The Writers’ Roundup is on vacation until I reconnect with my Google Reader in late February. I need a break from RSS! If you really miss it, you can always browse old Writers’ Roundups; they may be old, but they’re still bursting with information.

Whenever I spend money on travel, a few people raise their eyebrows (even if those eyebrows are digital), suggesting that it’s frivolous. Or that I’m “lucky” to have that kind of disposable income.

But part of the reason I can afford to spend money on travel is because I don’t spend money on handbags. Or shoes. Or expensive dinners or fancy shows. I don’t go out drinking often, I don’t take many cabs, I don’t get my hair colored, and I rarely shop for clothes.

In other words, I can afford to travel because I’m frugal in other parts of my life. My trip is someone else’s Gucci.

(Plus, I travel cheaply. Partly because backpacking lets me see places the way locals do, and partly because that means I can afford to travel more.)

We all choose our priorities. Yes, we have unavoidable expenses, but so much of how we spend is choice — choice that’s often mistaken for obligation.

Remember: most of your obligations are actually choices.

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One of the best things about travel, says my friend Elise, who joined me in Costa Rica last week, is how it bends time — how time moves more slowly when you’re on the road, and you can fit more memories into a shorter period.

It’s true. When I first drafted this post, I’d only been traveling in Central America for two weeks, but it felt like I’d been away for far longer. At home, when I’m busy with my daily routine of work, hitting the gym and seeing friends, two weeks can go by in a snap. But when I’m experiencing a new place, time crawls… in a good way.

That’s partly because when you’re traveling, time doesn’t matter. Unless you’ve got a bus to catch or someone to meet (and in some countries, even those obligations don’t run on schedules), you simply don’t need to know the time. You wake up with the sun, eat when you’re hungry and explore – or try to get to your next destination – during the rest of the day.

But it takes a while to get to that place, to embrace the timelessness of travel.

During my backpacking trip in Africa, an expat friend gave me a bracelet with a wooden circle that sat on the outside of my wrist. It looked like a watch without a face. Back then, I actually wore a watch to work, so going without one while backpacking seemed, well, deviant — and replacing it with the bracelet, symbolic.

Now I rely on my smartphone to tell time when I’m home, not bothering with a proper watch. Yet it still seemed fitting when I bought a blue woven bracelet from an artist in northwestern Costa Rica and tied it onto my left wrist, filling the space where my watch once lived. That bracelet reminds me to let time bend.

Why does it bend? I think time moves so slowly when we travel because we’re focused on the now, on living in this very moment, rather than thinking about what’s on tap in an hour or tomorrow or next week. Time bends not only because we’ve forgotten it exists, but also because we’re deeply embedded in the watch’s nemesis: the present.

My present is a mountain town called Monteverde, a cool reprieve from the hot beaches where I’ve spent most of the last week. It’s touristy here, but I’m so fascinated by the ecosystem and the people who live here that I don’t really mind.

Santa Elena, the town next to Monteverde (Costa Rica).

For environmentalists, you’ve got the cloud forest to hike through, where you can spot spiders (including tarantulas!), raccoon-like animals called coati, rare birds (like the quetzal, which I saw yesterday) and the sloth. I know, right? Who knew sloths were an actual animal?!

A cloud forest, I learned while hiking through one yesterday, is similar to the rainforest, but drier and cooler, which means it’s home to a different set of animals than you’d find in a tropical rainforest. It’s called a cloud forest because it’s literally in the clouds; we’re so high up here in the mountains that the forest has near-permanent fog and mist.

If that’s not enough, there’s also a community of Quakers here, settlers from America. Lonely Planet tells me they came here years ago to escape the draft – they’re pacifists. Now they operate a cheese factory in town, have a Quaker school, etc.

I ran into a guy who’s part of this community yesterday in an ice cream shop, where a girl who I guessed went to the Quaker school had just sung a recital. He used to work in Manhattan as a lawyer, the guy told me, and moved to Monteverde seven years ago; his parents had lived here in the ’70s.

Our interaction lasted only as long as the (slow-moving) ice cream line, but I left there feeling both intrigued and satisfied. Intrigued because I wanted to know more about this lifestyle – and satisfied because I’d just learned a bit about how these people lived.

That’s why I travel. Sure, it’s cool to see a new species of bird or learn to speak a foreign language or taste the local cuisine. But the most fulfilling part of travel for me is the random, unplanned interactions with people who offer insight – whether intended or not – into how they live.

Those people moments are what bend time when I travel.

Planning to take a Leap in 2012? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer newsletter for practical tips on making it happen.

Schemers and Leapers (which is most of you), check out this cool new initiative: The Leapyear Project.

Since 2012 is a leap year, social entrepreneur Victor Saad is rallying anyone who has thought about taking a leap to do it now. His definition of leap includes anything that makes your community or the world a better place, but in my mind, that almost always includes self-improvement leaps, too.

I chatted with Victor via Skype recently, and he’s a pretty cool guy. He’s bootstrapping this project while living in Chicago, and he’s a perfect example of someone who’s creating his own career. Victor wants to earn a paycheck by building communities around initiatives for the public good, but the recent college grad didn’t wait for a company to hire him. Instead, he just started doing it. This is a brilliant and under-utilized professional move.

Victor Saad

I’d love to support him in this endeavor, partly because I think he has what it takes to succeed and partly because I love the premise of a Leapyear project. So here’s what I’m doing to get involved:

• Encouraging you all to check out The Leapyear Project site and see whether you’re well-positioned to participate.

• Rallying my local go-getter community on Leap Day — that’s February 29 — by holding a meetup in my neighborhood. If you live in or near Washington, D.C., I hope you’ll join us! Would love to hear about your leap.

Here’s a video from Victor about the project:

Planning to take a Leap in 2012? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer newsletter for practical tips on making it happen.

The Writers’ Roundup is on vacation until I reconnect with my Google Reader in late February. I need a break from RSS! If you really miss it, you can always browse old Writers’ Roundups; they may be old, but they’re still bursting with information.

My lover travel gave me the best Valentine’s Day gift ever — a border crossing.

Border crossings fascinate me because life can be so different on two sides of an artificial line.

On the Nicaraguan side, trucks lined up for nearly a mile waiting for inspection so they could deliver their goods into Costa Rica. People rode in beat-up taxis and chicken buses (aka old American school buses), and paid their fares in cordobas (200 = $1).

But once we walked into Costa Rica, the buses turned into coaches, relative luxury. This is, no doubt, the wealthier country. In many parts, dollars are used as often as colones, the local currency (500 = $1).

Here’s the other reason I love crossing a border: it means I’m deep inside a region, in the thick of local culture. It means I’m really experiencing the place. Most tourists don’t cross borders — we usually fly from one place to another, and don’t get far enough from the airport to cross into a neighboring country. But literally walking from one country into another is one of the most interesting travel experiences out there.

Exiting Nicaragua and entering Costa Rica required at least half a dozen passport checks. First we paid a municipal tax to leave, then waited in a short queue (and in the rain) to cross the road toward Nicaragua’s exit building, where we got exit stamps and exchanged the last of our cordobas for colones. (If you think it’s confusing to go from your currency to that of another country, try figuring out the exchange rate from the country you’re leaving to the country you’re entering.)

Then we walked across a parking lot and literally across the boder into Costa Rica:

My travel mates walking from Nicaragua into Costa Rica.

Entering Costa Rica!

Once across the border, several sets of border police checked our passports alongside the road until we entered a building, where we waited in a line for our entry stamps. Soon we were sitting on a coach bus, waiting in comfort for a ride to the nearest city, Liberia.

Of course, we could’ve boarded a bus in Nica with 40 other tourists and been ushered through this entire process…

But where’s the fun in that?

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I’m always on the lookout for tools and strategies to deal more efficiently with the overwhelming number of emails I get each day. Here’s something that’s helped out lately: Gmail’s Canned Responses.

Canned Responses lets you create a template for an email response that you write often, then import that response into your email with one click. Saves you LOADS of time.

So, for example, I often get emails from Brazen Life fans (a blog I manage and edit) asking how they can contribute guest posts. For the last few months, I’ve been responding to each one individually, letting them know that we do accept guest posts, so long as the topic and voice are unique, and linking to our writer guidelines.

With Canned Responses, I save myself from having to write that email over and over. Now when I get that request via email, I press “respond,” choose the appropriate Canned Response from a drop-down menu, and boom, the response is ready to go.

How’s that for saving precious minutes?

Here’s what Canned Responses looks like in my email:

I’ve also created a Canned Response for passing on press releases and another that says I’m traveling and will respond when I can (for my Nicaragua trip next month — I’ll send that note selectively rather than using an autoresponder).

So how do you add Canned Responses to your email arsenal? Sign into your Gmail account, then navigate to “Settings” (upper right corner) and “Labs.” (Google Labs are features still in test mode, which means they don’t automatically work; you have to add them onto your email to take advantage.) Then type “Canned Responses” into the search box, and activate the Lab.

You’ll also want to create a few Canned Responses from the start, and you do this by drafting the response as an email, then clicking on the “Canned Responses” drop-down and choosing “Save” –> “New Canned Response.”

The first step though, is thinking about how you can make this work for you. What email responses do you write again and again? Maybe it’s a response that has to do with your blog or your business, or a pet project or side gig. How could you use this Lab to make your life easier?

Would love to hear your ideas in the comments!

Planning to take a Leap in 2012? Subscribe to The Traveling Writer newsletter for practical tips on making it happen.