The answer, of course, is “duh!”

(I’d also accept the Latin “Derrr!!”)

It’s inevitable. And travel apps will likely be all the rage until they invent the retina display and cerebral interface with a global 28G data connection to the Knowledge Cloud that will download information to our brains like the freaking Matrix and when people meet, instead of shaking hands and small talk, they’ll kung fu fight. Or possibly breakdance fight, I’m not sure. But until that lively day arrives, travel apps are likely going to be our travel information platform of choice.

The rapid industry transition to travel apps has been especially heavy on my mind recently, having awesomeified my Florence Explorer app back in March (for iPhone and Android) and having just completed the world’s best (and so far only) Romania travel app, which will hopefully be published by the end of May.

While toiling away on these guides, I’ve thought a lot about the travel app platform and why it might be the thing that once and for all buries printed guidebooks, which people (like me) have been anxiously awaiting since they first laid hands on a Palm Pilot.

With two apps under my belt now, I’ve become intimately familiar with the dynamic, option-rich possibilities that apps provide and how, when done correctly, they’re superior to printed guides on virtually every level. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still much work to be done before apps can claim total dominance. First, let’s look at the positives.

Frequent updates, mean increased accuracy
Guidebook haters LOVE to chirp about how the information in a guidebook, even the day it hits the shelves, is already at least a year old. And with some guidebooks having two, three and even four year life spans, that information admittedly gets pretty stale, especially for destinations that tend to change rapidly. (Thanks a lot Romania.)

Not so with apps. These things can be updated as often as the authors/publishers see fit. With the approval interval at iTunes still being fairly slow – all part of the greater good content-wise, but the lag is still frustrating at times – the updates aren’t as instantaneous as updating web pages, but it’s pretty close. As this article about Inkling and Frommer’s teaming up rightly points out, the relative ease of updates for travel apps mean that even blips like temporary closures of sights can be duly noted, never mind huge stuff like visa rule changes and transport developments.

Convenience and ease-of-use
Even rabid guidebook devotees will admit that packing a paper lump the size and weight of a gold brick into their backpack is a little inconvenient. Never mind the inevitable tears, page obscuring wine spills and the not insubstantial nor inconspicuous effort of hauling that dead weight around town all day and pulling it out for reference. A sexy travel app on a feather-light smartphone eliminates all of these issues. (Except the wine spill ramifications – that stuff ruins everything.)

There’s also the matter of ease-of-use. Book fetishists notwithstanding, few people will reminisce fondly about the days of flicking back and forth through an 800 page guidebook, from text, to maps, to practical matter. Apps, when designed in an intuitive, thoughtful manner (notice I said ‘when’, see below), deliver the information you need far more efficiently.

And did I mention GPS? The days of being lost all the time in maddening places like Berlin, Naples and St Paul are about to be permanently behind us.

Cost
Apps cost less. Much less in many cases, particularly if you use the same app for more than one visit over the course of several years. Assuming that you’ve purchased your app from a reputable publisher that doesn’t abandon update duties, that one-time purchase could be worth the price of two or more theoretical guidebook purchases you might have made over that same period depending on the number of times you visit the destination and the intervals between those visits.

Now, for the ‘bad’ and the ‘needs improvement’ categories.

Interface
One of the top complaints about travel apps, for the moment, is that they are poorly designed and not intuitive. Even apps published by popular brands, who maybe rushed a little too much to get the product out, suffer these shortcomings.

One of the main reasons I hitched my wagon to Sutro Media was the lavish praise for their design and interface. Also, though this is becoming more and more common, they were one of the first to have 100% offline app functionality, including the oh-so important maps, so people wouldn’t take it on the chin with roaming fees while trying to use the app abroad.

However, outside of Sutro and the encouraging news about this Inkling/Frommer’s collaboration, most travel app designs are still prohibitively sucky (and their maps rudimentary), so for the time being people will probably find that thumbing through a book and/or using a paper map is less confounding.

Quality of content
This is also a huge problem, particularly on the Android Market, where any yahoo that knows how to copy and paste can publish and sully the market with their own travel app. As slow and exasperating as it can sometimes be to publish on iTunes, this is where I have to give them credit. They have been increasingly judicious in travel app approval, meaning their catalog isn’t completely saturated with ad-filled, free and $0.99 apps that were slapped together by some content farm hack in Bangalore who scraped the (unedited, unverified) information from wikitravel and travel websites. Relying on these apps for accurate information is like traveling around with a 47-year-old guidebook, something only a certifiable masochist would do to themselves on purpose.

The number of travel apps out there that were actually researched on the ground by a destination expert are still disconcertingly low, with Sutro and a few others being notable exceptions. (And no, they are not paying me to say that, but they should be.) As the platform develops and becomes more lucrative, one hopes this situation will improve and customers will likewise learn to tell the difference between the shit and the gravy.

So, we’re looking at a tipping point in, I don’t know, two or three years? Maybe? Hopefully?

In the meantime, on a personal note, I have to say that authoring an app is far more liberating and less tedious than guidebook authoring. Issues like word count limits are moot. Convoluted text formatting, out the window. Memorizing all the wrinkles in a 144 page product manual… What product manual? Oh glorious freedom!

Anyone else out there walking into the travel app light? What’re your thoughts?

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So here’s a wacky thought: should there be reviews for travel blogs?

On the heels of last week’s rant, I’m wondering if the travel blogging industry wouldn’t benefit from a little fear. Constructive fear, obviously. This isn’t junior high school, though some days it feels like it. No, I’m talking about the same accountability, good practice expectations and repercussions faced by anyone that creates a thing for public consumption, like a book, restaurant or a car.

Reviews would not only comment on content, but also the blog’s total value, with each blog’s focus and mission taken into account. Granted, it would be a bit subjective, being that so many people are tackling so many genres and subgenres, but then that’s no different than book and movie reviewing.

Also, perhaps a little fact checking? Being that certain bloggers tend to embellish their credentials (because why not?), when appropriate, these reviews would also aim to call out the guiltiest fibbers.

The way I have (rather quickly) envisioned it, reviews would serve multiple purposes.

1.    Cataloging travel blogs. So, for starters, when the monthly “what are some good travel blogs?” call goes out on Twitter, those people could simply be pointed to the reviews.

2.    A good source for PRs. Since it seems they rarely take the, admittedly not insubstantial, time to really dig into the blogs before contacting the blogger, this would be a quick way for them to not only sort out the family travel blogs from the adventure blogs for more effective pitching, but also get a quick snapshot of each blog’s strength: practical info, photography, writing, humor, etc.

3.    Give new/aspiring bloggers a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

4.    Hopefully encourage a higher standard than our current “anything goes” environment, thereby raising the general standing of the travel blogging industry.

There’d be minimum criteria, of course. Say, blogs would have to be active for at least 18 months and have a minimum of 78 posts (an average of one post a week during the minimum interval) before they could be considered for a review. Also, I think there would have to be a panel of reviewers instead of just one reviewer, since everyone is going to notice/appreciate/hate different things. The obstacle we face here is that the travel blogging community is kinda incestuous these days, so the panel would have to rotate if someone had a conflict of interest by reviewing a friend blogger. Or, failing that, get reviewers that aren’t travel bloggers at all, totally eliminating a possible conflict of interest.

Reviewers, who would all be bylined for the sake of legitimacy and accountability, would have to read at least 10 posts and spend no less than, say, 30 minutes clicking around the site to get a sense for feel, content and features. After that, reviewers would write a review, maybe 250-500 words, detailing what they liked and didn’t like, then answer a series of questions and rank each blog on a number of scales, like “overall content,” “design,” “value,” “fun,” etc, and finally a “last word” summary paragraph for quick reference.

Downside: Where would we find the people to volunteer their time? How would the various expenses be financed?

But before any of that is addressed, would anyone really read these reviews? And would they make any difference?

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In February, Killing Batteries celebrated its sixth birthday. It occurred to me that I should post something back then, but I didn’t because, while I had many things to say, I couldn’t ignore the fact that ultimately I had no point. And “What’s Your Point?” is high on my top 10 list of travel blogging pet peeves, right below “Obvious Shilling” and “Are You Really Too Busy to Proof Read?”

“This Is Unspeakably Stupid” is up there too, but it jumps around depending on my mood.

Also, regrettably, no matter how I arrange the words, this post makes me sound like a narcissist, even though I’m about to spend several paragraphs tuning up lesser deserving narcissists. But hey, if knowing beyond a doubt that I’m better than other narcissists makes me seem like a narcissist, then I don’t care what you think.

[Pause for you to enjoy the exquisite phrasing of the previous sentence.]

At best, six years is a middling length of time in real life. If I hear someone has been doing something for six years, I might raise an eyebrow. I’m especially loathe to give people credit for longevity these days as everyone’s idea of noteworthy experience has shrunk to the length of a beer fart and job intervals on résumés are measured in months instead of years.

That said, six years in travel blogging looks and feels like several dynasties. The evolution from occasional journaling with maybe a few pictures to the 24/7 multimedia, multi-channel deluge has been dazzling. I’ve watched people that started out as commenters at Killing Batteries become travel blogging all-stars. And I’ve watched people who started commenting on their blogs become huge as well.

By these standards, I kinda feel like one of the granddads of travel blogging. And if, like me, you include the exhaustive HTML-based travelogue I maintained from 2003-2006 in my travel blogging resume, I’m elevated to being one of travel blogging’s great granddads.

(For you timeline fans, I know of at least two people who are still around that pre-date me by several years, making them the Methuselahs of online travel publishing.)

So, while Killing Batteries may have peaked around 2008/2009 and, due to my focus on paying work (or laziness, you pick), slowly faded from relevance since, I nevertheless often feel like one of the old folks sitting in a rocking chair on the perimeter of the travel blogging town carnival, watching the swarm of young and energized bloggers – some doing hand stands and back flips, while others are hitting each other with plastic bats and accidentaly detonating firecrackers in their hands.

With that self-indulgent vision established, here are the impressions/wisdom I’ve collected over nine years of online travel publishing.

Presentation and outreach have gotten way better, which is a relief since content and self-promotion have generally gotten worse. As I’ve moaned before, the quality of the actual writing part of travel blogging appears to have peaked early. Whether this is due to the staggering increase in travel blogger numbers and the crappy writers are proportionately more noticeable or if content has suffered due to the longstanding SEO cultivation versus quality debate I don’t know. All I know is that, even with my judiciously maintained blog subscriptions and Twitter feed, I am still routinely faced with noteworthy awfulness.

Then there’s the exasperating false sense of entitlement (“I’ve been blogging for six months! Where’s my book deal?”), which heartbreakingly transitions into the blind and unearned solicitations for credibility and ‘likes’, skewered recently in brilliantly timed fashion by The Oatmeal.

Admittedly, I’m feeling extra dour, having read an unusual number of craptastic blog posts in recent months. Even with so many people volunteering so much blogging advice (which we didn’t have when I was your age, kids), many posts still have that grade school “What I Did for Summer Vacation” whiff about them. Tedious, babbling, starved for evocative language, and riddled with typos. And not the little, forgivable typos that we’re all guilty of. I’m talking the whiplash, ankle-spraining, nose-breaking typos that a 9-year-old would notice from across a room while simultaneously playing Wii Tennis.

Another plague to the current state of travel blogging, indeed perhaps the greatest myth propagated by self-appointed travel blogging experts, is that posting frequently is one of the main keys to success. If you legitimately have strong, thoughtful topics two or three times a week, then by all means, post away. But you’d be the first in the history of travel blogging. Instead, what we get is deliberate, wearying gratuitousness.

A well-regarded, popular blogger recently reiterated this fallacy to my dismay. Someone who, coincidentally, I unsubscribed from a while back due to the fact that 2/3 of their posts felt forced and unrewarding. The bloggers that wake up and think “Oh shit, it’s Thursday, I have to write a blog post,” are doing their readers a huge disservice. If you have nothing inspired or compelling to say, then please, for the love of Buddha, don’t go to your desk out of some misplaced sense of obligation, look around the room and proceed to write an “I Love Lamp” blog post. That’s how readers become skimmers and in some cases then become ex-readers.

I Love Lamp on Vimeo.

Having vented all that, I have to grudgingly admit that I’m apparently wrong. People guilty of these infractions still somehow manage success. Notorious tone-deaf, grammar-spazs and halfwits; gratuitous posters, shills and poseurs; people that have shamelessly embraced their narcissism (rather than only tolerating it, like I do) have won baffling acclaim and lucrative collaborations.

While opining on this mind-screw, an observant colleague pointed out that part of the wide ranging discrepancy about who thinks what is best for travel blogging is that travel bloggers (and their readers) can kinda-sorta be dropped into two categories:

1.    The people that started out as writers
2.    Everyone else

Both categories have produced great travel bloggers (and terrible travel bloggers), but the people that inspire the most severe garment rending are usually from the ‘everyone else’ category. For whatever reason, this group is heavy on the ex-marketing types, corporate escapees, self-styled entrepreneurs and folks under the impression that they’ve collected an entire lifetime of wisdom by age 26, then feel compelled don their Capitan Profundity helmets and advise others with dangerously misplaced authority. For the same reason that I don’t recognize or understand the nuances from their perspectives, they seem oblivious or dismissive of tone, structure and/or even a passing attempt at creativity – failings that scream out at me every time I (don’t) see them.

Then there are the ones who won’t (or can’t) proof for basic grammar. I don’t even know what to say here. One hesitates to disparage people who genuinely, for whatever brain-wiring reason, can’t recognize proper grammar. But it seems that the people guilty of this are more often than not brazen SEO whores looking to pad page views rather than write something readable that might earn and keep a dedicated audience, making it difficult to summon any sympathy.

And I should remind people here, I’ve never taken a writing class. I don’t really know any of this stuff myself – at least not well enough to explain or teach it. That I’m simply writing by ear and these writer shortcomings are still so painful to my eyes means that properly trained writers (and, more importantly, editors) must be routinely reduced to tears when trolling travel blogs.

So, who should existing and new travel bloggers listen to? The disappointed, wistful great granddad or the easily impressed, circle-jerk kids?

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Disclosure: That even on my best day, my book reviewing skills are amateurish notwithstanding, I am good friends with Doug and have therefore opted to skip doing a book review in favor of an only sporadically serious interview on his travels and scoring his first book, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day.

With the impressive thoroughness of Doug’s replies, I’ll elaborate no further on our tumultuous history, filled with grudges, scars and tinted-windowed van abductions, and launch straight into the far more illuminating interview itself. (NOTE: This is the Collector’s Edition of the shorter, less goofball interview that appeared on World Hum last week. Go there if you’re pressed for time or hate mirth.)

Killing Batteries: What came first, the Five Wrong Turns hook or the resolve to pursue a book deal?
Doug Mack: The hook. I mean, I’ve always liked the idea of writing a book (or, more accurately, to have somehow written a book without actually putting in the effort), but, truthfully, I had never thought about it in tangible terms—it was sort of an idle, unpursued dream rather than a burning ambition. But when I discovered that 1963 of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and first looked through my mother’s letters from her days as a hippie Grand Tourist, that changed in approximately 2.4 seconds—it was one of those light bulb-over-the-head moments that happens in movies but not in real life. BOOK. MUST WRITE.

KB: How old were you when you landed this book deal?  
DM: I was 29 years old. Younger than Mozart when he got his first book deal, younger than Hemingway when he wrote his first symphony.

KB: How much ass did that kick?
DM: Honest answer? Okay: it kicked major ass. I still have a stupid grin affixed to my face (embarrassing as it is to admit). And that’s because I still kind of can’t believe it happened and I’m well aware of how lucky I am—I’m waiting for someone to jump out from behind a bush and point and laugh and say it’s all an epic prank and how could I not notice all the cameras this whole time … but until then, I’m just going to keep this dopey, delighted look on my face.

KB: Having seen so much of Europe now, I have to ask, are you now or have you ever been a dirty socialist?
DM: Yes. Spending time in Europe brainwashed me into believing in the central tenets of dirty socialism, namely, universal health care and widespread availability of gourmet pastries.

KB: These days, it’s tough to get an agent, never mind a publisher, to give you a second glance without an already impressive platform and readymade audience. So, how the Bachmann did you do it?
DM: It’s amazing how far your can get with a little blackmai—I mean, with an interesting hook and a lot of stubborn persistence.

Part one of that: The book has an obvious gimmick (touring Europe with a 1963 guidebook), but it  uses that quirky hook as an entry point into in something larger and more earnest—namely, a big-picture discussion of the social history of tourism in the last generation. Plus, there’s the personal-history element of following in my mother’s footsteps. So there are a number of different angles, but they all tie together—which, I hope, adds up to an interesting hook and, therefore, and interesting book.

The book is also a bit of a spoof of classic travel-memoir tropes: I’m not trekking across a desert, I’m not learning tradition crafts in a forgotten village, I’m not seeking enlightenment or the wisdom of the ancients. This is manifestly not My Year In a Quirky Sun-Dappled Village With Eccentric Locals. Instead, I’m a clichéd tourist through and through (and, in the process, attaining my own skewed version of enlightenment-or-something). And I think that for once, being  absurdist and contrarian actually helped by setting me apart and creating what I hope is an amusing, insightful remix of the standard travel-memoir formula.

So the hook helped. And then there’s Part Two: becoming a workaholic, stubborn, asocial hermit. Just kidding. Mostly. I researched and hustled—that is to say, read wearying numbers of web sites and books with titles like How to Write a Book Proposal in 972 Simple Steps!!—and wrote a proposal and got rejected by a dozen agents and kept polishing and pitching and failing and failing (repeat another dozen times), but trying to, as Samuel Beckett so wonderfully put it, “fail better.” I can’t pretend that I have some magical formula for any of this, but, eventually, after all those months of fail-tweak-fail-tweak, an agent gave me a chance and took me on. The whole process was a combination of lucky breaks and just struggling through, putting in the hours.

KB: Best place for doughnuts in Europe?
DM: Not Amsterdam, I’ll tell you that much.

KB: When you’re famous will you remember the little people that, say, proofed an early draft of your book, let you sleep on their hotel room floor one time in Vancouver and interviewed you just before the book came out to help spark promotion?
DM: The who? Just kidding. Yes, of course, of course. But I thought we agreed not to tell anyone else about that tanker of Strongbow you demanded as remuneration.

KB: [Toweling off from Strongbow bath] What with your love of aerograms and postcards, you appear to be an old school travel aficionado. What three things would you change about modern travel or the travel industry?
DM:
1.  End checked-bag fees. I don’t really mind some of the other additional charges that have popped up. For example, lack of free meals on shorter flights—okay, fine, charge extra for that. Besides, I’m just going to bring something from fresher and tastier from one of the terminal restaurants or from home. But baggage fees? Come on. That’s asinine. Nearly everyone travels with some sort of luggage, and it’s all getting on the plane somehow. So don’t encourage people to carry on even the biggest bags and hold up departure while they try to shove their taxidermy elephant into the overhead bin.

Incidentally, guidebook author Temple Fielding, one of Arthur Frommer’s foremost predecessors and competitors, had his own method for gaming the baggage-fee system. In addition to his two regular suitcases and oversized briefcase, he also traveled with a large raffia basket (full of his luxury-booze stash and a portable record player, among other things). The airlines didn’t know how to categorize the basket (“Well, sir, I don’t even know what raffia is, so we’ll just pretend we don’t see it”) so they didn’t charge him an extra-bag fee. But you’ll have to read the book for the rest of that story.

2. Make digital devices not work abroad. Consider this a modest proposal to help those of us want to be fully immersed in place but can’t seem to find the off button on our electronics: mandate that all phones and computers not work—at all—when transported out of their home countries. Force me to pay for time on an Apple IIE with a mangled keyboard at an internet cafe or to make calls on a tinny pay phone or, God forbid, to talk to a local if I want information.

Not really, of course. I want people in any given place to have the same access to digital communication, and all the benefits it brings, that I do in my home. And I want all of those benefits for myself, the visitor, as well. But there’s a point at which communication-addiction is detrimental to the travel experience—I know, I’ve been there, I’ve wasted (and that is the word) countless hours on mindless internet-hopping and status-updating, pulled away from the people and sights and sounds and culture and language of the place I’m visiting. This even happened during my trip (I talk about it in the book), a trip that was in large part a rebellion against information-overload and an embrace of old-school ignorance and reliance on wits and serendipity. Yet I still got the internet-withdrawal shakes. So maybe I need some help.

3. End the snobbery. Last winter, here in Minneapolis, there was a light rail train wrapped in a huge ad for package tours—golf, shopping, the usual—to Mexico. The main slogan, in foot-high letters: “Mazatlan for travelers not tourists.” Does that expression mean anything anymore? On the first page of my 1963 guidebook, Frommer says that it’s a book “for tourists”; he doesn’t use the word with irony or as an insult, he’s just calling them precisely what they are. There should be no shame in that (as Evelyn Waugh quipped in 1934, “The tourist is the other fellow”–someone else,  not you).

Tourism has always been, to some degree, an act of status, a statement that you have the time, money, and ability to go abroad. With the budget travel boom of the 1960s, though, it exploded and fragmented, open to more people and more ways of showing off, including not just conspicuous consumption but conspicuous frugality. Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It’s absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the latest Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. It’s equally absurd when it means avoiding cities or landmarks for the sole reason that they’re popular. The net effect is the same, an attitude that views travel as a collection of merit badges to be earned, then flaunted: Saw This, Did That, Stayed at the Four Seasons, Slept in a Ditch.
But each attitude completely misses Frommer’s essential underlying point: what matters is not finding something your friends haven’t found but appreciating and understanding that thing—that culture, that place, that food—on your own terms. You can be close-minded even off the beaten path; you can discover all kinds of interesting and wonderful things even on the most tourist-swarmed landmark.

4. Bonus demand: Free. Public. Restrooms. This isn’t specific to modern travel, but it’s still something that I’d change, if only anyone asked me. Especially in places like train stations and restaurants. Everyone, at some point during the day, will need to use a toilet. As a matter of public health and basic human decency, do not make us pay for them. It is a scientifically proven fact that a full bladder is all it takes for even the most staunchly anti-globalization, anti-capitalism individual to rejoice at the sight of a McDonald’s –and its free, clean washrooms—abroad.

KB: At their respective physical peaks, who’d win in a fight between Arthur Frommer and Tony Wheeler?
DM: Rick Steves.

KB: How many guidebook authors does it take to change a light bulb?
DM: Just one, but only after hours of exhaustive research. And all the internet commenters will complain that it was done incorrectly—and that, really, you can just use Twitter for that now.

KB: If you were going to do this trip all over again using modern resources, what would you rely on most?
DM: I would at least glance through a modern guideboook and phrasebook so that I could have a better understanding of the basics of how to understand and get by in a given place and culture. I would also use Twitter or other social media to try to make connections with locals before I left (and those people could also have helped me understand more about the culture and the background). Mind you, I enjoyed having to make the extra effort on all of those fronts—understanding the culture, meeting new people. I had to be very attuned to my surroundings, and I enjoyed that sense that my brain was always working on overdrive to figure things out. Being out of your element has its benefits. But there can and should be a balance, and sometimes I found that being ignorant and out of touch led not to lessons learned or serendipitous discoveries but merely to frustration and fatigue. See: my entire time in Venice, where I was eternally lost and where every restaurant I found seemed to have Maestro Boyardee  running the kitchen.

KB: What country am I thinking of right now?
DM: Italy. Because everyone is always thinking of Italy.

KB: Of the destinations you visited, which one best stood up to the test of time based on Frommer’s 1963 descriptions?
DM: Probably Rome. You turn any given corner there and it’s all but given that you’ll suddenly be in front of some ancient and important and impressive landmark—the Forum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps. The same places that have been drawing delighted tourists for hundreds of years. There was a deli there, Il Delfino, that was almost exactly as Frommer had described it, and where all the patrons seemed to be older, like the could have been there since 1963. From the built environment to the general culture to the relatively high number of Frommer-recommended hotels and restaurants that were still open today, Rome was more or less what I expected based on Frommer’s (and my mother’s) descriptions.

KB: And which was the most unrecognizable?
DM: It’s a toss-up between Berlin and Madrid, since both of those cities and countries had decidedly complicated political situations back then (Iron Curtain, Franco …). Obviously, Berlin is twice the city it once was, for tourist purposes. In my guidebook, Frommer notes that you can go to East Berlin as a tourist—the wall was there to keep Easterners in, not visitors out, per se—but that it was bleak and not really worth the trip. If you did go, Frommer recommended that you “register your name with the American MPs at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time at which you plan to return, and if you’re not there, they’ll take action. (Let us pause to give thanks that World War III was not inadvertently started by a tardy tourist.) Today, Checkpoint Charlie is a quintessential tourist trap, where you can pay to get your picture taken with guys dressed as American and East German soldiers and then pop across the street for some Subway at the food court called Snackpoint Charlie. (Once again, I am not making any of this up.)

Also, the former East Berlin is the new tourist center of town, in part because that’s where many of the flashiest bars and restaurants are located, and in part because that’s where you can go to get your Cold War kitsch fix, an important part of the modern tourist itinerary. Take a ride in a clunky Soviet-era car; look at some Eastern Bloc architecture; buy some old Soviet military uniforms from one of the many sidewalk vendors. It’s … pretty jarring to see the Cold War themed and packaged as a tourist commodity.

KB: As a fun comparison, in each destination you visited, what would $5 buy you today?
DM:

•     Florence: Some crappy knockoff designer sunglasses from an unofficial vendor by the Arno (but only after you bargained down from the original price and the salesman, with a practiced sigh/grin, says that he’s never, EVER made an offer this low, but …).
•     Paris: A pain au chocolat and maybe a macaron from Gerard Mulot on the Left Bank, along with eternal, wistful memories of same, an enduring, bittersweet nostalgia for that transcendent instant when you first tasted the pastry rapture and for a shining, buttery blink of the eyes, all seemed right with the world. This is all true. Or a couple of condoms from the Eiffel Tower gift shop. Also true.
•     Amsterdam: Aw, bro, I know this kinda shady place down a back alley, you gotta bang on this steel door, but for five bucks they’ll hook you up with a little bag of this, like, super-primo … Gouda.
•     Brussels: A couple of chocolate bars in the shape of Manneken-Pis.
•     Berlin: Two fake East German stamps in your passport at Checkpoint Charlie.
•     Munich: Beer! Or a prostate cancer test from a vending machine at Oktoberfest. I promise this is a real thing. Unfortunately (or not), it does not involve a little robot hand cranking out of the machine, finger extended. In fact, it’s a little stick; you pee on it, like a pregnancy test, which you can also procure from the same machine.
•     Zurich: Ha! Good one. Right, like you can get something for $5 in Zurich. You take a single breath of that crisp Alpine air and it sets you back 8.35 CHF, which is, like, $210.04 at the current exchange rate, though that does include VAT.
•     Vienna:  Your choice of all manner of Mozart-themed tchotchkes. A Mozart wig, alas, will set you back quite a bit more than five dollars, but such is the price of timeless fashion.
•     Venice:  A map, so you can figure out where the *%$@!! you are in that enchanted labyrinth-land. Or a shoddy plastic version of those famous Venetian masks.
•     Rome:  Gelato. Gelatogelatogelato. Go to Gelateria del Teatro, near the Piazza Navona. Five bucks (or, you know, the equivalent in euros) will get you two scoops of creamy transcendence that rivals the Sistine Chapel for literal awesomeness.  (Hyperbole? Of course not.) Try the lemon. Or the chocolate-wine. Thank me later.
•     Madrid: A ticket in the highest, most sun-blasted seats at a novillada con picadores bullfight. Available online through a Ticketmaster subsidiary. (Again, I am not making this up.)

KB: Now what country am I thinking of?
DM: Suriname.  Just to be tricky. Because that’s one country NO ONE can locate on a map (Africa? South America? South Pacific? Jupiter?).

KB: Rate the following on a scale of 1 to 10, with ’1′ being despondent and ’10′ being unbridled euphoria:
DM:

•     Getting a book deal:  10
•     Realizing that you had to write the book: 3
•     Writing a book while maintaining a semblance of a personal life:  3
•     Finishing the manuscript: 9
•     Having to cut 18,000 words from the manuscript: 1
•     Checking edits by some 20 year old that’s never left the Northeast and couldn’t find Zurich on a map if someone dangled a million dollar bill in front of their face: 5(th Amendment)
•     Final proofing of the manuscript, being that it’s the 12947th time you’ve read the damn thing and you just wish you could get on with your life: 3
•     Rating random experiences proffered by people with ADD: 0
•     Holding your book: 7
•     Holding your book up to your nose and snorting deeply: 8
•     Using a pile of your books as a snuggle pillow: 9
•     Going to work, standing in the middle of the office, holding your book above your head and yelling “Hey cubicle monkeys! While you were naysaying my dreams and toiling at your jobs, look what I did! So, you can all just suck it!!”:  11
•     Realizing that this is the last question: -2

DM impersonating KB: Bonus question: Where can I purchase a copy or several of this fine work of literature?
DM: Why, that’s a splendid question. The book is—

KB: Uh, I didn’t ask that question—you put in this part.
DM: Sure, if you say so. It’s now available at IndieBound or Amazon or your friendly local bookseller for a mere fifteen dollars. Mozart wig sold separately.

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This video is actually old news, but I’m belatedly posting it here to alert certain key visitors that I don’t look half bad on camera.

It was produced a year ago as a promo piece for Architecture Minnesota magazine’s Videotect competition “Exploring the Built Environment”, the subject being the skyways of Minneapolis and St Paul (and Rochester). They’d gotten wind that I have a (totally healthy and normal) fixation on the Minneapolis Skyway System that, unsurprisingly, peaks in the winter months. Take last winter, for example, when I voluntarily confined myself to the Minneapolis Skyway System for two weeks as a livability test and to explore my skyway-as-neighborhood theory for an article.

Architecture Minnesota asked to follow me around one afternoon with a Flip camera and an iPhone pointed at me and considering that there was no script and no plan whatsoever, it turned out really well. Check it out.

Videotect: Leif in the Skyway from Architecture Minnesota on Vimeo.

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Recently, for maybe the third or fourth time since they cured polio, I received an email marketing blast that actually fell within the easily identifiable realm of interests here at Killing Batteries headquarters. Except it was forwarded to me by my travel writing coconspirator Frank Bures, not a PR shop. Ah, well. Keep trying, people. (Except for the PRs that keep pitching me family travel stories. You guys need to be publicly flogged.)

In 2003, when I quit my job, sold everything and took off for over four years of global vagabonding, I brought with me a densely packed DVD case. Even with it being bulky, heavy and delicate I never regretted it for a second. Those movies filled many idle hours on planes, trains and lonely hotel rooms in deserted towns during low season.

Well, now movie-loving, frequent and long haul travelers have a far more elegant solution. Digiboo allows flash drive-armed travelers to spontaneously buy or rent movies and it’s being launched this week exclusively at the award-winning Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport.

Now the really important thing here is IN YOUR FACE EVERY OTHER AIRPORT!!

That said, being that MSP is a hub for an airline that rhymes with ‘Smelta’ and Smelta has historically been an industry leader in leaving people stranded in strange cities, blaming ATC, leaving them with no recourse and no way to retrieve their luggage at 11pm, then locking the doors and going home, I felt it was prudent to check out this boredom-deterrent, movie download thingie as soon as possible. For the people.

Currently there are 11 Digiboo movie download kiosks peppered around MSP, loaded with (at the time of writing) 700 movies, including recent films such as “Bad Teacher,” “Captain America” and “Hugo.” Rentals are $3.99 (new) or $2.99 (catalog) and can be viewed within 30 days of download. The caveat is that one only has 48 hours to watch the movie once the movie has been opened, though the movie can be viewed as many times as one likes in that 48 hour period before the rental license expires. Purchased movies cost $14.99. Rentals can be viewed on only one device at a time, while purchased movies can be watched on up to five devices. New movies are added to the kiosk every week as titles become available.

Utterly intrigued, I all but ran to a nearby hotel earlier today, where Digiboo executives were camped out, for a hands-on test.

The touchscreen kiosks are admirably intuitive. You can search for movies by genre, pull up a list of recent releases, or type in a movie title (or even actor name) into the search field. Once you’ve selected your film, you swipe a credit card, which both sets up payment and registers your Digiboo account without having to type a single character. Your film then zaps out onto your flash drive, a process that, in my case (using a USB 3.0 device) took about 30 seconds. That’s it!

The movie files range in size from 1.5 to 2.1 gigs. If you don’t have that much space available on your flash drive, a USB external hard drive can alternatively be plugged into the kiosk.

But wait! If this is your first time using Digiboo, you’re not quite done. You need to register your laptop before you can view your movie. As frequent MSP travelers know, as wonderful as MSP is in virtually every other way, they criminally still do not have free wi-fi. Until they join all the other wi-fi forward-thinking airports of the world, say San Salvador or Bucharest, Digiboo has a solution.

If you think ahead, you can register your laptop at home, right now in fact, using the Digiboo website. But if you haven’t done this step, here’s the beautiful thing, each Digiboo kiosk is also a wi-fi hotspot. You can’t surf the web, but you can register and also install the Digiboo player app on your laptop without hunting for a wi-fi hotspot or paying for an airport wi-fi subscription. Simply connect to the Digiboo wi-fi hub and zip-zop your laptop is registered. You don’t even need to open a browser.

Plug the flash drive into your laptop and double click the Digiboo player setup exe file. Again, this is a first-time-only task that requires a wi-fi connection, so don’t run to your departure gate until you’ve completed this step using the Digiboo wi-fi hotspot. Even on my foot-dragging netbook, the install only took about 2-3 minutes. Now you’re ready to watch your movie, in my case, The Dark Knight.

Digiboo has only landed the licensing rights to standard-definition movies (so far), but being that I typically travel with my 10” screen netbook these days, I doubt I’ll miss those lost lines of resolution.

Following the initial installation at Minneapolis/St Paul airport, Digiboo will install kiosks in the Seattle and Portland airports in the next few weeks. Further expansion is expected this summer.

Now, is Digiboo a desperately needed airport/airplane entertainment solution or a flash-in-the-pan, geek-bait novelty?

It is, albeit near the very bottom of the list of First World Problems, a bit tedious to be shuffling a flash drive between a kiosk and a laptop for 5-10 minutes just to load and watch a movie. And one analyst rightly points out that consumers are embracing streaming video with breathtaking speed, ostensibly rendering the Digiboo service obsolete before it even gets started. However, any frequent traveler will recognize that massive demand still potentially exists within the captive, in-transit demographic who don’t want to suffer through streaming movies via airplane wi-fi, not to mention the inaccessibility of streaming options like Netflix and Hulu when one is outside of the US. (Though there are work-arounds for truly dedicated, savvy geeks.)

The only reason I’m writing about Digiboo is that I believe I’ll be using this service lavishly from here on out. With my frequent, long trips abroad and utter loathing of paying for hotel wi-fi under any circumstances, having movies sitting on my hard drive has been and continues to be the ideal solution. Until someone invents something better.

For the moment, Digiboo movies will only play on Windows devices. Plans to expand to the Mac and Android OSs are in process.

——————————————————————————-

*The following paragraph is unrelated to the post above

Itching to see Australia? Flight Centre has cheap international flights to Australia from all over the world.

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“What was the worst travel scam you’ve ever fallen for?” Doug Mack asked me during the second round of drinks at a recent “meeting.” The soon-to-be-published travel author had just returned from a trip to Havana, Cuba, where he and his girlfriend had been victim to the “I meant that’s the price per person” airport taxi scam after forking over the originally agreed upon total, and was looking to commiserate.

I paused, trying to think of a gripping story, but came up empty. It’s possible that Doug, like many people before him, believes that I get into a hell of a lot more hijinks while on the road than I actually do. I don’t know why people think this. Believe it or not, I am, in general, the picture of common sense and decorum while I’m on the road. My world travels have been surprisingly, almost uncannily, disaster-free.

Yes, there were the relentless, but relatively tiny bribes I was shaken down for during my first visit to Moldova and Transdniestr (I’ve since developed a defense strategy.) There was that time some jackass tried to snare me with the Greedy Tourist scam in Kiev. I might have been kinda drugged while going through the naughty tourist motions in Bangkok’s notorious Pat Pong district. But in 25 years of traveling abroad I’ve never been robbed, beaten or even had medium sums of money liberated from my wallet.

Usually it’s inexperienced travelers that get caught up in travel scams. Naivety, unfamiliarity, fatigue, greed, drunkenness or an unfortunate combination can lead people to do things they might not ordinarily do. Exchange money at the bus station with a dude sporting a face scar? Buy discounted precious stones to sell for a huge profit back home? Two incredibly attractive women suddenly wanna be your best friends and go bar hopping? Instant alarm bells would go off if any of this happened at home, so why do people fall victim to these situations in foreign countries?

Some travel scams are far more sophisticated. So sophisticated that even travel-hardened veterans sometimes fall for them. Longtime Africa savvy traveler Peter Gostelow recently fell victim to a new wrinkle on the bait-and-switch money changing scheme in Malawi. After six months of living in Romania, in the company of three eagle-eyed companions, one of them Romanian, I was taken for quadruple the normal taxi fare in Bucharest (which still only amounted to about US$35).

In truth, anyone having an off day can fall for a scam, not just traveler newbies. As proof, I solicited travel scam stories from a few travel writing veterans. Here’s a sampling:

Eva Holland website Twitter

“I was freshly arrived in Istanbul, and naturally I was only carrying big bills, straight from the Forex. So when I got hopelessly lost and wound up taking a quick taxi ride back to familiar ground, the driver had to hand over a lot of change. Later, when I went to spend those bills, I learned that they were discontinued notes, now-worthless old lira rather than the new ones that had come into circulation a year earlier. He must have had them ready and waiting for a sucker to climb in his cab — and this time, that sucker was me.”

Paul Clammer Twitter

“Even experienced travellers have to start somewhere, and so it was that I found myself in Morocco in 1994, looking for help in a Lonely Planet guide I’d one day end up co-authoring.

We’d arrived in Casablanca, and almost immediately fallen in with a lovely guy who took us around and introduced us to mint tea. Nothing untoward, but when we met him the next day he needed $30 to pay for a parcel that needed posting – of course we were happy to oblige, and he’d pay us back in the evening. Our rendezvous that night was in a seedy bar, and when we arrived there were plenty of empty bottles on the table. He’d pay us back in a moment, but first a few beers.

And then the details of a complicated drug smuggling scam – he had friends on the docks, who immediately turned up, equally drunk and swaggering and looming over us. Maybe we could actually lend him some more money, as an investment for a bigger shipment? It sounded like an offer we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) refuse. Nervously, we offered another round of drinks, and then when we were at the bar, ran pell-mell out of the door, and straight into a taxi. Thoroughly spooked, we crept out of Casablanca on the first bus the next morning. ”

Zora O’Neill website Twitter

“Egypt is difficult because the people who aren’t scamming you are so incredibly kind, so I live in fear of mistakenly accusing one of the nice people of being a sleazy bastard.

What happened this time: I was there in September 2011, so people were still a bit giddy about the revolution. My first day out walking around Cairo, everyone on the street was all, “Hey, you heard about us in America? What we did? Revolution!”

On a quiet street, one guy flagged me down. He wanted me, an American, to understand how Egyptians worked together. During the 18 days of the revolution, he told me, he and his neighbors, Copts and Muslims, had banded together to keep the street safe. My scam-sensors were on high alert. But he was talking to me about the revolution–he couldn’t possibly be so callous as to be using this as bait. Could he?

Oh, of course he could. Next thing I knew, I was locked in this basement perfume shop, sipping tea and sniffing really dubious lotus-flower oil.

For the first time in my life of visiting Egypt (nearly 20 years at this point), I bought some perfume. It must’ve been a cumulative effect over the decades–the touts finally wore me down. I spent nine bucks on some crappy lavender oil. I did turn down the upsell for the pretty glass bottle. “Well, I had to try,” the guy tending the store said with a shrug.

I wrote it off in my expenses as “Onsite research” and added a note in the guidebook about revolution-related sales gambits. And how you shouldn’t get too mad at the sales guys–they have to try.”

Ryan Ver Berkmoes website Twitter

“First time I took a guided day trip tour. It was from Mexico City to assorted old Aztec ruins and pyramids. I was psyched as the price was great and I’d see a lot in one day. Well what I saw a lot of was really shitty gift shops filled with other glassy-eyed daytrippers looking at a lot of crap, much of it imported from China. Meanwhile the “guide” was collecting his commissions and telling us how this was his “cousin’s place” and other complete nonsense.

Our lovely lunch was a bus-trip-filled slop house with steaming tables of shit that wouldn’t pass muster at Taco Bell. Our stops at the sites were very brief and mostly consisted of warnings NOT to buy handicrafts from the vendors of the official gift stores… (as opposed to his “cousins”)

I learned my lesson and am very picky about ever signing on for day trips. There are good ones, but first ascertain how many retail opportunities will be presented, etc.”

What’s the worst travel scam you’ve ever fallen for? Were you on your first trip or your twentieth?

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From: Leif Pettersen
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 03:41 AM
To: submissions@inflightmagazine.com
Subject: pich

Dear booger eater,

You know, I’ve always hated your magazine. Erry time I pick up this stink bomb and sedate my brain with the tedious hack work you jackoffs print I wanna rip open the emergency exit door and jump to my deth.

Is your editorial direcction set by a nun, a 3rd grader and Papa Smurf? Jesus.

But I found out yer the new editer I thought I’d give you a chance at printing something other than complete shite for once.

I’ve been stalking you online for three days now and I think we’re total soulmates. Were both drink wine and watch Nurse Jackie and think that vacaions in Florida is for bitches. So, clearly you’re not an idiot. Respect!!!1

So, heres my idea: you send me to Italy, I rent a fucking Lamborghini and I just drive, man. Just drive aroun and see what happens! You ever notice how if you drive a Lamboghinni in Italy you can get away anything! I shit you not. I culd dress like a hobo, drive my Lambo right up to the Vatican and that’d totally let me in! its a intriguing dichotomy and a statement vis a vis society to day.

So that’s it. If this works, we could do all a series. Drive a Lambergini to France, drive a lamborghini to Spain, etc, etc. and I ll totally tweet everything, facebok, etc, etc.

You chew on that. I’m gonna chew on this burrito.

Call me.

Leif Peterse

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Oh, look! Another voter-driven, who-to-follow travel Twitter list!

So, here’s the fundamental problem with these voter-driven lists: they’re far more reflective of existing popularity and the willingness to campaign by the contenders than appreciable talent. Sure, voter-driven Top Whatever lists serve a vaguely useful purpose, even if that purpose is often a distant third to page views and link bait. And in this instance, credit where credit is due, several people from the original list of contenders are performing much better on Twitter these days, in my opinion, than the last time I checked in on/unfollowed them, so there’s something to be said for that welcome revelation which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise experienced.

That said, when/if a who-to-follow travel Twitter list is at all necessary, I feel that readers are far better served by a list that’s been carefully cultivated by someone with highly selective, exacting taste, along with a few words explaining why those travel Twitter personalities merit following.

(Who, me? OK, I’ll do it.)

For the sake of disclosure, the attributes I most appreciate (and personally aspire to) in travel twittering are: a pleasing balance between informational, evocative, entertaining and reasonable self-promotional tweets, dispensed, when space allows, with style and wit.

Here’s the problem, or perhaps it’s just my problem… Lots of people do a couple of these things admirably well, but surprisingly few manage to consistently deliver the entire package. Far too many people burden their followers with an overabundance of tedious, off-topic tweets, wearying self-promotion and/or operate as if Twitter is an instant messaging application. A little of this is fine and expected when one engages on Twitter, but there’s a threshold and, frustratingly, too many people have no idea when they’ve galloped through that threshold on their non-stop, express trip to Suckville. These failings, and my daily struggle to manage distractions, are why I have been and continue to be so fastidious with my Twitter feed management.

With that in mind, and in no particular order, the following are some of the travel people who, when I’m hurriedly skimming Twitter, I always stop and read due to the high probability that they’ve tweeted something great. Of course, this isn’t remotely comprehensive, so anyone that wants to point me toward similar feeds, please leave a comment.

David Whitley: The Grumpy Traveller’s Twitter feed is chock full of travel wisdom, frank opinions and hilarity, with an endearing self-effacing touch. The man is a veritable tornado of freelancing activity, so there’s rarely a moment when he isn’t on a trip, planning a trip or just grumpily returning from a trip. Though he’s recently threatened a direction change, I’ve long been a loyal fan of his blog for its insightfulness and, usually deserved, lambasting of various travel industry shortcomings that every writer, PR person and traveler should absorb.

Ryan Ver Berkmoes: Though Ryan mostly ignored Twitter in the beginning, over the past year or so he’s been active and totally nailing it. He managed the difficult trick of cultivating strong Twitter content without the usual newbie mistakes and now his careful link selection, reliable one-liners and the fact that he’s seemingly on the road for 300 days a year for Lonely Planet, make his feed uniformly exceptional.

Grant Martin: Grant has forgotten more about flying and flight booking than most of us can ever (honestly) claim in our bios. He somehow serves as the editor-in-chief at Gadling while still holding down a fulltime, frequent traveling job requiring him to look at stuff in giant microscopes. He’s also not afraid to publicly call people out on concerns/infractions when necessary, which, of course, I love.

Annemarie Dooling: In a sign of how I’m sometimes alarmingly closed off from great people on Twitter, I only started following Annemarie about six months ago. Holding down what seems to be five or six different blogging jobs is probably why she always seems to have a finger on (and tweets from) the pulse of digital and print travel media.

Mike Barish: More “character” than “personality,” Mike’s feed is eclectic and fun, though his affection for SkyMall products is cause for mild concern. Mike’s showmanship, wit and gift for quippy commentary were seemingly made for Twitter, often out-shining whatever link he happens to be tweeting.

Jamie Pearson: My interest in the mommy blogging genre is just a whisker below my interest in kitty fashion shows and just above my interest in NASCAR. So that I find Jamie’s feed to be consistently smart and entertaining is a testament to her personality and tweet selection, even when they are mommy tweets.

Jodi Ettenberg: I’ve spent some time with Jodi and know this isn’t (literally) true, but based on her Twitter engagement, I like to imagine her Blackberry is Velcroed to her forearm, runner style. Her relentless, yet engaging feed, documenting her ongoing vagabonding and peppered with reliably clickable links on a large variety of topics, many of them #longreads, is endlessly impressive and fascinating.

Paul Clammer: Lonely Planet author, NGO worker and baffling appreciator of what I call “unleisure travel.” Paul’s guidebooks include Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Dominican Republic and Haiti, where he’s currently living, volunteering and firing off evocative tweets.

Zora O’Neill: Yet another seemingly in perma-transit Lonely Planet colleague, with a particular talent for sharing factoids, clever insights and food tweets wherever she washes up.

David Farley: In addition to being an extremely talented travel writer, Farley is the author of one of history’s most bizarre pieces of travel narrative nonfiction, “An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.” He’s also one of the most (sometimes) brutally honest people I follow on Twitter, which can be both gratifying and sometimes scary.

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Remember Slackerology? My probably best-selling, award-winning, religion-changing, planet-saving book proposal may have fizzled out on the desks of 26 editors, to the detriment of all society (history will vindicate me), but I’m still living and honing the theory every day.

[If you need to get up to speed on the modern, minimalist lifestyle I’ve cheekily labeled ‘Slackerology’, you can read about it in great detail here, here, here, here and here or read an incredibly condensed explanation here.]

Further to that, I recently had the occasion to do a detailed calculation of my annual living expenses for the first time (oddly) since moving back to the US and, while I knew the number would be low, the total shocked even me.

My base annual expenses came in at almost exactly US$25,000. Add in the expenses for a few, longish, non-work trips and I’m pegging my annual sustainable income needs at about 28 grand.

How the Bachmann do I do it? Before I tell you, one little thing…

This blog post is entitled “How I live on $25,000 a year,” not “How you can live on $25,000 a year.” Every person and living situation is going to be different. So, those of you who are already getting tuned up to post a comment like “Dear Pompous Ass, what you’ve said here just isn’t feasible when you’re from [place with an inordinately high cost of living] and live 10 miles from work, so thanks for the useless information, but I can’t blah, blah, blah, lame excuses, blah…” can save yourselves the effort. I do not care and I will probably mock you. However, I’d be overjoyed if you gleaned and applied even one or two ideas from this post that could potentially make a difference to your annual living expenses.

OK, my base annual living expenses are comprised of the following list:

•    Mortgage/condo association fee – I live in a 606 square foot (56.3 square meter) condo in a non-flashy building, in the dead-center of Minneapolis, a city that happens to have reasonable property prices. And I have space to spare. As I’ve proselytized previously, people don’t need very much space to live comfortably. My mortgage and condo association fee (which pays for everything except electric, internet and phone) comes out to roughly $1,120 a month.

•    Electric – My small living space and modest lifestyle mean that my electric bill stays low, averaging $32 a month over the past 12 months.

•    Internet – Non-fluctuating, non-debatable expense, $45 a month.

•    Phone – I only have a cell phone (no landline), with voice and data service. No text messaging. Why no text messaging? Because it costs an extra $10 a month and my Android has email, five kinds of instant messaging/chatting software and, oh yeah, makes phone calls. Remember phone calls? Also, text messaging is destroying in-person social interaction (I’m speaking of those people who send/receive one text message for every six waking minutes of their day and give those texts priority over the people sitting right next to them) and greatly increases the chances that idiots will hit me with their cars. But my friends are hard to train and they still send me texts now and then, which cost 15 cents each. So, my cell phone bill fluctuates between $59 and $61 a month.

•    Groceries – I typically spend $40-55 a week on groceries.

•    Transport – This is the estimated, seasonally fluctuating expense for my rechargeable bus/train pass and the maintenance for my bike. I work from home and rarely ride public transport in the warmer months. I estimate that I pay roughly $300 a year.

•    Entertainment/food/alcohol – A generously padded fund. I don’t go out for lavish dinners of lobster burgers and foie gras dogs very often, but I do more than my fair share of brunches, food trucks, happy hours, drinks, burgers, burritos, delivered pizzas, and movies. Also, I enjoy the occasional (case of) wine and cider. I’ve allotted $4,300 a year.

•    Health insurance – I happen to be an exceptionally healthy and (attention ladies) virile 41 year old. With my history of indestructibleness, I have made what seems like a sensible gamble and only purchased basic, individual health insurance which costs $87 a month.

•    Miscellaneous – I landed on $1,800 a year. An admittedly arbitrary, but I believe safe, number for irregular purchases such as clothes, books, DVDs, presents and, every third year or so, a new laptop and smartphone, among other things.

That’s it. That’s 25 grand.

Now, you may notice a few, glaring omissions from that list, including:

•    Car – As I’ve already described in wretched detail, car ownership is second only to shelter in daily expenses and one of the leading time-consuming maintenance burdens and hair-yanking stress triggers for most people. Admittedly, this choice is especially easy for me because I work from home and I’ve located myself in a walkable neighborhood that also happens to be my city’s main public transport hub, but there you go. Not owning a car means approximately $9,000 that I don’t have to raise each year to keep it physically and legally running.

•    Gym membership – My condo group shares an embarrassingly basic, but perfectly passable fitness center. Nevertheless, most of my neighbors maintain gym memberships elsewhere, because they’ve convinced themselves they’ll get a better workout if there are more sweaty people around, white towels everywhere, a different, refrigerator-sized apparatus for every muscle group and cardio equipment with cable TV that constantly measures 16 vital signs and sperm count. Even without my pitiable fitness center, I’m confident that I could get a perfectly good workout by purchasing a few, small, key pieces of equipment (about the same price as maybe two or three months of gym membership fees), educating myself on do-it-yourself cardio and muscle isolation exercises and good old fashion discipline.

•    Dental – I’m one of those medical tourists you read about. I get my teeth checked out in Romania every summer while doing guidebook research. A check-up costs about US$15. I’ve had a few very old fillings drilled out and refilled in recent years, which, with x-rays, costs about US$20 each.

•    Pets – Disclaimer that pet owners should read before sending hate mail/comments: I am already acutely aware that I approach life with what is apparently an especially high level of critical logic and common sense. Imagine a high-functioning Rain Man, but with better taste in food and TV. People behaving in a manner seemingly devoid of logic and common sense is a source of endless bafflement and frustration for me. At the top of this list is any action/behavior/philosophy motivated by religion, followed closely by how utterly useless nearly all politicians have become, but pet ownership is probably in the top 10. What pet owners see as emotionally uplifting companionship, cuteness and I don’t know what else, I see as an unnecessary output of resources. Never mind that caring for pets requires mild (goldfish) to substantial (dogs) time and energy, not to mention the ongoing disposal of fecal matter, vomit and the logistical management for whenever one wants to leave town or even have a long day away from home if Fido/Fluffy shits/barfs on the carpet if he isn’t attended to every six hours, but those extra expenses add up quickly. Especially so when the pet gets old or sick. Even in a year with no pet emergencies, those expenses mean all the more hours you have to be at work to raise the money to keep that pet alive, as well as time away from work/friends to care for the pet when they get into the dark chocolate or tin foil. If you have the debilitating craving for non-verbal companionship and the daily clean-up of another entity’s excretions, go volunteer at a hospital ICU or animal shelter or something.

•    Shopping – I don’t shop. Correction: once or twice a year, someone close to me corners me with a shotgun, binds my hands, injects me with a sedative, throws me into the trunk of a car and drives to an Old Navy. This is how I get new clothes. Apart from that, I don’t shop. This is largely due to the fact that my job/social life do not require dressy attire or even all that much variety. Lastly, “de-crapify your life” is one of the base tenets of Slackerology, and idle shopping – clothes, knickknacks, whatever – does not mix with having less crap. Plus, shopping makes me sleepy and hungry.

That’s pretty much the gist of it. A low-impact, comfortable, well-fed, frequently inebriated lifestyle for 25 grand a year, what many people could earn in a low-stress, part-time job – or full-time freelance travel writing in a shitty economy. Add two vacations in foreign lands each year and bump it up to 28 grand. Any additional income you want for savings/investments is up to you. (Obviously, adjust for the cost of living and income in your area.)

So, please help this high-functioning Rain Man understand, why do people sacrifice free time, friends, family, health and a decent night’s sleep to earn double or triple that much and more?

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