Just a reminder to everyone: if you want to apply for the Whitsunday Islands caretaker possition now is the last day to do so. Just take an hour today to put together a minute long video explaining why you would be the best person to represent the Whitsunday Islands to the world, and then upload it and cross your fingers.

I’m headed off tomorrow for my next adventure: a road trip through Poland to Horní Bečva, a little town in the mountains of northeastern Czech Republic. My team mates will be my old friend Ilana from uni and flatmates Alina, Anemona, and Marcin. Anemona and Marcin are playing host on this trip as they are both Polish, and Marcin goes to art school part time in Horní Bečva. I’ll do my best to keep you updated with sights and tales along the way, but I’m not taking my laptop on this one, so no promises.

I’m really excited to get an insiders view of Central Europe, which seemed like a tough nut to really crack while I was there a few years back. Also, I giggle with excitement about the name Horní Bečva, which is pronounced, and I’m not making this up, Horny Bithchfu.

Map of our basic route:

less than $200 to get across the Atlantic

I had to head to Washington, D.C. for work the weekend before last. The ticket, booked just a few days in advance was only $450 round trip, and the flights were so empty that I hand two seats each way. And that’s nothing abnormal right now. My email alerts are regularly showing my prices under $300 to fly from the US to London, and sometimes even lower as you can see above.

Kayak searches and price trend watcher tell the same story. Prices are really low right now, and it doesn’t look like they are headed north any time soon. Did you know you can get round trip from the US to Moscow in a couple weeks for less than $600? That’s crazy. If you’ve got the time and money, now is certainly a time to fly somewhere fun.

On New Years Eve this year in Girmentz, Switzerland, we were blessed with over a foot of snow in one night. Of course fighting off the hang over to get to the slope the next day was a challenge, but capturing the sublime beauty of the fresh snow was easy as could be.

This weekend I was wandering around Bath, and walked by a fairly large apartment block that was boarded up and ready for demolition. My imagination switched into high gear and only the need to return to London kept me from stopping the group for a bit of urban exploration.

I’ve only done a little bit of abandoned exploration, the most exciting of which was wandering down a couple of hallways of old US military barracks in the old Panama Canal Zone (see image right). It wasn’t really hard core as far as exploration goes, but I certainly felt a thrill wandering around a space that felt more hospitable to ghost stories than people.

I’ve always been slightly fascinated by unused human spaces, like the old ghost towns (or soon to be ghost towns) I’d dive through as a kid gowning up as a kid in New Mexico. But my interest was recently kindled by the ongoing series of abandoned places on Web Urbanist. While following this, I somehow missed a great compilation post that can serve an introduction to exploring the abandoned world. Defiantly food for thought if you know of any old abandoned places around, you get to see another world without traveling very far at all.

Collage from WebUrbanist