About this Travel Journal

This is Joel Klebanoff’s travel journal. I started it in May of 2019. I will not try to add entries from previous journeys because I have a horrid memory and would undoubtedly get things wrong. I suspect nobody would care if I got things wrong. Other than me.

Are you the sort of person who seeks out adventure and wants to push life to the edge? Are you looking for an online travel journal that will let you live that life vicariously or that will give you tips on how to pursue that dream yourself? If so, then you probably should look elsewhere.

Don’t get me wrong. I love that you’re here. I hope you’ll spend some time exploring this travelogue and then come back and explore it some more. But I’m a self-effacing neurotic. My travels tend to reflect that. I shy away from danger, or even just excitement. I don’t imagine I’m the only one. If you share my personality, I’d like to use it full-time rather than sharing it, if you don’t mind. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got. But you’re welcome to follow along here if you wish.

Or if you’re the opposite of me, you might be interested in reading about how insecure people travel, seeing as though you’re never going to experience that yourself.

And if what you’re interested in is an honest, personal account of interesting places around the world written by an ordinary person, those who know me would say an ordinary schlemiel, who loves to travel, you’ve come to the right place.

Traveling Without a Car

One thing you should know about me before you explore my travel journal, something that might make you decide against exploring it, is that I hate driving.

When I was younger, I drove a lot more than I do now. You won’t see it in this travel journal because it was decades too long ago, but I drove to both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, into California and down to Florida and New Orleans in the United States. Nevertheless, I never enjoyed driving. It was something I tolerated because I thought (not always accurately) the destinations were worth the journey, but I couldn’t afford a lot of flying when I was younger. I wanted to see some sights along the way, or a combination of the two.

The older I got, the more I disliked driving. Now, I hate it. I live downtown, close to a subway station. A car isn’t necessary for my day-to-day life. I got rid of mine when I retired.

I still have a drivers license and if there’s something I want to see that I can’t get to without a car, I might rent one. But that is very much the exception, not the rule.

Therefore, if you’re looking for a travel journal that will describe places you can see without a car, this might be the one for you. However, if you’re looking for a car-based roadtrip travalogue, you should probably move along. (Although, you are still very welcome here if you want to stay.)

In those few exceptions where I do rent a car during my travels, I will mention that in these travel journal pages, possibly including considerable whining (whining is one of my stronger skills) about the drives.

Exploring this Travelogue

This travel journal uses standard blogging software (WordPress). The homepage for Joel’s Journeys and Jaunts shows the most recent ten entries, providing the page title, a brief excerpt, and an image from the post. As I post a new entry, it gets added to the top of the home page, pushing the preexisting ones down. You can scroll through entries, ten at a time, using the numbered navigation at the bottom of these index pages.

When you read an individual travel journal entry, after the body text, you’ll find links to the chronologically next and previous posts. So you can read through the whole journal that way.

Okay, this next bit gets a little tricky because it varies depending on the type of browser you’re using. There is a menu of destinations I’ve been to grouped by continent, country, sometimes province/state, and municipality. If you click on any of the destinations, at any level of the geographical hierarchy, you’ll get an index page showing all of my travel journal entries from that location. The tricky part is where that menu is. If you’re on a large desktop browser, it will appear at the top of the screen. If you’re using a smaller screen, such as on a phone, you’ll probably have to click on or hover over a menu icon to see it. If you’re on an intermediate-size screen, such as a tablet, well, who knows where it will appear, but it will be in one of those two locations.

When you’re on a desktop browser, you’ll see a sidebar to the right of the screen. Within that, there’s a drop-down list (Location Categories) that provides the same function as the menu I described above. If you’re using a smaller screen, the “sidebar” usually won’t be at the side. Its contents will typically appear after the rest of the page content.

If you select a continent in either the top menu or the drop-down menu, it will take you to index pages with all of my travel journal entries (ten entries per sequential index page) from that continent, regardless of the country or locale within the country. For example, if you select “Asia,” you’ll get an index of all of my travelogue entries from anywhere in Asia. On the other hand, if you select one of the countries on that continent, say Japan, you’ll see an index of all of my entries from Japan, regardless of the municipality, but only Japanese entries, not ones from any other Asian country. Likewise, if you select a city, you get an index of all of my entries from that city, but only that city.

There’s another drop-down menu within the “sidebar.” If you want to see all of my travel journal entries for a particular trip I’ve taken, possibly so you can see what I found doable on a single-trip itinerary, you can use the Trips drop-down list. You’ll also see a link in the sidebar to an index page for all my trips.

That’s probably more than you need to know to find your way around this travel journal. Happy exploring! 

The Genesis of this Travel Journal

I started this travel journal because a Dear Relative recommended that I blog about my travels. My DR probably thinks I never listen to any suggestions she gives me. You’re wrong about that, DR. But I’m still not going to get a dog or cat; or take up a musical instrument; or start drawing or painting.

I’ll continue to write here about my travels until it is no longer fun. Then I won’t, because travel is supposed to be about fun. At least, my travel is supposed to be about fun.

Then again, if you want to steer all of your friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, strangers in the night, strangers in the day, and anyone else to this travel journal and convince them to read every page here, and come back to check regularly for new pages, I’ll slap advertising on it when traffic to it suffices. Then I’ll make money off this journal, which will allow me to travel more and travel better. But I estimate the probability of that happening to be near zero, plus or minus 0.00000001%. I’d love to be wrong about that, though. If you’re the sort of person who loves to prove other people wrong, you know what to do.