When I told people my first stop in Eastern Europe was Slovakia, I usually got a blank stare. Or a question meant to gain understanding of what exactly was there. Why travel to…where were you going again?

Older people know it as the latter half of Czechoslovakia. As in the order of the words, it’s to the east of Prague. I’ve been basing myself in Košice (photo at the top), which has one of the most attractive city centers you could wish for in Europe. Pedestrian-only and almost no tour groups in site. Most tourists you do see are Czech, Polish, or Hungarian.

And you find castles like this all over the Kosice region.

Plus there are some great parks and protected areas where you can take in nature through hikes, cavern exploration, or boat rides.

As for prices, which I’m checking out for a book update, it’s a mixed bag. Overall, Slovakia is significantly cheaper than the U.S., which you can’t say for anywhere in Western Europe right now. The best deals are on what you consume: restaurant food, wine, and beer especially. This is a country where you can still get a big lunch and a glass or two of wine or a beer for less than US$10.

You’ll seldom pay more than 6 euros for admission to anything and usually it’s more like 2. Transportation is reasonable, but not all that well set up for English speakers. There’s not much of a backpacker infrastructure, so this is a country where I would definitely advise carrying a guidebook—and a phrase book.

I’m getting ready to hop on a plane to Eastern Europe, where I’ll soon be reporting on cheap travel in four countries there. I’ll be doing some stories for Perceptive Travel and writing chapters for the next edition of The World’s Cheapest Destinations.

Meanwhile, here’s what this blog’s readers have been checking out the most over the past month:

10) Peru’s Salkantay Trek vs. the Inka Trail

9) Good & Bad Travel Gear Trends for 2012

8) Travel Safety in Perspective – USA vs. Mexico

7) Quit Your Job, See the World

6) Updates on the Cheapest Places to Travel, 2012

5) How Many Countries Have You Been to? (Spoiler alert—I don’t care.)

4) I Want to Move Abroad – Where Do I Start?

3) How to Get Around Spirit Air’s Baggage Extortion

2) 6 Places to Live for Super-cheap

1) The Cheapest Places to Live in the World – 2011

I’ll be doing a 2012 version of that last one in June. Stay tuned by signing up for the RSS feed (top right) or following me on Twitter (@timleffel).

Making memories in Maisan, Korea. April 1997

There are plenty of naval-gazing travel blogs out there and from the start of this one in 2003, I’ve tried to be more useful than that. This is primarily a blog about how to travel well for less, how to get more out of your travel budget and maybe learn something, grow a little, and become a better person through the experience.

But this morning I heard a report on NPR about how it was 20 years ago today when Rodney King gave his “Can’t we all just get along?” speech in Los Angeles. This was in the midst of the 1992 riots after the four white police officers that beat him up (with TV news cameras recording it) were acquitted. I was watching it all on a TV screen in a bar facing Central Park in New York City. I was having drinks with the Charlatans UK, one of the bands I did marketing for at RCA Records.

So how did I get from there to here? I thought it would be fun to look at where I was and what I was doing soon after that, then 5, 10, 15 years later.

Almost exactly two years later, I was in Los Angeles myself, but only on a layover on my way to Japan, the first stop on my first round-the-world journey. I hadn’t traveled all that much before, honestly. Lots in the U.S., a few trips to Canada and the Caribbean, but nothing all that exotic. This was my time though. I had gotten fired from my job after being way too honest with my boss way too many times. My girlfriend’s company had gone bankrupt. We had talked about traveling long-term and if we were waiting for a sign, these were two big ones. We sold most of what we owned, rented out my condo, and hit the road.

Five years after that Rodney King speech, my journal was my “Easy P.P. Spring Notebook.” I was on month six of a one-year English teaching contract in Korea. My now-wife and I had traveled through Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel before settling down in Korea to replenish our finances. Over the course of the year, we worked our tails off but managed to save around $30,000. (That financed another year of travel and gave us a big cushion when we returned.) We traveled a lot around South Korea, sometimes seemingly being the only foreigners in town, and gained the kind of cultural experience you can only get from living somewhere for a while.

Ten years after those L.A. riots, in April 2002, I was in the midst of enjoying 9 weeks of severance pay after surviving four rounds of layoffs and getting caught in the fifth. This was the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and since I’d returned to the U.S., I’d been working for a tech company, writing just at night and on weekends. I was based in Nashville, but the home office was in Silicon Valley—tech bust central. But I had started writing my first book and now I had time to really get on it. Plus I had more time to spend with my new baby, who was a year and a half and chattering away already.

Fifteen years after those drinks while the riots raged, in 2007, I had mostly cut ties with any non-writing jobs and was making a living writing, editing, and ghostwriting books for business clients. We bought a little beach house in the Yucatan state of Mexico and all traveled to Guatemala. I got invited on a press trip to South Africa and Botswana and I took my wife to Peru, where we hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I launched Perceptive Travel. This blog turned four. I won a Grand Prize for a story I wrote from a travel journalism association, then won a first prize a year later.

Twenty years after the music biz gig in New York, here we are. I just spent a year living in Mexico with my family and we’ll return there for two years next summer. This year I’ll travel to four countries in Eastern Europe on my own, then go to three countries in Southeast Asia in July with my family. Before the year is up, jaunts to Nicaragua, Boliva, Colombia, and Chile, and speaking at TBEX in Colorado. I’m living in Tampa, FL, creating new memories in a new place.

When you look back at your milestones 20 years from now, what will you see? Great experiences and growth, or the same ole same old and stagnation?

Just because you travel doesn’t make you a better person than one who doesn’t—or a person who truly can’t afford to do it. But at least it means you’re not sitting still. If your life is not changing and you’re not being challenged, you’re slowing down before your time.

Here’s to your next 20 years being full of exciting surprises.

I reviewed this innovative Camelbak All Clear bottle in detail over at Practical Travel Gear, but it speaks to such a strong travelers need that I’m mentioning it here as well.

Anybody who has read this blog for a while knows that I put bottled water in single-use plastic somewhere on the evil scale between Darth Vader, Dick Cheney, and Bashar Al-Assad. The manufactured demand for these drink-and-toss bottles of water has led to giant floating garbage dumps in the oceans and the soiling of almost any landscape where people leave the bottles in their wake. Almost nowhere in the world does a majority of them get recycled. Most end up on or in the ground, where they’ll stay for centuries. (The Grand Canyon finally banned them this year, but not without encountering massive pressure from Coca-Cola that led to delays.)

So I’m hoping this Camelbak All Clear bottle is a success. You fill it with ordinary tap water, turn it on, shake it around for about a minute, and drink. That’s it!

In places you couldn’t drink the water before, now you can. So far I’ve only used it in Mexico, but it worked like a dream there: I didn’t buy any bottled water for nine days and drank with this from six different taps. No digestive problems at all.

Sure, this magical technology is going to cost you. The All Clear retails for about $100. But have you ever tracked how much you’ve spent on water over the course of a few weeks or a month on the road? Chances are, that’s about how long it would take to pay for itself. Everything after that is gravy, plus you’ve kept 100+ bottles out of the landfills or streams. It charges by USB, quite handy, and there’s a carrying pouch for the purifier part. (You can put any Camelbak top on it when you’re actually drinking from it.)

You can get the CamelBak All Clear Water Purifier Bottle at REI.com or at Summit Hut.

If you want something that takes up less room and can be used with any wide-mouth bottle you have already, check out this review of the SteriPen Freedom wand.

From The Economist - Hillary's travels

Do you know of anyone who has traveled to 95 countries since the beginning of 2009?

There is one, and it’s all been well-documented. No, she’s not writing a book about some frantic attempt to land in half the world’s nations in under four years. And no, she doesn’t work on cruise ships or an airline. But many of her stops have been as short as they would be for someone who did one of those two things.

It’s because the woman who achieved this feat is the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. That’s her travel map since Obama took office in January, 2009.

The article in The Economist that this comes from is only presenting it to show how hard she has worked to mend troubled relations after the Bush years and meet with world leaders in places that aren’t just strategic allies or enemies. Sure, some of these stops were just jet in/jet out meetings and photo ops, but it’s got to be a good thing in the end for one of the world’s most powerful diplomats to get views from multiple sides of the world.

It seems to be assumed that she’ll give up this hectic job if Obama wins again, though Democrats are hopeful she’ll be on the ticket as Vice President, ensuring all those currently angry women will have even more incentive to get out and vote.

But my question is, how many passports has she been through? I guess she doesn’t have to pay extra like we do to get them expedited…