Posted: 1/30/2020 | January 30th, 2020

A new year brings a new sense of possibility as we create new goals to help us get closer to that ideal self we have in our mind.

And one of those goals usually involves trying to travel more.

But when you are starved for time and money, travel can seem like a pipe dream. A wish that might never be fulfilled.

Luckily, there’s a wave of positive developments for those who want to travel more: cheaper airfare, more deal-finding websites (and other information) online, free walking tours in more cities, and more opportunities to bypass the traditional travel infrastructure and connect directly into the local way of life via the sharing economy.

So, as we get deeper into 2020, I want to share some suggestions on how to travel on a budget this year so you can check off that New Year’s resolution! Here are some of my top tips to help you:
 

1. Change Your Mindset

Changing your mindset might not be a traditional budget tip, but it’s important nonetheless. Action begets action and, as you think of ways to travel cheaper, it becomes a game where you try to keep finding ways to save money. The first step makes all the other steps easier.

Start with a “yes, I can” mindset. Don’t think “I can’t travel” — think “What’s one thing I can do today to make my trip closer to reality?”

Life is a mental game. Do one thing every day that gets you closer to your trip and you’ll find yourself building an unstoppable momentum.
 

2. Come Up with a Savings Plans

Unless you’re Bill Gates, we all need to save more money. But how do you do that? While life is expensive, I do believe there are always ways to save a little more. There’s always something you can cut. A little bit of savings adds up a lot over time.

Get into the habit of putting money into your travel fund regularly — even if it’s just a few dollars a week. Every little penny will help. The more you save, the more you want to save. It sort of becomes a game. It’s no longer a chore.

Here are some posts on how to save money:

• 22 Ways to Cut Your Expenses and Have Money for Travel
• The Ultimate Guide to Traveling Cheap
• How Michael Saved $14k in 6 Months Making $9 Per Hour
• How I Find the Money to Travel

3. Score a Flight Deal

One of the things that people always tell me holds them back from traveling more is the cost of flights. But, let me tell you, we live in an age of cheap airfare.

If you can be flexible with your plans, there are always deals. Sure, maybe you can’t take advantage of that sale to Europe next week, but you can still find a date and a destination that work for you at a great price if you’re flexible about one or both factors.

I like to use Google Flights. I type in my home city and then “everywhere” and see what the cheapest results are. I then base my plans around where I can fly to for the least amount of money.

However, if you don’t want to do that (I think it’s a perfect Friday night activity), you can check out some of the following websites that search for deals and email them to you:

• Scott’s Cheap Flights – The best website for finding flight deals from the US
• The Flight Deal – Incredible deals for flights all around the world
• Secret Flying – Another site with amazing flight deals from around the globe (they find a lot of Asia/Africa/South America deals not found elsewhere)

4. Get Points!

Travel hacking, the art of collecting points and miles, is a great way to save money. By getting point-yielding credit cards and using a few ninja techniques, you can get hundreds of thousands of miles without spending any extra money, thus getting you free flights, free accommodation, and added cash back. It’s what all serious travelers do. There’s no excuse not to do it! I mean you’re spending the money anyway, so you might as well get some treats for it. Here are some resources to help you begin:

• How I Earn 1 Million Frequent Flier Miles Every Year
• The Ultimate Guide to Picking the Best Travel Credit Card
• The Ultimate Guide to Travel Hacking

Even if you aren’t American, you still have options, as points and miles have gone global:

• Points Hack (Australia/New Zealand)
• Head for Points (UK)
• Canadian Kilometers (Canada)

5. Use the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy has led to a plethora of new money-saving and community-building platforms that have made travel even more affordable, personal, and accessible. It’s never been easier to get off the tourist trail, connect with locals, and experience their pace of life. I live by these websites when I travel! You should too. My favorites include:

• Airbnb – The best platform for finding rooms, apartments, and homes for rent by locals.
• Couchsurfing – Great for finding free accommodation (often on people’s couches) and meeting travelers/locals. The hangout feature on the app is my favorite, as you can see who is around to meet up.
• Trusted Housesitters – The most comprehensive website to find house-sitting gigs. You watch a place on vacation while the homeowner is on vacation.
• EatWith – Allows you to eat home-cooked meals with locals (it’s the Airbnb of food). It always leads to interesting encounters, so it’s one of my favorite things to do.
• BlaBlaCar – A ridesharing app that pairs riders with verified locals who have a spare seat in their car.

6. Find the Free!

The world is awash with amazing free travel resources (like this website) that can help you travel on a budget. No matter where you are going, there’s probably a blog post on what to do and see there for free or cheaply. Someone has been there and they’ve written about it! Make the best use of all them to help you plan your trip.

My favorite search term is “free things to do in X.” You’ll always get a result!

Additionally, don’t be afraid to walk into a hostel — even if you aren’t staying there — and ask them what to do for cheap. Their clientele is budget sensitive, so they always know what to do and where to go for little money.
 

7. Stick to Public Transportation

If you’re on a budget, skip the taxis and rideshares like Lyft or Uber. Unless you can lower your cost by sharing a ride with other passengers, public transportation is going to be the most cost-effective way to get around. Not only will it save you money but you’ll get to see how the locals travel too.

Google Maps usually can give you a basic overview of the public transportation options and prices available. You can find information about day passes and/or multiday passes local tourism offices which will save you even more money. (See the next tip for more about that).
 

8. Use Local Tourism Offices

Local tourist offices are a wealth of knowledge. They exist solely to provide you with information on what to see and do. They often have tons of discounts not found anywhere else and can also keep you updated on local events, free tours, and the best spots to eat. They can help you find public transportation discounts and/or multiday passes too.

Don’t skip the local tourist office! They are serverly underutilizted resource.
 

9. Get Cheap Accommodation

Accommodation is one of the biggest fixed costs travelers have, so reducing that cost can lead to big savings on the road. I’m sure many backpackers would sleep in a barn if it were the cheapest accommodation they could find! Heck, I’ve slept in hammocks in national parks to save a buck!

Since you have to stay somewhere every night, reducing this expense can save you a lot of money off the total cost of your trip. Stay in hostels, use Couchsurfing, get last minute hotesl on Hotels Tonight, stay at universities (yes, you can do that), or try an Airbnb. Since there’s a lot of ways to cut your accommodation costs, here are my posts on how to get accommodation deals:

• How to Find the Perfect Apartment Rental
• How to Find Cheap and Free Accommodation
• How to Crush it on Couchsurfing

And here are the websites I use to book cheap places to stay:

• Booking.com – For finding budget hotels and guesthouses.
• Hostelworld – The best site for finding hostels.
• Agoda – Another great hotel website, specifically for Asia.
• Hotel Tonight – Offers discounted last-minute hotel stays.
• Airbnb – For finding private rooms, entire apartments, and homes for rent by locals.

10. Eat Cheap

Other than accommodation, food is one of the biggest travel costs. After all, everyone needs to eat. But there are lots of ways to eat on the cheap:

• Go grocery shopping and prepare your own meals
• Shop at local markets
• Use apps to find deals (Yelp, Seamless, LaForchette, TasteCard, RiceBowl)

Also, use the five-block rule. There seems to be this magical wall that surrounds tourist areas. Most people don’t go past it. It’s been my experience that if you walk five blocks in any direction from a major tourist area, you end up losing the crowds and finding the local restaurants. Tourist restaurants don’t care about quality since tourists aren’t coming back. Residents do care so places catering to them need to be better — and more affordable – or they go out of business. Those are the places you want to eat at. Use the above resources to find where the locals eat and avoid crappy food! Moreover, check out these articles for tips on eating cheap around the world:

• How to Eat Cheap Around the World
• How to Eat Around the World on a Plant-Based Diet

11. Travel Like You Live

The majority of people in your destinations don’t spend lots of money per day, like tourists do. Neither do you in your day-to-day life. So take that mentality with you. Walk, take public transportation, grocery shop, spend a day in a park, and look for deals. Do the things you do at home every day to keep your costs down.

Too many people get into this mindset that when they go on the road, they just have to spend, spend, spend, spend. That’s not true at all. There’s no law that says you have to spend more. Be smart with your budget — just like you are at home. That will help you save money and prevent you from going home early broke.

***

The world is full of different ways to travel on a budget once you know where to look. This year, make travel happen. It doesn’t matter if you save only a dollar a week. What matters is that you take the first step! Action begets action. Once you take the first step, all the other steps will be easier.

The post How to Travel on a Budget in 2020 appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

This week Chris Christensen, Jen Leo, and I are joined by this week’s guests Earl Bridges and Craig Martin, long time philanthropy veterans, globetrotters, and best friends are co-hosts of the new PBS Travel Series THE GOOD ROAD.  In this new series, they trek around the world to meet people who are making a difference. …

Read moreThis Week in Travel – Episode 260

The post This Week in Travel – Episode 260 appeared first on Everything Everywhere Travel Blog.

You all sure know how to make me feel great! Thank you for showing up on my 13 years of blogging post and leaving all those special comments. I don’t expect you all to comment all the time, who has the time, but I so appreciate all the support and comments on that yearly post. It just makes me so happy to know that so many of you have been with me from the beginning of this blog and so many have joined during my journey. Thank you again! I couldn’t do it without you all coming by day after day.

So let’s get to Fashion over 50. I haven’t dressed up much at all the last few weeks, because bathroom renovation. Things are a mess around our house, the bedroom is in disarray and my closet is sort of closed up and I have to get things out of there as I can, so yoga pants and warm tops have been my wardrobe the last few weeks. That’s normal anyway for my weekly routine. But I did manage to get dressed for church last week.

The post Fashion over 50: Leopard Cardigan Sweater appeared first on Southern Hospitality.

Looking for a paradise that includes beaches, lush jungles, waterfalls, culture, and shopping? The Hawaiian Island, Maui is known to have it all and we can attest to that! Whether you love adventure or just want to relax by the beach, Maui makes for the perfect island to visit. While you might never want to …

Read moreBest Things to Do in Maui

The post Best Things to Do in Maui appeared first on Everything Everywhere Travel Blog.

This weekend enjoy the best Asheville has to offer with fewer crowds and some of the best deals of the year.

Make the most of the recent rainfall by visiting one of hundreds of waterfalls around the region. They’re sure to be raging from the rainfall – just be careful and mind the slick rocks. If the rain continues into the weekend, then there are plenty of rainy day adventures to be found all around Asheville. Check out our roundup of activities for indoor fun.

Planning a trip to Asheville is easy. Utilize our easy-to-use search to check room

Updated: 01/26/2020 | January 26th, 2020

Every year, tens of thousands of people go overseas and teach English. Young and old, they go for many reasons: to learn about a new culture, make some money to travel, seek adventure, or just experience something new.

The time I spent teaching English overseas in Asia was life-changing. In Thailand and Taiwan, I learned that I could make friends and start a life in a strange place, as well as adapt and thrive in a different culture. It gave me a confidence that nothing else before had ever done. It helped make me a better version of me.

Yet, with seemingly millions of places to teach, most people often wonder: where are the best places to teach English overseas? What countries provide the best experience, pay, or benefits? Here’s my list of where to score a fun, rewarding, and well-paying job teaching English overseas:
 

1. South Korea

South Korea is one of the best places — if not the best — to teach English overseas. Jobs are abundant, the pay averages $1,600-2,600 USD per month, and you get awesome benefits, like a contract completion bonus, free housing, and airfare reimbursement.

A lot of recent college graduates are attracted to Korea because of the money, benefits, and the fact that Korea takes many first-time teachers. If you don’t have any experience, this country is one of the best options for you. As a place to live, Korea has plenty of things going for it: the food is delicious, the country is dirt cheap, and the people are friendly.

Plus you will find lots of other international young expats there. Since you earn so much money in a country with such a low cost of living, most people leave having paid off a substantial portion of their debts! You could easily walk away after a year of teaching with your loans (school or non-school) paid off AND money for travel!

2. Japan

Japan has a reputation for good jobs which means it also attracts as many people as South Korea. Though the years of easily teaching in Japan and making quick cash are long, long over, people willing to stay at least a year can generally save a substantial sum of money.

While the cost of living can eat up a lot of your salary, especially in Tokyo, there are a number of programs out there (including the government’s JET program) that reward long-term teachers with generous benefits and completion bonuses.

Additionally, the Japanese are incredibly friendly and polite, the food is endless gourmet heaven, and the culture is unique. It’s one of my favorite countries in the world.

3. The Middle East

The Middle East lures many teachers in for one reason: its salary packages. Middle Eastern countries offer incredibly large salaries (up to $70,000 USD per year for an experienced teacher), lots of benefits, and no taxes. A teacher can walk away with around $40,000 USD after one year.

However, this is no place for the recent college graduate. These countries want certified and experienced teachers. If you couldn’t teach at a public school in your home country, you have little chance of getting a job in this part of the world. As such, most of the teachers here are older and more settled and have families.

Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia are the most popular destinations for teaching English in this region.

4. Thailand

Thailand attracts lots of young and new teachers with its cheap cost of living, warm beautiful weather, tropical beaches, mouth-watering food, and party atmosphere.

Most of the language school teachers are ex-travelers looking to save for future travels…or travelers who thought they were doing that but ended up never leaving. The pay in Thailand isn’t that high ($1,000–1,500 USD per month), unless you teach in Bangkok or at an international school.

However, teaching English in Thailand isn’t about making lots of money — it’s about everything else: the ease of getting a job, the food, the fun-loving atmosphere, the weather, and everything in between. It’s one of the best destinations for young, new teachers, especially in a larger city, since you’ll fit right in.

5. China

As China rises in global stature, its need for English teacher grows as more and more citizens need to know the language for their job. Moreover, the culture puts an emphasis on learning it. As such, it is one of the easiest places to find work. No matter where you go, you can find work, even in saturated cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

You can earn a decent salary teaching English here (upward of $1,500-2,000 USD a month), and many jobs give completion bonuses, free housing, and airfare reimbursement.

China is the brave new world and a country in constant change. It’s a good location for teachers of all abilities — there’s something for everyone there!

6. Prague

Prague has a seemingly abundant supply of teaching jobs. The city has grown in size over the last few years, attracting a variety of tech start-ups and expats, which has created a lot more job opportunities for teachers.

While it’s very hard to get a job in the public school system or a university, there are plenty of language schools in the city to choose from. The pay isn’t as high as other countries in the world and there are few benefits (especially when compared to Asia or the Middle East), but you’re a stone’s throw away from everywhere in Europe.

The city is one of the most beautiful, vibrant, fun, and popular cities in Europe, which makes Prague an excellent central base from which to explore the continent.

7. Spain

Teaching in Spain is one of the best opportunities for anyone looking to work in Europe. There are plenty of jobs, the government has an active program for attracting teachers, and your visa means you can freely travel around Europe.

There are also many opportunities to teach private lessons on the side. You don’t get many benefits (or high pay compared to Asia or the Middle East), but the pay is still enough to live off of.

8. Taiwan

Taiwan is an excellent country to teach English in, thanks to lots of job opportunities (though they tend to be with young kids), high salaries, benefits similar to South Korea, and lots of other young teachers to share a social life with. The country places a high importance on learning English, and you’ll be able to find freelance tutor opportunities besides your regular, steady teaching job!

I loved my time in Taiwan, made some wonderful friends, and adapted to a completely new culture.

9. Teaching English Online

This was something that didn’t exist when I was teaching. Thanks to the Internet, you no longer have to be tied to one location to teach Teaching online is becoming more popular as a way to make money while working remotely. Platforms like Cambly and italki don’t require any teaching degrees either. The pay isn’t great but it’s something that can have you earn enough money to keep traveling.

***
I had a lot of fun teaching English overseas. It was on my favorite experiences on the road and it taught me so much about myself. You gain a lot of perspective on life by living in another culture.

While there is an opportunity to teach wherever English isn’t the native language, the destinations above draw the biggest crowds, offer the best pay, the best perks, and are the most fun.

If you are thinking about becoming an English teacher overseas, my advice is to head to one of these destinations and just do it!

Ready to Make Money Overseas? Get My Comprehensive Guide

This digital guide will put you ahead of your competition, help you land a high-paying job with a reputable company, and give you first-hand knowledge from real teachers! Get started today with this downloadable PDF (for your computer, e-reader, or mobile device) with the book PLUS 12 interviews about life as a teacher, plus job advice from one of the industry’s top recruiters!
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The post The 9 Best Places to Teach English Overseas appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

Posted: 01/27/2020 | January 27th, 2020

In 2010, I decided to spend the summer in NYC. I was two years into blogging and was making enough where I could afford a few months here. Still new to the industry, NYC was where all the legends of writing lived and I wanted to start making connections with my peers.

It was that summer I met Jason Cochran, a guidebook writer from Frommers, editor, and the man I would consider my mentor.

Though we never had any formal mentor/mentee relationship, Jason’s writing philosophy, advice, and feedback, especially on my first book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, has been instrumental in shaping me as a writer. Much of his philosophy has become mine and I don’t think I would have grown to where I am without him.

Last year, he finally published the book he’d been working on about tourism in America, called Here Lies America. (We featured it on our best books of 2019 list).

Today, we’re going to go behind the scenes of the book and talk to Jason on what does lie in America!

Nomadic Matt: Tell everyone about yourself.
Jason Cochran: I’ve been a travel writer for longer than I’ve felt like an adult. In the mid-‘90s, I kept a very early form of a travel blog on a two-year backpacking trip around the world. That blog became a career. I’ve written for more publications than I can count, including for a prime-time game show.

These days I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com, where I also write two of its annual guidebooks, and I co-host a weekly radio show with Pauline Frommer on WABC. For me, history is always my way into a new place. In many ways, time is a form of travel, and understanding the past flexes a lot of the same intellectual muscles as understanding cultural differences.

So I have come to call myself a travel writer and a pop historian. That last term is something I just made up. Dan Rather made fun of me once for it. “Whatever that is,” he said. But it seems to fit. I like uncovering everyday history in ways that are funny, revealing, and casual, the way Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell do.

What made you want to write this book?
Before I began researching, I just thought it would be funny. You know, sarcastic and ironic, about Americans going to graveyards and places of suffering just to buy lots of tacky souvenirs, eat ice cream, and wear dumb t-shirts. And, that’s still in there, for sure. We’re Americans and we like those things. Key chains will happen.

But that changed fast. For one, that would have become a very tired joke. It wouldn’t carry for three hundred pages. Things clicked for me early on, on the first of several cross-country research drives I took. I went to a place that I wasn’t taught about at school, and it clicked. I was at Andersonville in rural Georgia, where 13,000 out of 45,000 Civil War prisoners died in just 14 months. It was flat-out a concentration camp.

Yes, it turns out that concentration camps are as American as apple pie. The man who ran it was the only Confederate officer who was executed after the war. Southerners feared the victors would hang their leaders by the dozen, but that vengeance never materialized. Not for Jefferson Davis, not for Robert E. Lee—the guy who ran this camp poorly got the only public hanging. And he wasn’t even a born American. He was Swiss!

But that’s how important this place was at the time. Yet most of us have never even heard of it, except for a really bad low-budget movie on TNT in the ‘90s in which all the characters bellowed inspirational monologues as if they thought they were remaking Hoosiers.

So just getting my head around the full insanity of Andersonville’s existence was a big light bulb—our history is constantly undergoing whitewashing. Americans are always willfully trying to forget how violent and awful we can be to each other.

And Andersonville wasn’t even the only concentration camp in that war. There were a bunch in both the North and the South, and most of them had survival rates that were just as dismal. So that was another light bulb: There’s a story in why our society decided to preserve Andersonville but forget about a place like Chicago’s Camp Douglas, which was really just as nasty, except now it’s a high-rise housing project and there’s a Taco Bell and a frozen custard place where its gate once stood.

And did you know that the remains of 12,000 people from another Revolutionary War concentration camp are in a forgotten grave smack in the middle of Brooklyn? We think our major historic sites are sacred and that they are the pillars of our proud American story, but actually, how accurate can our sites be if they’re not even fairly chosen?

What was one of the most surprising things you learned from your research?
In almost no instance was a plaque, statue, or sign placed right after the historic event in question. Most of the monuments were actually installed many decades after the event. In the case of the Civil War, most of the memorials were erected in a boom that came a half-century after the last bullet was fired.

If you really get close to the plaques and read past the poetic inscriptions, it quickly becomes clear that our most beloved historic sites aren’t sanctified with artifacts but with propaganda placed there by people who weren’t even witnesses to the event. There was a vast network of women’s clubs that would help you order a statue for your own town out of a catalog, and they commissioned European sculptors who cashed the checks but privately grumbled about the poor taste of the tacky kitsch they were installing all over America.

We’re still dealing with what they did today. It’s what Charlottesville was about. But most people don’t realize these statues weren’t put there anywhere near the time of the war, or that they were the product of an orchestrated public relations machine. By powerful women!

I wrote a line in the book: “Having a Southern heritage is like having herpes—you can forget you have it, you can deny it, but it inevitably bubbles up and requires attention.” These issues aren’t going away.

Places we think of as holy ground, like Arlington National Cemetery, often have some pretty shocking origin stories. Arlington started because some guy got pissed off at Robert E. Lee and started buying corpses in his rose garden to get back at him! That’s our hallowed national burial ground: a nasty practical joke, like the Burn Book from Mean Girls. Dig a little and you find more revolting secrets, like how the incredible number of people buried under the wrong headstone, or the time the government put the remains of a Vietnam soldier in the Tomb of the Unknowns. They pretty much knew his identity, but Ronald Reagan really wanted a TV photo op. So they sealed all the soldier’s belongings in the coffin with him so that no one would figure it out.

They eventually had to admit they’d lied and gave the soldier’s body back to his mom. But if a thing like that happens in a place like Arlington, can the rest of our supposedly sacred sites be taken at face value at all?

It goes a lot deeper. At Ford’s Theatre and the surrender house at Appomattox, the site we visit isn’t even real. They’re fakes! The original buildings are long gone but visitors are rarely told that. The tale’s moral is what’s valued, not the authenticity.

What can visiting these sites teach us about how we remember our past?
Once you realize that all historic sites have been cultivated by someone who wanted to define your understanding of it, you learn how to use critical thinking as a traveler. All it takes is asking questions. One of the most fun threads in the book kicks off when I go to Oakland, a historic but touristy cemetery in Atlanta. I spot an ignored gravestone that piqued my interest. I’d never heard of the name of the woman: Orelia Key Bell. The info desk didn’t have her listed among the notable graves. She was born around the 1860s, which was a very eventful time in Atlanta.

So I took out my phone and right there on her grave, I Googled her. I researched her whole life so I could appreciate what I was seeing. It turned out she was a major poet of her time. I stood there reading PDFs of her books at her feet. Granted, her stuff was dreary, painfully old-fashioned. I wrote that her style of writing didn’t fall out of fashion so much as it was yanked down and clubbed by Hemingway.

But reading her writing at her grave made me feel wildly connected to the past. We almost never go to old places and look deeper. We usually let things remain dead. We accept what’s on the sign or the plaque as gospel, and I’m telling you, almost nothing ever reaches us in a state of purity.

I figured that if I was going to probe all these strangers, I had to be fair and probe someone I knew. I decided to look into an untimely death in my own family, a great-grandfather who had died in a train wreck in 1909. That was the beginning and the end of the tale in my family: “Your great-great grandfather died in a train wreck up in Toccoa.”

But almost as soon as I started looking deeper, I discovered something truly shocking—he had been murdered. Two young Black men were accused in rural South Carolina for sabotaging his train and killing him. You’d think at least someone in my family would have known this! But no one had ever looked into it before!

Here Lies America follows their trail. Who were these guys? Why would they want to kill him? I went to where their village used to be, I started digging into court documents from their murder trial. Let me tell you, the shockers came flooding. Like, I found they may have killed him because they wanted to protect a sacred old Cherokee burial mound from destruction. There was this crazy, larger-than-life forgotten story happening in my own damn family.

My experience with that poet’s grave has a happy coda. Last week, someone told me that Orelia Key Bell and her companion are now officially part of the guided tour of Oakland. The simple act of looking deeper had revived a forgotten life and put her back on the record. That’s what visiting these sites can do—but you have to look behind the veneer, the way I do with dozens of attractions in my book. This is the essence of travel, isn’t it? Getting to a core understanding of the truth of a place.

A lot of what you wrote showed how whitewashed many of these historical sites are. How do we as travelers dig deeper to get to the real history?
Remember that pretty much everything you see at a historic site or museum was intentionally placed there or left there by someone. Ask yourself why. Ask who. And definitely ask when, because the climate of later years often twists interpretation of the past. It’s basic content analysis, really, which is something we’re really bad at in a consumer society.

Americans have it drilled into them to never question the tropes of our patriotism. If we learned about in grade school, we assume it’s a settled matter, and if you press it, you’re somehow an insurgent. Now, more than any other time in history, it’s easier than ever to call up primary sources about any era you want. If you want to go back to what our society really is, if you want to try to figure out how we wandered into the shattered shambles we’re in today, you have to be honest about the forces that created the image that, until recently, many of us believed we really were.

Do you think Americans have a problem talking about their history? If so, why is that?
There’s a phrase, and I forget who said it—maybe James Baldwin?-but it goes, “Americans are better at thinking with their feelings than about them.” We go by feels, not so much by facts. We do love to cling to a tidy mythology of how free and wonderful our country always was. It reassures us. We probably need it. After all, in America, where we all come from different places, our national self-belief is our main cultural glue. So we can’t resist prettying up the horrible things we do.

But make no mistake: Violence was the foundation of power in the 1800s, and violence is still a foundation of our values and entertainment today. We have yet to come to terms with that. Our way of dealing with violence is usually to convince ourselves it’s noble.

And if we can’t make pain noble, we try to erase it. It’s why the place where McKinley was shot, in Buffalo, lies under a road now. That was intentional so that it would be forgotten by anarchists. McKinley was given no significant pilgrimage spot where he died, but right after that death, his fans paid for a monument by Burnside’s Bridge in Antietam, because as a youth, he once served coffee to soldiers.

That’s the reason: “personally and without orders served hot coffee,” it reads—it’s hilarious. That is our national mythmaking in a nutshell: Don’t pay attention to the place that raises tough questions about imperialism and economic disparity, but put up an expensive tribute to a barista.

What is the main takeaway you’d like readers to take away from your book?
You may not know where you came from as well as you think you do. And we as a society definitely haven’t asked enough questions about who shaped the information we grew up with. Americans are finally ready to hear some truth.

Jason Cochran is the author of Here Lies America: Buried Agendas and Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went Down. He’s been a writer since mid-1990s, a commentator on CBS and AOL, and works today as editor-in-chief of Frommers.com and as co-host of the Frommer Travel Show on WABC. Jason was twice awarded “Guide Book of the Year” by the Lowell Thomas Awards and the North American Travel Journalists Association.

The post Here Lies America: An Interview With Jason Cochran appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

Life is flying by and I can’t believe I’m even typing 13 years of blogging. It still blows my mind that it’s been that long since I fired up this blog for the first time. Every year at this time, I like to reflect on the state of my blogging journey and where I am at this time. It’s a good way to look back at where I was when I started it all, where this path has led me and where I want to go. I don’t have all the answers on where I want to go, I’m still figuring that out along the way, but it’s been such a fun journey I plan to continue indefinitely.

I’m 63, which makes me a senior and the fact that I can do this for a living and have it go with me into retirement years is the best thing ever! I built this blog from scratch and it supports me very well. God has certainly blessed me beyond anything I could have imagined back then.

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Hi friends and Happy Saturday! Here are some fun things to read today from my friends and I. Hope you enjoy browsing. From pillow collections, to organizing, to a look a quartz vs. granite, there’s something to pique your interest. 

The post Home Style Saturday 175 appeared first on Southern Hospitality.

Happy Friday friends! We are plugging along on the master bath renovation, but I’ve got a fun feature for you today from Instagram. Leigh is not a blogger but has a beautiful 1924 Colonial in Delaware that she and her husband, Ben have worked on and decorated at House 1924. Fresh from a Fall feature in Country Living, Leigh shared the photoshoot pics with me and it is such a charming home. I know you’re going to love it, so go over and follow Leigh if you’re not already and get ready to be charmed. All the design work and almost all of the construction has been done by them and their family. 

The post Feature Friday: House 1924 appeared first on Southern Hospitality.