Most of our regularly scheduled NFT and Blockchain content will be on hiatus through the summer. Vagobond Magazine and the daily beats will return after summer.
I hope you’ll all excuse this series of posts and articles that I’ll be doing over the next 6-8 weeks. I’m happy to announce that my long scheduled and long delayed trip around the world is commencing now. It’s not the first time I’ve been around the world – but it’s the first time I’ve booked all the transport from start to start going in one direction over a defined amount of time.
For various reasons, I won’t be sharing my itinerary ahead of time, but it will be shared as I go. I can tell you this – I’m heading West from Honolulu until I get to Honolulu. Along the way, I’m going to be revisiting some places I’ve been before and seeing a few places I’ve never been. In a perfect world – this would be a years long journey taking me to every country on the planet but this trip will be significantly shorter than that.
I’m going to be traveling in a way I’ve never done before – I suppose it’s a way that isn’t done much at all. I’ll be going light with almost no baggage. A regular school size backpack will be all I will carry with me to start. To be fair, I’ve enjoyed bringing more stuff with me on some recent shorter trips – having a big suitcase is pretty nice, but this time, I want to buy what I need as I go.
In the past, I’ve been a backpacker and in some cases a dirt-bagger. Sleeping in hostels, couch surfing with strangers, sleeping outdoors or in out of the way (free) places. This time, I’ll be staying in some pretty decent hotels – without much in the way of baggage. So this isn’t backpacking and it’s not dirt-bagging and it’s not luxury travel and it’s not middle class travel – I’m not sure what exactly it is.
I’ve paid for a great many of my hotels with travel points from credit cards. My flights were booked when flights were cheap – which was a bit of a mistake because the airlines have had no compunction about screwing over those who didn’t pay out the nose for their flights. Royal Moroccan Airlines cancelled my flight without a refund or a alternate flight – I can’t get ahold of anyone to refund me. Customer service is 100% dead. Another set of flights through a budget booker have been changed to worse flights three times!
I’ve got airport lounges and a four day stay in a New York City apartment through NFT perks for holding specific NFTs. With any luck, I’ll be meeting up with some other blockchain folks along the journey. I won’t be couch surfing – but I also hope to meet up with some CS folks along the way too. It’s not really digital nomad’ing because I’m not working as I go, or at least not planning to.
So if this isn’t backpacking or dirt bagging or couchsurfing or luxury travel – wtf is it? I’m not really sure what to call it. I’m a wordsmith so I’d like to think I can come up with a reasonable name for it. I suppose what I have paid for has been paid for with profits I took from working in blockchain this past year. I’m not so much a travel blogger any longer as a blockchain and NFT blogger.
Maybe that’s where the roots of the word are. Blockpacking. I’ll have to sit on it, sleep on it, mull it over. Blockpacking. Travel Blocker. Block Surfer. BagBlocking. None of these quite work. That’s okay – it will come.