Meet Plan Go! Take The Trip Of Your Life/Career!

Have you ever just wanted to just pack up and catch a plane to some far-flung location? Stand up in the middle of your cubicle farm and announce that you’re going across the ocean to your bleary eyed co-workers? Or even just wanted to unplug and see what the world has to offer for just a few weeks? But how can you? You’re working, you have families, bills, mortgages, pets, RESPONSIBILITIES! Well gather around folks, we’ve got something to tell you…Career Breaks!! It’s not only possible but will most likely be the best thing that has ever happened to you and even to your career.

Career breaks are fairly common across Europe and Australia but have are just begging to be seen in the United States and Canada. What is a career break? It’s basically just what it sounds like, taking a break or sabbatical from your career, in most cases to travel.

Last year several seasoned travelers and career breakers created Meet Plan Go! An online career break site full of articles, tips, and insight about traveling and taking a career break from people who are or have done it. Not only do they have a great site, but last year they created Meet Plan Go! Events across 13 cities with over 1500 attendees all on the same night! Read what the NY Times had to say about it.

This year the event will be held in over 17 cities across the U.S. and Canada. And for the first time there will be an event in New Olreans, hosted by yours truly! Leaving our old life behind to go traveling wasn’t easy, but doing so not only gave us amazing expereinces and memories but have absolutly made us better people all around. It gave us the confidence to come back and start our own company in a new city, something we had wanted to do in our past life but was too uncertain to try. Taking the time to travel opened so many unexpected and amazing doors, and now we want to share this passion and experience with others. We want to nudge those who might be just “daydreaming” into taking the next step!

Does the idea of taking off and exploring the world get your blood pumping and nerves tingling? If so here’s where you can find out more:

Meet Plan Go! Website

Meet Plan Go! Facebook

Meet Plan Go! Twitter

Sign up for the informative and fun Newsletter

See all the cities and hosts for the event!

Early bird tickets to the event will go on sale at a discounted price in May, don’t wait to the last minuet as last year several hundred people were on the waiting list.
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A Parade of Designs

Carnival season is in motion here in New Orleans. The houses have exchanged their Christmas decor for the purple, gold, and green of Mardi Gras. Flags are hung and King Cakes are baking. Its like having a second Christmas coming, and we are anxiously awaiting to celebrate and watch the parades from our small office on St. Charles Avenue.

So in honor of our first Mardi Gras while living in the NOLA, today we are offering up a small parade of our own. A parade of some our recent design work done for some truly amazing travel bloggers and writers.

Astahaya: Private Caribbean Charter

www.astahaya.com

Astahaya.com was actually our very first job as ‘The Traveling Designers’. We met the owners (Tom & Christian) while boat sitting in Curacao, and we all became fast friends. They wanted a website to showcase their beautiful yacht for private charters, and well, we were more than happy to help. In fact, the entire website was designed and built from the spacious salon of Astahaya. We recently updated the website with new information. Working on it again brought back a lot of fond memories of our journey through the Caribbean and of all the friends we made. If you would like to see some amazing photos of a truly spectacular yacht, be sure to check out Astahaya.
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A Wrapping Worthy of the Gift

Celebrating Latin America at Ground Level Cover Art

Today we have a guest post from Steven Roll of Travelojos, the Latin America Travel Blog. We recently worked with Steven helping him design and format his new ebook “Celebrating Latin America at Ground Level”, which is available for free download here.

Below, Steven shares a little about his project and how “Hop & Jaunt helped him deliver on his commitment to produce an e-book that highlighted the talents of the Latin America travel blogging community.”

A Wrapping Worthy of the Gift by Steven Roll

” One of the things I’ve come to love about travel blogging since I started Travelojos in December, 2008 is that it motivates me to put actions behind my words. That makes me fortunate because I truly enjoy what I write about: traveling to Latin America, learning Spanish, and enjoying the culture even when I’m at home in the Washington, D.C. area.

Before I started blogging, I never would have pushed myself to do things like enroll in a language immersion program in Guatemala this year.

Another one of my goals for 2010 was to publish a free e-book featuring the work of other Latin America travel bloggers.

The idea behind Latin America at Ground Level was to have expats or regular travelers to Latin America write about the region’s pleasures and endless contradictions. Each would contribute a short personal essay about a special aspect of Latin America and what it means to them.
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Serving Up Delicious Design

November is upon us. The time of year when our thoughts and minds turn to holiday feasting. A chance to indulge our appetites and fatten our waistlines in preparation for the approaching winter.

And here at HOP & JAUNT we have been busily serving-up tasty new designs for our fellow bloggers. What better time of year to spruce-up your website or blog with some custom design details? Its easier than you think.

Here are some custom headers we’ve recently created for some great bloggers. Feast your eyes upon these:

Living in a Hostel Header Design

Hostel connoisseur, Runaway Jane, contacted us to create this fun custom header for her website Living in a Hostel.com. During years of travel, Jane has stayed in hundreds of backpacker hostels, and has grown to love the experience. On her blog she offers insight and advice into hostel accommodations. She wanted a custom header that was fun, colorful, and depicted the unique lifestyle of hostel living. I especially liked this project because it gave us chance to do a lot of illustrations.

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TBEX ’10 and New York: The First Day

New York! What can I say, it stole our hearts and most of our cash.

Two weeks ago John and I traveled across the country to attend TBEX ’10 (Travel Blogger Exchange’s conference). I’ve seen online that some 800+ posts have been written about all aspects of this conference. But for those who weren’t there or who have no idea what a TBEX is, or just wants to re-hash the good ol’ time had there, let me go over the fun filled weekend highlights!

To get to New York John and I drove 3 hrs north to Birmingham, Alabama. Sure there are smaller regional airlines nearer but we had a plan. We were determined to take the train back! More on that on the following posts. As we stayed at a friend’s house we naturally stayed up too late chatting and catching up over a bottle of wine. Waking up at 4am is never fun, but with only a handful of hours of sleep it gets darn right tough. Little did we know that we were just getting started on this late-night early morning cycle…

Sleeping at the airport

We flew to Chicago and then to Newark Airport. All the while I was trying every position possible to curl up and sleep, but the airline seat engineer seemed to have done everything possible to dissuade such activities. Finally we arrived in Newark, and flying in we were treated to a spectacular vista of the cityscape. From Newark we hopped on the train to Penn Station ( I was a little disappointed as I had confused Penn Station to images from Grand Central Station). From Penn Station we took several wrong metro lines before getting acquainted with the subway system and finally found our selves safely checked into the hostel with a few hours to spare before the pre-party was to start!

Newark Train Station

After a short neighborhood exploration we took a quick nap in our hostel bunk beds. While asleep I sadly managed to kick a hole into my favorite white Panamanian made in Ecuador but bought in Colombia hat while sleeping….the first causality from NY. This was actually our first time sharing a room with strangers in a hostel as well. The hostels we stayed in Colombia offered private rooms. We thought it would not only help shave a few bucks off the trip but thought it would be fun to try it out. Turns out we didn’t have any time to socialize with those in the hostel as TBEX kept us out and about all day and night except for when we crawled straight into bed.

Overall the Jazz Hostel was a friendly, clean, and situated very conveniently to everything. They had a roof top (though only one chair now) and a common room with wi-fi. I would recommend it to any budget oriented traveler, or those who would rather spend their money other than on a bed. That being said I wasn’t a huge fan of the beds…reminded me of a half-deflated air mattress filled with potato/rice sacks. But John didn’t notice this so could just be me.

It’s such a small world, our room-mates were two English guys who had a passion for all types of American sports. When we told them we had just arrived from Alabama they responded by saying “oh yeah? Last time we were here we were at an Auburn game down there!” It’s amazing how small the world can get!

Our Jazz Hostel Room

The TBEX pre-party was to be held in the Omni-Berkshire Hotel. A swanky place a little ways uptown from where we were staying. (more…)