No, Honolulu isn’t alway sunny. There is a reason we have rainbows on our drivers licenses. This photo shows the M/V Manoa getting underway, after they got rid of me as second officer. This was my last ship before retirement.

Once I had my condo ready to show, I had time on my hands between showings. Of course, I continued working on my novel, but when that wasn’t occupying me I began planning my year of travel. I definitely didn’t know where I wanted to go, what order, or for how long. I was just dreaming.

One of the first travel blogs I read was Mike Eglan’s Gastronomad. I was familiar with Mike Eglan since he is a frequent guest on my favorite podcasts on TWIT.tv. His blog is filled with lots of great tips for how to travel full-time and enjoy the food as well. He puts together what he calls experiences, which look wonderful, though currently out of my price range. In spite of that, I still avidly read it, and dream of the day I can afford to go on one.

Mike’s blog lead me to his book Gastronomad: The Art of Living Everywhere and Eating Everything. This was the book that gave me the idea for what I like to call Airbnb roulette. To play this sort of roulette you type into the Google image search bar a short description of the sort of place you want to stay followed by “site:airbnb.com”. This gives you images of all the photos that match that search on Airbnb.

I searched for “studio apartment site:airbnb.com”

Click this link to see a really fun search: Treehouse site:airbnb.com

The point of searching this way is to find the type of place you would like to stay. Once you see a place that looks right click over to Airbnb and find out where the place is. This sort of searching has made me pay attention to areas of the world that are not as popular as the standard vacation sites, but have just as much to offer. One cute little apartment has left me with a dream of living three months in a small city in Estonia. Another is pointing me to Ecuador. The “E”s are totally random.

My mind was fixed on Estonia, so the next thing to do was figure out how to get there. My favorite site for checking out airfares is: Google Flights Google flights is a work in progress. Things there seem to change every time I go on. That being said, it is still a great resource.

The above screen shot shows how I first searched for a oneway flight from Honolulu to the mainland. Below this section was a list of the flights available on that date. This isn’t much different from any other flight search site. The price graph is where things really get fun.

You can see that if I delayed my flight I could save some money. This a real help to avoid paying more than you have to when, like me, you have a flexible schedule.

As I wrote before Google is always playing with this site. This was something I had not seen before today:

On my search, I have toggled the Overhead bin feature on. I am looking forward to when they include information on the Checked Bags.

Once I had an idea where I wanted to go and how to get there, I was on to packing. Packing is where I always have a lot of fun.