Now, more than four years later, I’ve come to understand that although loads of people take off on what they call “solo trips” every single day, most of them don’t stay solo for long.

One of the obvious perks of traveling on your own is that you don’t have to compromise your travel plans one iota. Feel like spending an extra day or two in a city you’re really enjoying? Go for it. Want to skip a stop you’d originally planned on? No problem. You have only yourself to answer to, and someone else’s conflicting travel style or agenda never has to get in the way.

But something most people who aren’t into solo travel don’t realize is that solo travelers are constantly meeting people when they’re out and about. Sometimes they strike up conversations with fellow travelers in hostel common rooms, sometimes they share drinks with locals. The bottom line is that whether you set off by yourself or not, you have to be really anti-social to avoid interacting with other people the whole time you’re on the road.

If you’re not as extroverted as some of the people you know, however, but you still prefer to travel by yourself, the internet has become a great tool to help bridge the gap. Your trip planning might be all about the solo travel ideas, but if that research leaves you with no tips on how to connect with people, you might get lonely quickly. Of the many online tools you can use to “meet” people before you meet them, the one we’re partial to (for obvious reason) is BootsnAll’s Facebook app, BootsnAll Traveler Connect.

Not only does BootsnAll Traveler Connect help you find locals in the places you’re visiting (so you can ask them questions and get travel advice before you arrive), it also helps you find people who are visiting the same places you are (so you can meet up if you’ll be there at the same time). It all happens through the Facebook interface you already know and love, but you don’t have to “friend” a bunch of strangers and give them access to your prom photos. We think it’s a grand tool, and we hope you do, too. Please let us know what you think of the app!

photo by Peter Gene

For me, the biggest part of TBEX – and, in fact, the reason for the formation of the group – is the people. I dearly love what I do, even if it means sitting in my house for days on end tapping away at a computer keyboard and not really interacting with anyone aside from my cats and my husband, and I also love that what I do has led me to meet so many incredible people. It’s things like TBEX that let me turn those virtual meetings into real-life meetings, and I can’t thank the organizers enough for that.

Not all travel bloggers are predisposed to craving human interaction, as blogging is a solitary art and travel is often about observation. I feel lucky, then, that so many of the people I’ve interacted with online have turned out to be gregarious folk who are as engaging in person as I hoped they’d be. Simply buying an around the world ticket doesn’t make someone interesting or outgoing, nor does it make them a travel blogger. So while TBEX certainly attracts a particular sub-set of the travel community, it’s one that seems to be growing.

A scan around the conference auditorium or the social get-togethers at any given moment offered an interesting mix of feedback. For one thing, we travel bloggers like our technology. There was many a bowed head in a darkened bar, faces glowing from their smartphone screens, as we updated Twitter or scouted out the next stop on an NYC tour. But for all the travel iPhone apps that we think are helpful or just plain cool, for many there’s nothing that replaces the quality of conversation you get when you meet someone face to face. If we were all so devoted to technology that we preferred chatting via @-replies, those bars would have been significantly quieter.

Using technology to facilitate interactions with real human beings, however, is something I think all of us at TBEX can get behind. Being able to talk online with others who shared a common interest in travel is why BootsnAll was founded back in 1998, and it’s why we were so excited to launch BootsnAll Travel Connect just last month. Reading a travel guide online can help you travel better, but there’s nothing like getting personal tips on the best out-of-the-way tapas from someone living in Madrid, or hearing about a festival or special event that happens to be going on in Santiago while you’re in town. And without technology, it would be much more challenging to have instant connections in destinations all over the world.

I’m very much looking forward to next year’s TBEX conference in Vancouver, BC, and I know I’m not alone in that – but the travel bloggers I met last weekend and who I regularly interact with online won’t wait until next year to connect again. We’re engaging every single day, both online and off, in front of our computers and in real life meet-ups. At least for me, the border between my online life and my offline life is getting more and more blurry – and I love it.

>> To read more about BootsnAll’s experience at TBEX this year, here’s our TBEX 2010 Wrap-Up and Photos, Lessons Every Travel Blogger Can Learn from TBEX, and a personal Ode to Some of the People I Met at TBEX 2010.

photo by Sarah Sloboda

As I talked about a couple weeks ago, summer is the ideal time for a road trip. And what better destination for a summer road trip in the United States than one of our glorious National Parks?

National Park vacations were popular long before Ken Burns decided to wow us with his movie-making skills once again, but he definitely reminded many of us just how amazing the parks system is. If you visited a National Park with your family as a kid, are planning your first trip to one of the parks, or are just about to introduce your own children to the wonders of the National Parks, you’ll be in good company this summer.

One of the most popular parks to visit, whether you’re from the U.S. or coming from overseas, is the Grand Canyon. It’s a stunning thing that can’t be fully understood until you’ve seen it – and even then words fail. The problem with visiting the Grand Canyon is that although the scenery is breath-taking, it can be incredibly crowded. There are several areas where tourists can stop to see the canyon, and some of them feel more like RV campgrounds than National Parks. To avoid the worst of the crowds and get the most out of the experience, it’s good to learn about the best ways to explore the Grand Canyon before you leave home.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a weather wimp – I can no longer handle extreme heat or cold (and this is after I was born and raised in New England, so I was once accustomed to both). So while the idea of visiting Arizona in the summer isn’t exactly high on my priority list, it’s usually not too difficult to find cheap flights to Phoenix. Once you arrive in Phoenix, however, I highly recommend getting into a rental car and immediately driving north. Get the heck out of that oven of a city as quickly as you can. Personally, I love Flagstaff as a homebase for visiting the Grand Canyon (among other cool things to do in the area) – it’s a cool college town with great restaurants, and it’s also higher elevation so it tends to be quite a bit cooler than Phoenix. It’s still plenty warm, don’t get me wrong – the air just won’t melt your face off as soon as you step outside, that’s all.

Wherever your summer road trip takes you, whether it’s to one of our stellar National Parks or not, travel safe and bring back lots of good stories. We like hearing them.

photo by Trodel

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your best friends won’t necessarily make the best road trip partners. There are fairly specific qualities that make someone a good candidate for a companion on a road trip, and it’s the kind of thing you want to find out in advance – not midway through the plains states when you really wish you had stayed home.

So when you’re ready to plan a road trip, here are a few things to consider:

• Pick your travel companions wisely. Talk about what you all want to get out of the trip, how each person travels, what kinds of accommodation people prefer, and what stops everyone considers essential. And don’t overlook topics like what kind of music people like, what road food they’re into, whether they’re up for splitting driving duties, etc.
• Get a thorough pre-trip inspection done on your car. Even if one of your fellow road trippers is a mechanic, the last thing you want to do is be stuck on the side of a road somewhere doing car repair. Still, even with a pre-trip inspection, don’t forget to pack a car safety/emergency kit in the trunk.
• Bring (or buy en route) a good road map. Get a map that’s specifically meant to navigate by, not one that’s pretty or that comes free with the newspaper. Having the best handheld GPS unit is great, but having a good map as a backup is always advisable.

Are you planning a road trip this summer? Are there any road trip tips you think are essential to think about before hitting the highway? Let us know in the comments.

photo by Unhindered by Talent

So check out some of the BootsnAll crew (guys vs girls) and our mad soccer skills.

In all seriousness, Chris and Ian really are in South Africa for World Cup, and you can check in on them via Twitter.

Summer brings out the festival spirit all over the world, partly because the weather is so awesome everyone just wants to be outside, and partly because so many of the people who go to big music festivals are people for whom summer is their one vacation time per year. We’ve had festivals on the brain lately at the office, so we recently put together a list of some of the best 2010 summer festivals – and we’re sure there are more out there that we missed. In fact, we’re kind of starting to wonder if you couldn’t pack an entire summer with music and arts festivals, going from one to the other without going home until September…

One thing we did notice when we were putting together that list of festivals is what great names they sometimes have. Sure, you have fairly self-explanatory festival names like the Glastonbury Festival, but most of them have some weird-sounding word in the name that just makes you curious to learn more, whether or not you plan to go to the festival. For instance, the name Bonnaroo Festival doesn’t necessarily scream “music festival” to you, does it? And yet that’s exactly what it is – a top-notch music festival in Manchester, Tennessee (making that two excellent music-related reasons to go to Tennessee). And if you heard there was a Sasquatch Festival, would you think it was more about music or hunting for Bigfoot? (Hint: it’s all about music.)

Other entries in the strangely-named festival contest include California’s Coachella Festival, Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, and the long-running Lollapalooza Festival. And even though the Burning Man Festival isn’t such an odd name, considering they do actually burn a big statue of a man at the end, I think it’s safe to say that the whole festival itself falls into the “slightly off-kilter” category.

If your summer plans don’t include traveling to one of these festivals, don’t worry – we’re also keeping our holiday travel guide updated so that you can peek at it and see what excuse is coming up whenever you’re in the mood to plan a getaway.

photo by emilydickinsonridesabmx

What’s new:

• Travel articles – front and center — and bigger pictures!
• Flight, hotel, and hostel search – one-click away
• WhyGo travel guides – featured destination content
• The amazing deals feed - the latest and greatest deals to help you feed the travel bug.

So what do you think? Or let us know here, or on twitter or facebook.

“Oh, them?” says Saint Peter, “They’re Oregonians. They’re too wet to burn.”

Haha, yes, we get it. It rains here. Quite a bit, in fact. But what people who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest may not know is that there are usually stretches of time during our long rainy season when the sun comes out in all her glory, making everything sparkle and giving us a hint of what’s coming up in the summer. (Before the skies open up and drown us again, of course.)

But although summers in this part of the world are fantastic, that doesn’t mean we don’t take the opportunity to get out of town and travel a bit. The prices on traveling in the summer months are often higher than at other times of the year, but even if your summer travel budget isn’t huge there are ways you can enjoy a trip this summer.

In the U.S., the unofficial start to summer is the three-day Memorial Day weekend coming up at the end of the month – and although it’s a popular time to travel (which means you won’t exactly have your vacation spot to yourself), that also means there’s a plethora of Memorial Day deals available. Around the BootsnAll office we shudder with displeasure when we hear the word “staycation,” and we would never suggest that taking a different route to get to the store is somehow “vacationing at home,” but we’re also willing to bet there are places in your own country you haven’t explored. I’m not so sure I’d be willing to fly all the way from Portland to Paris for a three-day weekend, but there are plenty of places nearby that would be excellent options for Memorial Day.

If getting out of town is more important to you than where exactly you end up, then be sure to sign up for last minute travel deal alerts. With most of these, you’ll get an email on (for instance) a Tuesday with flight deals for that coming Friday. Sometimes the flights listed are budget airline travel deals, but they’re also often on big-name airlines that are just looking to fill seats on their planes. The prices on these flights are often rock-bottom, and it’s a fun way to be spontaneous, visit a place you might not have had on your radar, and squeeze in a quick getaway without spending a fortune.

What does your summer hold? Is the summer when you plan your travels every year, or do you prefer to enjoy the weather in your own neck of the woods?

photo by Want2Know

Those of us in the Portland area are lucky to have several great weekend getaway destinations within an easy drive, making it relatively easy to head to the coast, the mountains, the desert, or even a rainforest for a couple of days to escape from the daily routine. Of course, Portlanders aren’t the only lucky ones – most people have a few nice weekend travel destinations close enough to where they live to take advantage of a spur-of-the-moment getaway when needed. Still, sometimes you want more than the same old slate of choices, even if it’s just for a short trip. And with a few big three-day holiday weekends coming up this summer, now’s the time to find cheap tickets and plan an adventure on a slightly grander scale.

Whether or not you already had plans to travel on Memorial Day, it’s one of three long weekends this summer – the other two being over July 4th and Labor Day – that will be popular times to get out of the house and away from home for a few days. Even people who don’t have loads of vacation time saved up can think about adding one extra day to that three-day weekend – and having four days to play with changes the landscape of potential vacation destinations completely. You may not want to go somewhere that’s a 6-hour flight away if you only have 2-3 days to enjoy it once you get there, but add in a whole extra day (and pair that with taking a red-eye flight the night of your last day at work) and that’s suddenly much more reasonable.

But traveling over a three-day weekend when everyone else is on vacation, too, might not be your cup of tea. You might prefer to wait until the weekend after the big holiday – or, better yet, to travel midweek – so you can avoid the crowds of other vacationers. In some cases, you’ll be better off shopping for cheap midweek airfare, as it can be easier to find than cheap weekend airfare.

The bottom line is that even if your travel dreaming usually consists of more long-term goals and longer trips, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a quick weekend getaway now and then along the way. Taking advantage of destinations that are within a day’s drive is an excellent way to do that, but those don’t have to be your only choices for a short trip.

Oregon coast photo by jeffk

The newest BootsnAll member will be arriving soon (@sekeener), so it might be a little early for them to start searching for family travel deals, but at least they can know what to consider with family cruise deals for the future.

Currently Reading:

• Five Ways to Prepare Your Kids For Big-Time Adventure – “Sherp” is a verb… too cute.
• Why It’s Not Selfish for Parents to Travel With Young Children – #5. If You Don’t Do It Now, You’ll Never Do It.
• How I Travel: Hosea Rosenberg – top Chef winner Hosea – tasting the road less traveled.

Remember it’s still Free National Park Week through Sunday! Happy weekend! (photo by OliverAlex)