Tripbase started a great project a few months back. Or, that is at least when we were nominated by 1000 fights to join in. Maybe it’s been around for longer? None the less, it’s about time we finally took part!

The project is meant to connect travel bloggers together and give them a chance to show off some of the amazing content from their sites by sharing 7 links.

Scott and I have been running Dream a Little Dream since April 2008! That’s 3 years!! We’ve been around off and on for the last year. But still, choosing 7 links in the following catogories have been quite a challenge. We have tons of posts from a long time ago we love and didn’t get much exposure due to being a new site in the travel world. On the flip side however, all of our more recent posts are just at such a higher calibre due to everything we’ve learned in these past 3 years to create better content and get more exposure.

Anyways, after much hard thought here is what we came up with:

OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL POST:
Christmas ornaments from our RTW trip

http://dreamalittledream.ca/christmas-ornaments-from-our-rtw-trip/

We’ve seen some beautiful things across the world but nothing quite compares to grouping all those beautiful memories together on our Christmas Tree to ensure they last a lifetime!

OUR MOST POPULAR POST:
Banksy vs the Bristol museum

http://dreamalittledream.ca/banksy-vs-the-bristol-museum/

If we look at our site stats this one post gets the most hits day in and day out. This paticular exhibit ended a long time ago but still Banksy continues to pull in the numbers for us. It really is quite remarkable how popular street art is.

OUR MOST CONTROVERSIAL POST(s):
1. Cairo from a women’s perspective 2. The Valve Sound System Show Down – Epic Fail 3. Netherlands soft drug policy – is it working? 4. Contemporary Museum in Vienna: Mak

1. http://dreamalittledream.ca/cairo-from-a-womans-perspective/

2. http://dreamalittledream.ca/the-valve-sound-system-show-down-epic-fail/

3. http://dreamalittledream.ca/netherlands-soft-drug-policy-is-it-working/

4. http://dreamalittledream.ca/a-contemporary-art-museum-in-vienna-mak/

Okay, I cheated and listed 4. What are you going to do about it? The reason I listed 4 as we don’t really have any posts that have caused any heated discussions or debates. It was really hard to figure out exactly what of our topics is controversial to people. Thus, I’ve chosen 4 topics which I think can lead to a variety of opinions if people actually commented or is a touchy subject.

OUR MOST HELPFUL POST:
How to care for a second degree muffler burn in Thailand

http://dreamalittledream.ca/how-to-care-for-a-second-degree-muffler-burn-in-thailand/

Step by step instructions on how to care for one of the most popular injuries that can happen on the tropical islands of Thailand.

A POST WITH SUCESS THAT HAS SURPRISED US:
AK-47′s and naughty squirrels

http://dreamalittledream.ca/ak-47s-and-naughty-squirrels/

Just a simple post about our time in Riga, Latvia that continues to soar high in our site stats. Maybe it’s the title that is causing all the attention. Guns and naughty things. Yup. That has to be it!

A POST THAT DIDN’T GET THE ATTENTION IT DESERVED:
Scott the hero

http://dreamalittledream.ca/scott-the-hero/

An epic and heroic tale of how Scott saved the day after crashing our scooter and causing me to get a second degree muffler burn. Complete with crash video!! How can this not be popular??

THE POST WE ARE MOST PROUD OF:
Our Canadian Thanksgiving experience in Germany

http://dreamalittledream.ca/our-canadian-thanksgiving-experience-in-germany/

We are proud of that entire day that ended with the great success of that amazing meal!! May not be as interesting to others but to us this was a very special moment during our travels. In the top 5 for sure.

Okay, we hope you got to read something from our site you might of missed before. Thanks for reading!

Here are our 5 nominations to other travel bloggers to share their 7 links. Be sure to check them out in the following weeks to see what they shared. It was hard to pick as there have already been so many nominated. Check out this list to see the others.

1. iStopOver
2. The Departure Board
3. Lives of Wander
4. Dan’s Adventure
5.  Across and Abroad

1. EAT! Vancouver did not give passes to every single TBEX attendee interested. Instead of giving some free tickets to be handed out by a TBEX rep as a first come first serve basis, EAT! Vancouver should of just allowed anyone that showed up to Will Call with a TBEX pass to be allowed in. Teasing is mean.

2. Early wake ups. 9am start? Really? On a weekend? Bah!

3. Those ear piercing sounds at the beginning of every movie played on the screens.

4. Our bums started to hurt from sitting and learning such great things all day long.

5. The sun was shining. Thus, making it hard to sit inside most of the day in a conference room with no windows.

6. Didn’t get into any of the special after party events or special tours due to limited space as we were too late to sign up for anything. See number #2. We are late for a lot of things that can end up resulting in a travel day from hell and finding out what happens when you over stay your Thai tourist visa.

7. With so much constant #TBEX Twitter activity going on non stop all day it was hard to pay attention sometimes in class. Especially when there were so many contests going on! (Which we even won one! Thanks @WheresAndrew for the great #TWITTERHUNT. We won the complete National Geographic – every issue since 1888 on DVD. Wowzers!)

8. It was only two days.

9. Way too many awesome people there being awesome in so many ways. Seriously. Stop it!

10. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a Top 10 list for why TBEX sucked? Geez!!

So yeah, TBEX 11 did NOT suck. It was quite the opposite of that!! Much awesome sauce was had by all. But, we just had to make the post to practice some ideas we learned this past weekend. Hope you found the humor!

Cudos to the Community Panel: Tell it like it is with Spud Hilton (San Francisco Chronicle), Jim Byers (Toronto Star), Rich Beattie (Travel + Leisure), Don George (Gadling) and, Mike Yessis (World Hum) for the tip on post titles.

Thanks for the great time at TBEX everyone! Hope you all enjoyed our lovely city and leave us with a happy.

If you’re in the travel industry, blogging or PR, and haven’t been to TBEX you should consider hitting it up next year! Registration has already begun. Check out TBEX 12 in Keystone, Colorado!

Were you at TBEX 11? Have anything you’d like to add to list?

Travis from FlashPacker HQ

Caption: The murals of Derry and Belfast help tell the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland. If you’re headed to Dublin, take a couple days and get up north to see them.

How could we not award the winner of this round to such a powerful image portrayed in community mural? It hits the exact spot of why Scott and I believe Street Art is a powerful tool in todays society.

Check out the next round of Travel Photography Roulette being hosted at this weeks winners corner of the web: Flashpacker HQ. We look forward to see what Travis selects for the next rounds theme! Congrats again Travis!!

Thanks to everyone who participated. We got some great submissions which made it very hard for us to choose a winner. Also a big thanks to everyone who helped promote the game on twitter (#photoroulette). Keep it up! You are all awesome!!

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Scott and I were the round 2 winners of the great new game, Travel Photography Roulette! The game was created by Jeremy at Living The Dream and I believe will be a great addition to our wonderful travel blog community.

If you haven’t already guessed… Scott and I love Street Art in all shapes and forms. Which brings us to this rounds term. We would love to see what kind of Street Art out there moved you enough to take a photo.

Please remember Street Art is not just limited to graffiti! The definition of street art is any type of art displayed in a public place that is not sanctioned by government sponsorships and is something you can view for free. Community supported mural projects, yarn bombing, stickers, stencils, graffiti, sculptures, flash mobs, street performers, sidewalk chalk-drawings, placed rocks, light instalments, the list can go on and on and on. Anything an individual (or a even a group of individuals) has done in a creative manner on the streets to add color, inspire someone, make a statement, leave their mark, or just because. Get it? Still unsure? Read this wiki on Street Art. Now onto the game!

The rules of the game are simple. The hosting blogger is the chosen winner of the previous week’s (7 days) game. The new host chooses a generic keyword or phrase that other bloggers submit photos to during the course of the week. Phrases can be as generic as ‘signs’ all the way to abstract thoughts like ‘religion’ and everything in between.

At the end of the week, the hosting blogger chooses their favorite photo that fits the chosen phrase and moves it to the top of the post as the winning entry with direction to the new host’s site for the next round. Readers can attempt to sway the author into picking a certain photo via comments but the author can ignore comments as they see fit. The game is repeated with the winner hosting the following week’s game and choosing a phrase for new photo submissions.

The following is a list of the previously played rounds of the game and the hosting blogger for each. This list also doubles as a winner’s table as each topic host won the preceding round! Click the host’s link to go directly to that entry to see some stunning photographs from the chosen term/phrase!

For Round 3, I have chosen the term: Street Art, and my photo submission is below.  Those interested in playing please provide a hyperlink to a photo you’d like to submit and it will get hosted on this page.  When submitting an image, please provide a brief description and location of where it was taken for captioning.   On December 7th I will pick a winner and that blogger can start the next round.

“Apartment building in a used to be bad end of Berlin covered in up-close faces by a group of local graffiti artists. After completion all the violence and crime diminished and the inhabitants once again live normal happy lives.”

Erica from Over Yonderlust
“Billie Holiday stencil, Austin, Texas”

Lindsay from The Traveller World Guide
“All the way from Tokyo, Japan! Eat it!”

Jeremy from Living the Dream
“Mariachi Band Playing in Cozumel, Mexico (2003)”

Rebecca from Travels at 88mph
“Rock displays in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC”

Jamie from Breakaway Backpacker
“This was taken off Venice Beach, California.”

Nico from 10 Times One
“Paris Street Art. Found in the Marais, 2010″

Stephen from Bohemian Traveler
“This one gets deep. From Cartagena, Colombia”

Anthony from Motojournalism
“Images from the past blend into footsteps of the present.
I saw this mural on my way south through Nicaragua. It shows the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, with kids playing futbol in front. I’ve cropped it so it’s difficult to tell where the mural ends and reality begins.”

Dustin from Skinny Backpacker
“Fear over immigration, shot in Helsinki, Finland.”

Travis from Flashpacker HQ
“The murals of Derry and Belfast help tell the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland. If you’re headed to Dublin, take a couple days and get up north to see them.”

Johnny from Johnny Vagabond
“Here’s some randomly-generated ‘art’ I found in Hanoi”

Please share this post each week to drive up views and increase submissions of these wonderful pictures to make the contest more interesting!  Good luck!

For awhile now we have been wanting to redesign our site for many reasons. Some of these reasons include:

• Update the look of our comments section to hopefully encourage more comments from our readers
• Have a featured articles section
• Show a magazine style layout with thumbnails and post summaries
• Have a better “share” section at the bottom of each post
• Clean up our sidebar
• Better site navigation throughout
• Ease of use for both us and our readers (old design gave us many errors when trying something new)

Last, but not least…

• Hoping a new look that works without bad coding errors will increase our desire to post more of our adventures on here! Since being back home and being busy with the real world we started to loose the desire, but it’s coming back again. Sometimes you just need a change right? Or maybe it’s the cold weather outside forcing us to stay in and have more time for this…

Anyways, here it is! I’m sure we will still be tweaking and adding a few more things but this is pretty much it! Be sure to take a look around by jumping to the home page.

What do you think?

*Please note it appears our commentluv is not working. Says we need to upgrade our wordpress but it is fully upgraded….

Watch this little mini documentary about it at FutureStates.tv and enjoy your long weekend saturday!

We’ve been without internet the last 3 days and have come to find our site is down. All of our posts, pages and comments had vanished. It seems our web host, hostpapa severs went down and around the same time we lost everything and our database shrunk to 0mb. Sent an email to hostpapa support and got a response saying “We don’t backup customer files, it’s up to you. case closed”

I have to say it’s pretty shitty customer service from hostpapa.ca No apology, no explanation why the servers crashed, no nothing. The only way I knew their servers went down (which they didn’t admit) is because I have a third party reporting service for outages. Also a friend of ours uses hostpapa and she actually got an email.. where the hell was ours?

Anyways, so we drank our troubles away through many pitchers of BeerLao, pool with the A-Team and many whisky cokes. This morning instead of tubing we nursed our hangovers and got ready to get our dream back up and running again. Lo and behold, I do an upgrade to the newest version of WordPress and it magically all reappeared like nothing happened.

My guess is that hostpapa realized that killing baby kittens is wrong and decided to make it up with this magic. But really, did wordpress magically have a backup we didn’t know about somewhere in cyberland?

None the less, sorry for the hiccup, we’re now back to our regularly scheduled program starting Monday.

While walking about one night, we ran into an interesting art installation just outside the National Gallery called One and Other, created by sculptor Antony Gormley. It’s located at the top of the empty 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square, originally designed to hold an equestrian statute which never got placed and has sat empty for years. But now it’s the location for temporary works of art commissioned by leading national and international artists.

Antony Gormely’s premise for One and Other was to have 2,400 people from across the world get their 60 minutes of fame, front and center. With an open concept of “do whatever you want to do.” 35,000 people apply for their chance to take part and were picked by a random lottery. Running 24 hours a day for 100 days, One and Other is an ambitious and quite unique art project.

It was a chance for anyone to show off their secret talents, voice an opinion, start a protest, dance, be naked, teach, advertise, or even just sit up there and talk on their phone while they video tape the people below. With 2,400 individual performances you can just imagine the variety of personalities that were brave enough to share themselves with the people of London.

Check out this SKYARTS page to watch videos from the best of the best.

Although the One and Other project has now been completed, Trafalgar Square has been used and still is a location for a more modern approach to art and making impressions to strangers. From a T-Mobile “Hey Jude” flashmob, to protests and rallies, and even to temporary art installations on the the 4th Plinth. It seems like a happening place in London to see something interesting. (the fountains and lion statues in the square are also nice to look) Even if you are searching for uninteresting things during your travels, your eyes will be please to boredom when you find out what some pale guy and his wife looked like back in the day inside the National Gallery. (with free admission… Yay?!??)

Shared accommodation in the mountains of BC

We have shared many vacations with our friends Steve and Karen. From enjoying all inclusive treatments in the Dominican, multi-day stag parties away from home, (Scott went to Las Vegas, USA, I went house-boating in Sicamous, B.C.), renting winter cabins, and even camping together in the same tent trailer or even smaller then that, the same tent!

So you could say we are pretty adapt to each other’s ways and handle small areas for multi days without a breeze! Well, we thought so too until we had to share hostel dorm rooms for 4 in Europe.

Scott has a super power, he can fall asleep like he has narcolepsy but actually doesn’t. Which is fantastic for him, but the rest of us are insanely jealous of it. The other problem is Scott has the capability to snore like a lumberjack and this snoring commences within minutes of him falling asleep. This basically leaves the small dorm room for 4 about 5 minutes to fall asleep otherwise you will be bothered by Scott’s snoring. Best part of this all… he snores louder when he is tired and has been drinking/partying lots. Well Europe has been quite the party and Scott has been snoring the loudest I’ve ever heard him.

For some strange reason Karen and Steve never learned this from sleeping in tents together. But they learned it enough in our Europe travels that we have started to book 2 double private rooms rather then a room for 4. Scott feels bad for keeping everyone awake all night, and Karen and Steve want to get more sleep, so we are all okay with paying a bit extra to have our own spaces. Only problem is what about me?? I still have to sleep with the snoring beast, and earplugs don’t drown it out!

Not our photo, but this our small room at the Generator Hostel in London

One of the smallest spaces we have shared with Karen and Steve was a private dorm for 4 with shared bathroom at the Generator hostel in London. It even seemed smaller then a tent trailer! Our small room in the generator had 2 bunk beds and a sink with about 2 meters wide x 1.5 meters long floor space. Needless to say we all took turns getting ready, one person gets ready and grabs their stuff while the rest sit on their bed and wait their turn.

We are thankful we never encountered a room this small: (however I can’t help but laugh at this random youtube video!)

Anyways, I thank the powers that be for melatonin! It’s my saving grace to get a good night’s sleep. Helps me fall asleep faster and helps me stay asleep until rested, with no groggy side effect the next day. I highly suggest all backpackers to travel with melatonin.  It doesn’t knock you out like a regular sleeping pill does. Makes the next day easier or if you take it on a train or something like that you will wake up quite easily if you need to and/or fall back asleep again if you get disturbed.

What do you do when you travel? What happens if you end up in a dorm with a snorer?

Jeremy currently lives in Dayton Ohio and is planning his very own “dream” trip around the world, hoping to embark in August 2010 once he is done his graduate research. Jeremy has already traveled to many countries in his life, but still has mad case of the travel bug.

We had a great time answering Jeremy’s questions and wish him all the luck in the world for his trip preparations and upcoming adventures.

Check out the spotlight here at Jeremy’s blog, and while your at it add his site to your RSS. It’s full of great planning tips and some stories from his past adventures. And if your on twitter, give him a follow!

Thanks again Jeremy for the spotlight!! We look forward to reading your future traveler spotlights and would love the chance to talk again about our Asia experiences once we land back in Canada.