We traveled almost 900 kilometers to participate in a world-famous festival that dates back 800 years. And the policewoman was kicking me out. It was my shoes. At each stage the police glance over the runners to make sure they're properly equipped, trying to prevent idiots from increasing the fatality count. My Five Fingers hadn't failed me over five months and eleven countries, but I wasn't ...

Life Nomadic is far from over, but today I'm in the US, back in Austin. We've been away from Austin for seven months and have circled the globe entirely. We're already planning more trips, but armed with experience, we don't plan on being on the road for such long stretches in the future. For me the trip was an epic journey, one that I will remember in great ...

We're now in France, which means that in the past two weeks we've been in seven different countries (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Macau, Hong Kong, Qatar, and France). That's a lot. We left Taiwan in early June, and that was really the last time we were properly settled. This style of travel is pretty exciting. We usually don't plan for the next country until the night before we go, ...

Man do we have a lot of catching up to do. This rapid fire traveling schedule doesn't leave us with all that much time to contemplate and write. If we aren't checking in somewhere, we're checking out and trying to catch a plane. We were worried about where we'd stay in Hong Kong. It's a famously expensive city and we intended to be there for about ten days. ...

Todd's experience running with the bulls was a lot better than mine, so I'm going to let him dazzle you with that story. The tradition in Pamplona is to sleep in the park, and then run with the bulls the next day. This is a convenient tradition because we didn't want to pay for hotels anyway. We walked as far away from the festivities as possible, which go ...

On Fridays, everything in Qatar is closed. It's like Sunday in the US with three times the service interruption. We had no idea, so when our flight landed in the wee hours Friday morning, the entire city was shut down. We had the wrong address and ended up in the industrial section 20 minutes out of town. The sprawl was incredible -- LA has nothing on ...

As our stack of plane tickets gets thinner and our passports get more and more inked up, we've started thinking about what we're going to do next year. A repeat? Take some time off? Some combination? This sort of travel is self perpetuating. If I had ten places I really wanted to visit before leaving on this trip, I now have twenty. Most people we meet are travelers, ...

When you're on the road for this long you get good at rationing. In our case, that applies to batteries and to food. I just last week ate a vegan food bar that I bought in LA in the beginning of March. We don't plan far ahead, so we never know exactly when we'll be able to buy acceptable food. Batteries are the same way. We're on ...

Why take a 24-hour train over a 4-hour bus? Because it's the last running train in Cambodia. Because it's packed with locals transporting fruit to the capital. Because you can ride on the roof! The train from Battambang to Phnom Penh used to run three times a week, but these days goes just once on Sunday. We took a taxi 150 km for the privilege. When ...

In a stunning display of forward thinking, we decided to go to the Vietnamese embassy to get visas. Ideally we would have gotten them for China as well, thus enabling us to take the train all the way through China to Hong Kong, but there wasn't time for that. We went on Friday. It takes four business days to get the visas, so we'd have them the following ...