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Posts Tagged ‘travel’

Traveling Tips #2 – Where Will You Be Robbed?

Posted in Other, Uncategorized, tagged , on October 6, 2010| 3 Comments »

Before we go any further, there are three things I want you to take to heart:

First, only a small handful of people experience personal danger while traveling! Of course, you hear about every single one of them in the news, so it seems like everybody has been victimized! That is just not true.

Second, almost nothing violent is more likely to happen to you abroad than could happen to you at home in the USA. If you don’t believe me, go turn on the local evening news or look at the police blotter in your hometown newspaper.

Lastly, much of what is really dangerous cannot really be avoided regardless of where you are. Earthquakes are dangerous, bombs on street corners are dangerous, hidden snipers looking for random victims are dangerous, violent people high on hard drugs are dangerous—and there is very little you can do to protect yourself against random danger.  By the way, all of the above are events that have happened in the U.S. in 2010, not in some foreign capital. See Point #2 above!

Having set the parameters for our conversation now, let’s look at the things we can do to travel more safely—wherever we are going!

The most common crime that travelers experience is petty theft, so what can you do to protect yourself from petty thieves?

  • Don’t bring anything, don’t wear anything that you can’t afford to lose! And I do mean anything. Let’s assume that you know better than to wear big diamonds or expensive watches, but don’t forget your camera, or your laptop, or your locket that your grandmother gave you, or your new Kindle. Many things you might regret losing, or it might be an inconvenience to lose, but the less you have that is truly valuable to you, the less you have that is valuable to a petty thief.
  • If you must bring something that is valuable to anyone else, keep it out of sight as much as possible. Your new Ipad may not have anything on it and be insured, so you are not worried about the possibility of it being stolen, but just carrying it on the shopping streets or using it in a café or while on public transportation could be more temptation than a watchful thief could stand.  Same for any kind of jewelry. Same for expensive clothes. Same for your passport!
  • There is absolutely no totally secure place to hide your valuables. I know of LST workers who have had money stolen from the bedroom of the home of their host by adult children of the host. I know people who have had the pouches cut that hang from their necks but under their shirt while they were asleep on trains. Backpacks and fanny packs are about the worst places to carry anything of any value; they are easily slit without your ever being aware. Checked luggage is easily opened and searched for goodies (This just happened at a US airport!). If I have a large amount of money or electronics, I will use either the hotel safe or the hotel room safe to store them for the duration of my stay—and even then I’m not 100% confident that it will be there when I get back.
  • Carry on your person only what you must have for that day. The last thing you ever want to do is to pull out a wallet full of your travel money in front of anyone!  This means you have to anticipate what you might spend and only carry that much with you or just a little more. (This is also a good budgeting technique!) Only carry your one emergency credit card—and have the emergency number somewhere else so that you can call immediately if it is stolen.
  • The safest place to carry extra cash, extra credit cards, and your passport is a safety pouch that you wear as a belt under your clothes. Now don’t do this going through security at the airport or you will have to virtually undress. Don’t carry ALL your money there or you’ll have to reveal all just to buy a coke!  Anticipate!! 
  • If someone attempts to rob you, resistance is almost always futile–and often dangerous. Imagine the danger of grabbing them or chasing them or beating them with your umbrella!! Besides, half the time the criminals are little kids or old ladies—and they always work in groups! It is almost never just one person you would have to go up against.  Resisting increases the chances that you might get hurt.
  • Know where the thieves like to hang out and look for victims. If you are staying at a tourist hotel, you can count on there being thieves in the vicinity, also, outside all those places where tourists go, on public transportation that goes to where tourists go, near train stations, and for you missionary types, anywhere that is identified as a place where Americans show up—like churches—is watched for an opportunity!   Now I didn’t say to avoid those places; rather, just be more aware and take less stuff there!

Sherrylee and I have traveled literally hundreds of thousands of miles to many parts of the globe for over forty years and we have never experienced any physical danger from assailants, and we have lost almost nothing to petty thieves—not because we are such vigilant travelers, but just by God’s grace!  It can happen to anyone, any place, any time even those who make the best preparations.  Naiveté, ignorance, or stupidity, however, will not contribute to your safety, so perhaps these pointers will be of help as you travel.

    What else do you do to avoid petty theft when you travel?

    Next: More Traveling Safety Tips

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    Tips For Planning Travel Abroad

    Posted in Christian Missions, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , on October 4, 2010| 3 Comments »

    Sherrylee and I are planning LST travel to Europe soon, so I am buried in airline, train, hotel, and rental car websites!  I’ve done this a lot—especially in Europe, so I thought I might share some tips with you.

    Know what your priorities are for your trip! I usually am juggling two or three different elements:  number of travel days, places that we need to visit, and costs are the big ones. In the last few years, Sherrylee has made me also include rest—probably pretty smart on longer trips.

    Here are some questions to help you rank your priorities.

    • Are your travel dates fixed or are you flexible? If fixed, rank this high; if flexible, you can move it down your list.
    • Where do you have to be? For us, this means surveying potentially new LST work sites or maintaining relationships with established LST sites.  For this next trip, our dates are fixed, so we are limited to how many places we can go to. For that reason, I have already had to make hard choices between established sites and new sites.
    • How much money do you have to spend? If you have more money than time, your answer will be different from those people on smaller budgets or shorter agendas. For LST trips, the answer is always small budget and long agenda—which is why it takes lots of time and research to make it work.  Yesterday I was looking at the cost of trains versus flights between Zagreb and Budapest—which is also a question of how much time we have as well.
    • What are the non-negotiables? We must be in Frankfurt on Wednesday the 17th because we must pickup someone at the airport who is joining us there!  We must be in Rothenburg on the 21st for the start of the American-European Retreat!  Almost everything else is subject to change.
    • What pace can you sustain? We have actually begun allowing ourselves at least a day of rest after the transatlantic flight if at all possible. In addition, rather than trying to be in another place every day—which is how we used to plan these trips—we now allow an extra day in some places, mostly just to pace ourselves.  People who don’t pace themselves often either exhaust themselves to the point they can’t complete their agenda, or they arrive home so exhausted that they lose a week or two recovering from their trip. Your trip will be more enjoyable, if you will pace yourself.

    I then work in concentric circles, from the BIG details to the smaller details. For me, this means buying tickets to Europe and back first!  That sets the boundaries with exact dates of travel.  The only tickets I have bought to date are the flights over the Atlantic.

    Next, I try to book the non-negotiables. For instance, I have made hotel reservations only in Rothenburg so far.  Today, I intend to nail down whether we will spend the night in Frankfurt on the 16th before our guest arrives early the next morning. We probably will, so we will need a hotel not too far from the airport!

    Then, I try to plan an affordable route. Usually it is least expensive to travel in the same direction as opposed to crisscrossing . If you are scheduling meetings with people in lots of different places, this can be challenging, so you have to work on it early, before you start purchasing any of your other travel. I like to fly to the furthest point, then work my way back to the place we will return from.  For this trip, that means flying from DFW to Frankfurt, but going to Turkey first, working our way back through eastern Europe and finishing in western Europe.

    After all of the transportation is set and purchased, then I go back and book hotels and rental cars, where necessary. These seem to be easier to cancel than flights, if something changes—and  something always changes!!

    Next, I’ll talk about useful websites and travel information that might help you, as well as strategies for using them.

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    From Pecos to Escondido: The Road Trip Continued

    Posted in Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2010| 2 Comments »

    American highways are remarkably free from roadkill! Yesterday we drove 934 miles and I don’t remember seeing anything dead on the road at all. Did you know that most of the roadkill in Australia are kangaroos! And you see a  lot. In fact, many people have those big cowcatchers—I don’t know what else to call them—on the front of their vehicles because hitting roos on the roads is so common.

    You’ll remember from yesterday that Sherrylee and I decided at the last minute to drive to California to help with an LST YoungFriends project at the North County Church of Christ in Escondido, just north of San Diego. You can read about the first 446 miles in yesterday’s posting—but you can start here also. The great thing about journeys is that they have an official starting place, of course, but today’s start is just as much of a start as yesterday’s start.  There must be a sermon there somewhere!

    After a quick stop at the ubiquitous Wal-Mart in Pecos, Texas, we got on the road again. Sherry enjoys reading aloud while I drive, so she suggested reading the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, we are pretty weird, but don’t worry, we balanced it with a Robert Ludlum novel later in the day.

    We have been reading and talking about Roman Catholicism for some time, since her brother recently became a Catholic priest.  Yesterday, most of our reading and conversation was on sacramentalism, but that is a topic for another blog.

    The amazing thing about driving in Texas is that when you get to El Paso, your halfway to California. Of course you have to speed past the sand dunes in Monahans, the Davis Mountains and Fort Davis, McDonald Observatory near Alpine, and the many great Tex-Mex restaurants along the way or you will just turn around and say, “Why would I ever want to leave Texas!!”

    The only thing I really found interesting in New Mexico was driving through Lordsburg.  Who knows what classic journey film has Lordsburg as the stagecoach’s final destination?

    Now Arizona has Tombstone and Yuma, but we missed the 3:10 train. I forgot about the time zone change! We didn’t stop, but if we go back that way, I’m planning to try to stop and sightsee.

    At some stop, we balanced our morning catechesis with an audiobook from Cracker Barrel (where else?) called The Bourne Deception—the full 17.5 hour/15 disc version. Pretty good deal for $3.50!  It was so good that we skipped supper. Our only interruptions were the Border Patrol control points—something we had never seen before.

    The Board Patrol check Points reminded me of the Arizona controversy. We were waved through easily, but I couldn’t help but think about it being a different story if we had been Latino—either of us.  I’m all for controlling our borders better to prevent illegal aliens from entering, but if you have ever been a foreigner in a foreign country (stranger in a strange land is the biblical phrase) and been discriminated against, you would know how humiliating and offensive any form of profiling or discrimination is.

    When Sherrylee and I lived in Germany and were looking for an apartment, we would occasionally call about one that looked great to us, only to be hung up on because we were aliens with an accent. That was almost as bad as the people who used the less formal language forms when talking to us as if we were either children or stupid. Well, you can see that I am sympathetic with aliens from my own experience of being one.

    You have time to think about many things on a road trip!

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    Roadtrips

    Posted in Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 11, 2010| 1 Comment »

    Sherrylee and I love road trips!  I’m talking about where you throw stuff in the car, take off, and drive for hours and hours.  In this day of instant gratification, which includes getting to places quickly from wherever we are, road trips seem a thing of the past, but since I’m writing this in the breakfast room of a Holiday Inn Express in Pecos, Texas—8 hours from Fort Worth and 12 hours from Escondido, CA.—I want to tell you about ours, so you can see what you think.

    Yesterday about 11am, we decided that I needed to go to Escondido, where LST is sending a YoungFriends group from Dallas for a week-long mission trip. We sometimes do this to simply provide a little help to both the group sponsor and the hosting church. Since our daughter Emily and her family are in Escondido, Sherry wanted to go too, but have you looked at last minute ticket prices lately! She suggested that we leave right away and drive—1394 miles—19+hours!  In less than 10 minutes, we had decided to do it—so we agreed to leave at 2pm.

    She went to the Hair Cabin for whatever, and I tied up stuff at the office, then stopped the mail for 10 days, ate lunch with the staff, and went home to pack.  Packing for road trips is soooooo easy because you don’t have to worry about weight, you don’t have to worry about how many ounces of liquid, you can take your good shoes, your running shoes, AND your flipflops—and they don’t even have to go in the suitcase. The best of all is being able to hang your clothes in the backseat. What a luxury!

    We were almost giddy as we drove out of the city right before rush-hour traffic—about 3:30, not 2pm—but that’s OK.  The first thing we did was play the alphabet game. What—you’ve never played. You have to find all the letters in proper sequence, call out the word that contains the letter—which means your opponent can’t use that letter in that word—and you can’t look backwards!  Oh, yes, and it has to be on a sign, not anything moving.  Sherry and I are fierce competitors, so I will confess to one tense moment when we both saw the J in Justin Boots at the same time. I think I really beat her, but it was so early in the trip, we agreed to both claim it as a tie—any sacrifice for matrimonial harmony!  Ultimately my generosity paid off because I found the Z in pizza just outside of Abilene and won.  We’ll see what happens today!

    And we always stop at Crackerbarrel restaurants on road trips—mostly because of all the fun things you can do there!  First, you can walk around and say, “Who do you think would buy something like that?” Then we look at the pictures on the wall and see if any of our forefathers are memorialized in their antique pictures—well, those pictures are of somebody’s people!! Don’t laugh.  Then we always try to beat the little triangle peg game that they put on each table.  Sherry was obsessed yesterday, so I cheated and found a clue on the internet about where to start that let both of us beat it once—but then we couldn’t repeat, so I bought her one to bring on the trip as we left. Oops, now I know who buys that stuff!!

    Don’t forget to go to the bathroom at Crackerbarrel—except be careful. In nine out of ten Crackerbarrels, the men’s room is on the left and the women’s on the right, which only sets us Stammkunden up for an embarrassing moment if we ever walk into the exception! I’ve done it several times, I confess.

    Next we listened to 4-5 episodes of Garrison Keillor’s Stories from Lake Wobegon podcasts off the ITouch that my kids gave me several years ago! What great kids. We tried listening to Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which I had downloaded for free a couple of months ago. It was a little heavy for the mood yesterday, but it might work today.  If not, we’ll stop at the next Crackerbarrel and rent an audiobook on CD—see why we always go there!

    We pulled into Pecos, Texas about 11:15 last night, couldn’t find the hotel, drove around until we found something open where we could ask. Soon we were in our room—but the toilet was broken—so then we were in another room, tired, but glad we were on the road—together!

    I wonder what today will bring?

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