We drove through Detroit yesterday due to a bit of a time constraint.  It was cool to at least drive through the city and see the GM building from afar.

Last night, we hung out with a good friend of mine, Kelley.  Apparently, Ann Arbor is a bit of a college town, therefore it is possible to find great drink specials on a Wednesday such as: $2 pitchers of Miller High Life.

By the end of the night:

• Alexi realized he had used the women’s bathroom at some point.
• We had played a few rounds of quarters.
• We apparently recruited a couple of college girls to play beer pong with us.
• We ordered “chips and cheese.”
• Our bill was less than $12.

Alexi is finishing up some work, then we’re headed to Chicago to get the van checked out.  Apparently, about 20 miles outside of town, the speedometer decided to stop working and the engine started sounding a bit…different.  We filled up with premium gas, which helped as it did with a knocking that was happening before.

This morning, we realized that the odometer is also not working, assumedly related to the speedometer.  So, hopefully we can find someone in Chicago to take a look at the van without screwing us over

Popularity: 17% [?]

It was awesome to see family that I hadn’t seen in quite some time.

The first night, we hung out with my uncle Tony, aunt Verna, and cousin Danielle.  We had  one of the best pizzas ever and talked late into the night with Bob and his awesome stories.  Tony’s house is over a hundred years old and he’s put a ton of work into it and the property - I hadn’t seen it in about three years and it looks so amazingly different.  As soon as the barn is finished, I’m totally heading out there to break it in.

The next night, we hung out with my aunt Lisa, uncle Charlie, and cousins Emma and Evan.  Evan’s about four months old, so it was cool to see him for the first time.  Emma’s four years old and a little chatty Cathy.  If Alexi ever gets down about being single, he can remind himself that he’s the apple of Emma’s eye.

That night, we went to an apple orchard and picked apples for an hour or so.  Then, we had the most amazing donuts ever.  Krispy Kreme doesn’t even compare.  I ate three within the first five minutes we had them.  Later, Charlie cooked awesome steaks (there’s your good review ;), and we celebrated aunt Lisa’s birthday with an ice cream cake.

I also got to see my grandmother and the new additions to her house which look amazing.  I’m definitely glad she made it out to Lisa and Charlie’s for dinner and that I got to see her for lunch as well.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Right now, we’re sitting at a place called the Linux Caffee. It’s just our speed. Coffee, bagels, Radiohead on the speaker box, and a stack of programming and OS books in the corner available for public consumption. Our van (and we) slept well last night in a busy street.

The dude behind the counter is a bit hippie-ish, but not to an uncomfortable or awkward degree. Their everything bagel with butter is, quite literally, the best bagel I’ve ever had in my entire life. And the laydeez that roll through here have been cute in that dorky, nerdy, fun, unpretentious way that we all know and love.

Speaking of women, hands down, Montreal has the best looking women I’ve seen in the entire world. We were told to expect the same of Toronto, but it’s not the same.

Montreal and Toronto downtowns are both really, really clean. Montreal carries itself with it’s touch of French; proper, prim, and a perhaps a bit rigid. Toronto feels more laid back like this cafe.

Both feel safe and are places that would be easy to live in. Apartment prices seem reasonable compared to similar cities in the US.

Both cities are amazingly bike friendly, which is rad.

All in all, the Canadian cities get my vote. I have a feeling that I’m really going to like Vancouver as well.

Stay tuned for “The Montreal Story.” French cuisine, late night boozing, and how train tracks and a GPS saved the day…night.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Find yourself eating every meal in different ZIP codes catching glimpses of the Internet on the hot spot du jour? One way to make this lifestyle a little smoother is a handy little website called IP Weather. It’s a bookmark that will give you a 3-day weather forecast based off your IP address. Neat, huh?

Popularity: 22% [?]

Looks like you can only plan so much! We were going to spend two full days in Toronto, but the drive from Glens Falls, NY put us in Niagara Falls, NY too late to see the actual falls. Determined to not miss it, we spent the night there and indulged in some Roy Rogers (a memory enhanced by childhood,) and a case of Molson. Neither were very kind to the digestive tract.

Waking up early so Ben could catch a client call, we headed over to the Falls, snapped some photos, and then went to the border to play Hide & Seek with customs agents. I guess you never get off easy when:

1. You claim a van as your residence.
2. You say you’re unemployed, for the sake of simplicity.
3. You have stamps in your passport from Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

Good thing Road Trip 2.0 is 100% legit!

We rolled into Toronto around 1:00pm only to discover that our Walmart’s parking lot has a 3 hour time limit. Plans fouled, we found parking on the street, and now are trying to get our sights in quickly. Ben’s down at the Hockey Hall of Fame, I’m soaking up local nerdiness at the Linux Caffe. Tonight we’re gonna party it up all crazy like, and tomorrow we roll out early for Detroit.

Popularity: 52% [?]

Planning a trip into a new city can get tough. There’s all sorts of questions: What are you going to see? Where are you going to stay? How will you get around? One of the best tried & trusted tools of the traveler has been, no surprise, the map. But paper maps get folded, torn, lost, and above all else, are hard to share with other people. Even more difficult is collaborating on these maps with all your buddies.

Enter the “My Maps” feature on Google Maps. It’s a relatively small feature to the already superbly popular mapping program, but it provides a lot of bang for your buck. Basically you can use it to scribble on maps to mark areas & points of interest. We here at RoadTrip20.com are using it to figure out things like:

• Where all the Wal-Marts are
• Where the coffee & free WiFi is
• What sites we want to hit up
• Where the bars & restaurants are
• And when we park, where the hell we left the van!

Toronto is the first city we’ve really put it to use, but it’s already proving very helpful. I could have prevented myself from stealing WiFi in a urine-infested park if I used this in Montreal. Anyway, enough rambling. Check out our map if you’re interested!

A legend is provided after the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 29% [?]

We’re not sure if this rule always applies, but it seems like taking small roads across the boarder is a much better idea than larger ones. Getting into Canada via some tiny little road was a snap. The guy asked us if we were bringing anything in, Ben says “only what’s in the van,” and we cross over. Ok, maybe there was a little negligence on the Customs Officer’s part, but whatever. We’re good people.

Getting back into the US we decided to shoot straight down I-87. BAD IDEA. The traffic there was horrible, as you can see in the left photo. As we finally got closer I saw a bunch of signs that I thought were amusing (right photo,) but apparently the Customs officers didn’t. They detained us for about 15 minutes, asking questions and attempting to delete my photos the entire time. While they didn’t manage to do that, they did manage to record a voice memo, which I kindly put at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

I can’t even operate the computers at work, I can’t operate a digital camera.

Popularity: 21% [?]

This could also be true for the rest of Canada, we’ll have a better idea later. The first European impression is obvious: everyone’s speaking French. But it goes much deeper than just road signs and overhead conversations on the Metro. The architecture and design have apparent roots overseas, too. The biggest similarity is the people. Everyone (and by everyone, I mean about 80%,) are in shape and seem to have a sense of style about them. You just don’t see people here eating their filet mignon in last decade’s sweat suit, unless of course they’re from out of town.

I could go on, but I’m sitting in a public park stealing WiFi from a near by “linksys” and power from a municipal building. And it smells like urine. Ahh, the joys of being on lifecation!

Popularity: 18% [?]

Expert online marketer Andy Beal was not only kind enough to sit down with me for an interview, but was also kind enough to mention Road Trip 2.0 on his much-acclaimed website, Marketing Pilgrim. For those of you who may have ended up here from the Marketing Pilgrim post, welcome!

Imagine this:

You’re driving around Boston on Lifecation. You’re looking for the best Irish pub in town, and have no idea where to start or who to ask. You prefer a bit of a dive bar with sports playing on multiple TVs and a late 20s/early 30s crowd. You are looking for a hotel in a specific price range, and would like for it to be near the bar…you don’t know how late of a night it’s going to be, since the Red Sox are in the World Series, after all.

As you drive into the city, your GPS/Cell/WiMAX Phone displays a comparative list of bars and hotels within 5 miles of each other. Each bar/hotel combination also displays the level of matching criteria based on your previously-input requirements. A dive bar with sports on multiple TVs, but with a college crowd, might display as matching 67%. It may be paired with a hotel two miles away that meets your price range, amenities, and availability at 90%.

A couple of blocks later, you happen upon a bar and hotel combination that are both 90%+ matching your criteria and within a mile of each other. You set it to book your room, park at the hotel, check in, and head straight to the pub just in time for the opening pitch.

Andy mentioned the fact that so many people are trying to define Web 3.0 as Web 2.0 becomes more settled into our marketing psyches.

In my opinion, Web 3.0 is in the works and it’s a combination of three key things that are happening:

• Microformats
• GPS/Geographic Location
• Open Wireless Networks

What Are Microformats?

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 39% [?]

Today, I’m spending most of the day as a work day…I just spent quite a bit of time putting receipts into our shared Google Spreadsheet, which we’re using to manage and balance expenses.

One of the things that I’ve learned on this trip is to always have something to do, because you never know when you’re going to not be able to do what you intended to, when you’ll be waiting on someone for something, or when you’ll end up on a Metro with 20 minutes to burn.  This happened a bit ago as I ducked into Starbucks to get some work done…no power outlet and my laptop battery was dead.  Here I was, with a stack of receipts and nothing to do with them.  Since I rode my bike here, I’m a few miles from the van and my books that I usually bring along with me.

What I did have, however, was the smaller of my two digital cameras and a stack of receipts.  I also have a group of virtual assistants based out of India through a company called GetFriday.

As I was organizing my receipts, waiting for a power outlet to open up, I seriously considered photographing each receipt, sending the images to GetFriday, having them enter the data into a pre-formatted spreadsheet, then I would just copy that to the shared spreadsheet.  The idea is that I would be able to at least make progress in the meantime rather than simply wasting the time away, listening to my iPod, waiting for an outlet to open up.

Cumbersome?  Absolutely.

Luckily, as I was organizing the last of the receipts, a table opened up near an outlet and I input them myself.

But, I think that this exemplifies the mantra of “Always have something to do” and what becomes possible.  When I talk to people about outsourcing, the first response I always get back is something to the effect of “I have no idea what I would outsource.”  Until I made the jump and hired them, neither did I.

In this instance, what would otherwise be considered laziness could have turned into an efficiency.

Next time, though, I’ll be sure to have a book on hand.

Popularity: 25% [?]