of these services it is very easy to set up multiple accounts.

The second step would be to set up a portable fax service. For this I would recommend using JFAX. JFAX will allow you to send and receive faxes from your computer. A fax service is necessary with many legal correspondences so it is always good to have a fax number handy when relocating overseas for any particular time period.

The third step would be to set up a forwarding postal address. To do this I would recommend you set up an account with one of the major providers in the United States that provide mail forward services such as the UPS store or a similar store in your area. Usually these stores will allow you to rent a box from them for a fee and then charge each month that you wish to have your mail forwarded.

The fourth step would be to set up a worldwide phone number so that you can be reached anywhere from one number. This is now possible through the VOIP services such as Vonage, Net2Phone and pc2call which allow you to make phone calls through a high speed internet connection. Since I have already discussed the difficulties in obtaining Internet access in Italy I will not bore you by explaining the problems that can occur with this particular aspect of moving overseas.

So there you have it a step by step guide to going mobile so that you can travel anywhere at anytime without really losing touch with any important contacts or friends. It is always interesting how technology has really enabled us to become independent of any one particular location.

Do you have any tips on how to live a truly mobile lifestyle?

It is always advisable to plan far ahead in order to save money when booking flights, hotels and car rentals. That is just common sense and how the industry is organized. However there are times when you need to leave at the last moment due to family illness, job responsibilities or you just want to get away for the weekend. I have stated previously on how to save money with airfaredig and using other websites. However I found yet another website to help you save some money. It is called lastminute.com believe it or not and this website specializes in finding deals on packages made at the last minute, hence the name.

Hopefully with these websites such as airfaredig.com and lastminute.com you can save some serious money on a last minute trip.

One of the best ways to avoid the dreaded homesickness that you eventually get when you are on an extended stay is to stay in touch with close family members and friends. However Europe and Italy are well known to be very expensive when it comes to obtaining internet access. I remember when I was in Rome having to sit in the lobby of the hotel to surf on my PDA because I could not get a wifi signal in my room. This is not the case in most modern hotels in the United States.

It is very common to have either wifi or direct internet access through a port in the wall. You want to have access to high speed internet connections while you are away because not only will this save you money on phone bills but also allow you to continue to work while you are away. I am sure I am not the only one who has a business to run regardless of where I am at in this world.

Well fortunately I have some a really good resource out there if you want to have a free wifi connection while you are in Italy or Europe. The only website I would recommend would be jtwire.com. This neat little website keeps track of all of the hotspots in the entire world so you can use this to find wifi spots while traveling within the United States as well. A quick look will tell you if the wifi spot is free or not and since this lists the location by type you can see if your hotel is wifi enabled or if there is one close by you.

I am sure many of my readers are fully aware that priceline.com can offer huge savings for the buget traveler. However many are not fully aware of how to properly utilize this website in order to get the cheapest price that priceline.com will accept. Well it turns out there is another website called biddingfortravel.com whose sole purpose is to promote informed bidding using priceline.com travel deals.

So in order to get the best deal with priceline.com it would be advantageous to first check biddingfortravel.com to see what was the lowest accepted offer for a particular state or country. I will say that it would be a really great idea to make sure that you first familiarize yourself with biddingfortravel.com and priceline.com terms and conditions before attempting to make any bid.

Using both websites is a great way to potentially save some serious money on your next flight or hotel or even car rental for that matter. Hopefully this might just save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars over time.

Okay I have now just started to monetize my blog. Even though I have only a  few posts I believe it is never too late to start getting some sort of return on investment. The first thing I did was insert the buy me a coffee plugin by Ankesh Kothari. Actually it is a buy me a beer plugin but since I do not drink at the moment I made it into a buy me a espresso plugin. The primary reason for doing this was to see how many people would help contribute to my trip to Venice, Italy so that I can immerse myself in the culture and learn the language.

So the question is how many cups of espresso will it take for me to go to Venice, Italy? Well at this time I am budgeting a trip cost of $7000.00 dollars so at 5.25 per cup of espresso so that is roughly 1333 cups of espresso. So either I will be extremely wired if I take all that coffee or I can have a trip to Venice. I would rather have the trip to Italy so if you do contribute rest assured that is where the money is going.

Anyways I hope to write some killer content down in the future to justify this plugin.