2017 - Page 2 of 17 - Living the Dream

A Travel Hacking Blueprint for All Budgets – How to Travel for Free

Those who know us personally know that we absolutely love to travel hack.

Where other bloggers may source the bulk of their travels through comps, partnerships, and other discounts, we pay for most all of it ourselves and owe a lot of it to the insane amount of airline, hotel, and non-branded credit card points we rack up in any given year.

But we'll let you in on a little secret: our version of travel hacking does not involve manufactured spending or crazy schemes in order to get points. It is simply through meeting minimum spend limits on credit cards and carrying on like normal!

Okay, it definitely isn't that sexy when you really stop to think about it. This method really is as simple as opening credit cards, spending as normal, and receiving points. But while this approach may be relatively straight forward, it does have one perk that we're going to share today- it is repeatable!

In this guide we're going to take you down the rabbit hole of all the things you need to think about to before opening one of the best travel rewards credit cards to reap major rewards. The first task? Figuring how many cards you could possibly use in a given year!

Experiencing Racism in Italy as an Asian Traveler

Italy is famous for its historical sites and culture. But one thing they would tell you about Italy is how rampant racism is, especially towards Asians.

During my travels in the country, I experienced a lot of it.

7 Stellar WordPress Plugins – Our Optimized List for Our Travel Blogs

In our ever-present quest to improve our travel blog, we have done a lot of back-end work you may not notice on the surface.

One of those is optimizing our WordPress plugins, as these tools are what take sites like ours from a normal blog and transform them into something special (not to mention helping get a ton of awesome blog traffic too).

A problem we've noticed when it comes to viewing websites is that you can't tell what plug-ins they use outright, and today we wanted to share a breakdown of the WordPress plugins we use and love!

Our goal with this article is to maintain a running list of all plug-ins that we currently use on our sites. As we rotate plug-ins in and out we will update this article accordingly, and all formerly used plug-ins of note will be featured at the end of this article as well as they could still be useful to others!

Note: We use BigScoots for our host and GeneratePress for our theme. In many cases the resources allocated by your server and how well plug-ins integrate with your theme have a direct impact on whether you can utilize them or not. While we cannot guarantee performance in every scenario, the following seem to work for us. If you need to upgrade your host or theme, we highly recommend both!

Rug Shopping in Morocco – The Bartering Experience

We knew we wanted to go rug shopping in Morocco before we got there, and did a fair bit of research online as to what to expect prior to arriving (including which of the many beautiful styles we would be interested in purchasing).

One thing that jumped out at us as we got started was the number of comments that shopping at Local Berbere Artisanal in Chefchaouen was much more laid back, offered better prices, and generally was a more enjoyable experience than, well, anywhere else in the country.

Even though it was the first stop of our trip, we found ourselves at the shop making a very expensive decision from the get-go and we are certainly glad we did.