Jeremy

Jeremy founded Living the Dream in 2008 to chronicle his long-term trip around Asia. Since then he has been on two long-term trips, visited 69 countries, and is just getting started. He is now on a Lifestyle Design quest to build businesses to pursue a life of travel.

When Can We Get a Real Spanish Tapas Bar in the USA?

We were spoiled when we went on a vacation in Spain for our honeymoon.

There is no easier way to say it than that. 

From the world-class cuisine, amazing Spanish tapas bars, free-flowing wine, all the way to the famous ham that we ate with every single meal, Spain satisfied our appetites with every bite. 

After returning home we tried to find a great restaurant that embodied all of the wonderful meals we had while in Spain.  In particular, was our quest to find a great tapas bar with the small plates of food that we had just about every day in the country. 

But as it turns out, tapas bars in the style we fell in love with are hard to come by, and our search has gone on unfulfilled for the last year.

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Travel Instagram Strategies to Take Your Profile to the Next Level

For those who don’t know me, you should know that I am an engineer as well as a travel blogger- which at times is a very dangerous combination. When I try out something new to help my brand grow, I put together a test and log everything so I can get to the real reason for why something works. (We then write about it in our Blog Your Trip series to share it with you).

Over the past year I’ve been conducting many successful Instagram tests, and they’ve been picking up in popularity thanks to this social network’s continued rise in prominence.

As I’ve had some time to reflect on our most recent tests (find the one on Instagram hash-tags and the one on gaining targeted Instagram followers here), I need to tweak some of the recommendations I wrote about in those posts to form our game plan moving forward.

So, before reading any further, I highly recommend you read through both of those first. Finished? Good, let’s recap.

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Don’t Start a Travel Blog, Start a City Blog

Downtown Pittsburgh

Over the years we have worked on many projects in the travel world to try and get our name out there and earn a living from our work.   Out of all of the projects we’ve worked on, this site- a global travel blog focused on long-term travel, and our newest site Discover the Burgh– a local blog for the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have grown the most.

The interesting thing about these two blogs is not their differences in how we run them.  To be honest, we run them almost entirely on the same business model.  What makes them unique is that the potential for growing and earning revenue on our local blog far eclipses anything we’ve been able to achieve with our global site.

As such, we wanted to share some of our thoughts today as to why that is, and what you need to consider when launching a local blog of your own to try and get into this (relatively) untapped marketplace.

Let others chase down the global marketplace all they want- city blogging is the next big thing.

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The Best Easter Island Hotels for All Budgets and Styles

Ahu Tongariki on Easter Island

If there was one thing about exploring Rapa Nui that surprised us the most, it would be that there was an incredible range of accommodation options available for visitors.

For an island so remote, we thought we’d be paying an arm and a leg to stay there, and as it turns out there are options available for everyone- from the most frugal budget traveler to those wanting all the bells and whistles (except for good internet- that one is impossible on the island, unfortunately).

As this information is often lacking in most reviews of visits to the island, and may be the deciding factor on whether or not you visit (you should), we wanted to publish this guide to Easter Island hotels so you know just what you are looking at when planning a visit to this incredible spot in the middle of nowhere.

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