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Where to Eat in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

by Brian on February 9, 2015 in Asia, Food & Drink, Travel, Vietnam

We owe a huge shout-out to Jodi from Legal Nomads for unfailingly steering us to terrific eateries in Ho Chi Minh City. Her Guide to Saigon Street Food is an absolute must read for anyone serious about exploring the best of South Vietnamese cuisine. But at nearly 10,000 words, Jodi’s guide is a little more than a mouthful. We did the hard work of chewing through her recommendations as well as some others to give you this more bite-sized take on our favorite places to eat in Vietnam’s largest city.

Chi Thong

Bun Thit Nuong Cha Gio

The name of Chi Thong’s signature dish, Bun Thit Nuong Cha Gio, says almost everything you need to know. Bun Thit Nuong loosely translates to “rice noodles with grilled meat,” which in this case is pork. And Cha Gio is a type of spring roll packed with seasoned meat, mushrooms, and diced vegetables all wrapped in moist rice paper before being fried into golden, crispy tubes of deliciousness.

Get $40 Off Your Next Booking With Hotels.com

by Brian on February 6, 2015 in How To, Travel, Travel Tips

Please Note: This offer has expired.

Well, this is timely. We just published an article describing our process for Finding the Perfect Hotel Room in which we said that our final stop is always Hotels.com. Just now we got an e-mail from the company offering a $40 off coupon for new users of the site. The offer is only available to people who have never booked with or received an e-mail from Hotels.com. And it’s only valid on bookings of $300 or more. But if you meet those criteria, you can get a $40 off coupon through this link.

Redeem Your $40 Hotels.com Coupon

One of the big reasons we tend to book more often with Hotels.com than with any other booking site is because of their Welcome Rewards loyalty program. It’s basically a 10% off program for frequent travelers. And because Hotels.com will match any other publicly available price on the internet, you can pretty much guarantee you’re paying 10% less than the best available price. Oh, and with this offer you can now pay $40 less than that as well.

P.S. If you click through the “Redeem Your $40 Coupon” button and it doesn’t bring you to the following screen, that means you’ve already been cookied by Hotels.com.

$40 Hotels.com Coupon

How to Find the Perfect Hotel Room

by Brian on February 2, 2015 in How To, Planning and Prep, Travel, Travel Tips

Brundholme B&B, in the Lake District (Keswick), England

(Update: The Chase Ultimate Reward portal no longer offers bonus points for booking hotels through Hotels.com)

As full-time travelers we live our lives out of hotel rooms and other rented spaces. Sometimes we’ll sleep in as many as three different cities in a single week. That adds up to a lot of hotels over the course of a year. As a matter of necessity, we’ve become pretty good at finding the best places to stay.

And by “best” we don’t necessarily mean cheapest. While we definitely consider ourselves budget travelers we focus at least as much on value as on absolute cost. Some things, like private rooms and central locations, are worth paying a little more for, in our view. So this article won’t teach you how to find the cheapest bed anywhere within commuting distance of your chosen destination. But if what you’re looking for is a great room, in an awesome location, at a terrific price then the process we outline below should work as well for you as it has for us.

Deception and Redemption in Hue, Vietnam

by Brian on January 26, 2015 in Asia, Travel, Vietnam

This was more than a meal. It was a rebuttal.

Any hopes we had of drying out after we left rainy Hoi An were quickly dashed. Our next destination has a reputation for notoriously bad weather, and in that regard Hue, Vietnam, more than exceeded our expectations.

In addition to the unrelenting cold and rain, the city also greeted us with a dose of unexpected irony. We had literally just pushed the print button on an article calling false every bad thing we had heard about Vietnam. Instead of the unfriendly and unscrupulous people we had been told to expect, everyone we actually met was exceedingly warm and helpful.

I guess we should have known that bad things happen when you tempt the Fates because it was the very next day that we boarded a bus to Hue.

How We Saved for Travel, and For Everything Else Too

by Brian on January 21, 2015 in How To, Money & Finance, Travel

With New Year’s celebrations now over it’s time for the hard work of resolution honoring to begin in earnest. Many of us will start the year resolving to spend less money and save more. If you’re like Shannon and me, the objective may be to accumulate enough to travel the world; or maybe you’re trying to build a college fund or pad a retirement nest egg. All worthy goals.

Unfortunately our good intentions are typically doomed to failure right from the start. By mid-year most of us will have fallen back into the same bad habits we resolve each year to end. We do that not because we lack the necessary willpower, but because we lack the correct perspective. To change our financial behavior we need to fundamentally change the way we think about money. We need to find a way to turn human nature, which constantly tempts us away from our long-term goals, to our advantage. Fortunately that is easier to do than you may think.