I’ve been reading a book called The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World.

The author is a man named Eric Weiner. In the book, he is traveling around the world, stopping in countries where the people have a reputation for being “happy.”

He is trying to discover whether or not there is something about the landscape, the climate, the economy or the culture that makes those particular people happier than others.

In many of the countries to which he travels, he meets ex-pats, or people who weren’t born there but have decided to live there.

For example, he meets an American woman in Bhutan that had been living there for decades. In Iceland, he met an American man who decided to sell off his life in the United States and declare Iceland his home.

I was always interested when he ran across these characters. For a while, way back in 1998, I was an ex-pat of sorts. I lived in Buenos Aires and taught English. But I wasn’t as hard core as some of the other English teachers I met. Some of them had been living in Buenos Aires for years. And some were living and working Buenos Aires, but they’d only moved there after living and working in Japan, in Thailand, in England. I was just playing at being an ex-pat. They were serious about it.

I developed a deep fascination and respect when it came to ex-pats. I wondered just how long I would be able to last living outside of the United States. That trip was the longest I’ve been away – eight months.

And so, when I started Global Roam ink, it felt only natural that I would include a regular series of articles about ex-pat life. I was very excited to publish the article “Is There More to Colombia Than Kidnappings and Cocaine?” which is about an American couple that moves to Cartagena.

And now Global Roam ink is working on it’s second issue. This second time around we’ll publish a story about a bi-cultural family living in the United States. The mom is from South Dakota, but the dad is from Honduras.

It will be appearing shortly.

It’s June, which means that kids across the country are anxiously awaiting the closing school bell. But June also means that family road trip season is just around the corner.

When I was growing up, my parents were avid fans of the family road trip. Once classes let out, my mom and dad piled me and my brother and our two dogs into the trusty family station wagon and set off for Missouri, the state all my grandparents called home.

It was a long drive from Minnesota to Missouri — eight hours to visit one set of grandparents and twelve hours to reach the other pair. And of course, because we were kids, my brother and I peppered the trip with petty arguments and the ultimate of all annoying questions:

Are we there yet?

Perhaps, if my parents had stuffed the glove box with a copy of Kid Chat: 204 Creative Questions to Let the Imagination Travel, my brother and I would have had something else to occupy our minds.

The book’s authors, Bret Nicholaus and Paul Lowrie, came up with more questions than the summer is long to keep road tripping families from falling prey to the Are-We-There-Yet complaints. The book is overflowing with fun travel-related discussion starters that will pique everyone’s attention and encourage all bodies in the car to chime in.

For example, question 59 reads:

If you had to carry a suitcase with you everywhere you went and it always had to contain the same things, what would you put in it?

Or try question 196:

If you could do something to a rest area to make it really cool, what would it be?

E’leese Madgett-Manrique is a 12 year-old girl that is doing something really cool.

She is riding her horse (and Arabian named Chip) in a loop through the state of Minnesota.

It’s going to take her entire summer to do. Her big departure date is June 7. She leaves from the town of Buffalo, Minnesota. As her map stands right now, she won’t get back home to her Minneapolis suburb until August 31.

But this isn’t just some sort of horseback joy ride. E’leese is actually a girl on a mission.

She wants to raise money for an organization she started called oneGirloneRide.

After she collects enough dough, she wants to buy a 3,000 acre ranch in rural Minnesota and turn it into a resort retreat for members of the military and their families.

As E’leese pictures it, the resort (which she wants to call The Ranch Minnesota) will be a place that is staffed by volunteers willing to clean cabins and cook meals so that soldiers can vacation for free.

I met E’leese, her mom Kerry and their dog Lucky the other day. I didn’t meet Chip, though. He was off in a barn somewhere. They were excited, nervous and ready to get on their trip underway.

As the summer days tick by, I’ll be checking in with E’leese to see how her journey is going. But if you want to follow her trip on your own, you can check out her oneGirloneRide blog.

In a previous post I wrote about Oprah Winfrey’s plan to get more American kids interested in the world beyond U.S. borders. Her newest organization – O Ambassadors – encourages teens to get involved in volunteer mission work in developing countries.

Now I’ve spent a bit more time tooling around on her new site. I’ve discovered a fun online game that’s a part of the site.

The game is called the Millennium Challenge.

It’s like a board game except it’s on your computer screen. Your character clicks the spinner, moves the number of spaces the spinner says, and then you draw a card from the stack to see what it says.

Some of the cards are simply trivia about other lands. Other cards give you a task to complete that will help you learn something unique about another place.

But you can’t just willy nilly complete the cards. If you don’t finish your job in the given time, or if you didn’t read the directions and do it wrong, your character will be punished and you’ll have to move backwards.

It’s pretty fun. I recommend you give it a go and hop on over. But player beware.

The game does play a song that gets pretty annoying after a while. I was muting before I knew it.

It was only a matter of time.

Oprah Winfrey has encouraged Americans to lose weight, read books and give away money. Now, she wants Americans to go abroad. Specifically American kids.

It’s not every day that I watch the Oprah show. But I happened to be home, and I happened to turn on the TV, and it just so happened that Oprah was there on the screen talking to groups of teens about their experiences doing mission work in other countries.

After talking to the teens, the show would play a video clip of the kids out and about in the world doing their good deeds. Again and again the show returned to a particular group of American teens who’d spent time in Africa building a school for local children.

The American kids were often teary eyed talking about their experience in another country, helping other people. They were proud of themselves — as they rightfully should have been — to have traveled so far from home, made new friends in another language, and built a school from scratch with their own hands.

Heck, I was even teary eyed watching the show. These kids had gone off and done exactly what I want Global Roam ink to encourage teens to do: go travel, go get smart, and return home changed and determined to be active, educated, and global in their outlook. I KNEW I was on to something when I hatched my Global Roam ink plan!

At any rate, Oprah is going to get American teens out there and doing good by starting a new organization aimed at supporting parents, teachers and students interested in the idea. Her new initiative, O Ambassadors, supports the whole thing.

There is even a whole section of the site devoted to teachers who want to start an O Ambassadors after school club at their school.

Or, click here if you want to watch excerpts of the O Ambassador kick off episode.

I’m so excited! Global Roam ink is mentioned and linked on The Huffington Post!

I wrote a travel-themed essay and submitted it for publication through a networking group I’m a part of called Ladies Who Launch.

I submitted the essay about a month ago and had no idea whether it would be chosen or not. I was told to “wait and see.”

But it was chosen! I’m so excited to see my byline and my author credit citing Global Roam ink on such a well-read and well-regarded site!

The essay is called “My Travel, My God.”

I’ll tempt you with an excerpt below, but of course, I think you should all go and read the whole thing!

I like to travel close to the ground. I stay in budget hotels and carry my clothes on my back. I avoid package tours, preferring to map my own path. Yes, I’ve gotten lost. I’ve been frustrated to tears. I’ll even admit to being scared. But I don’t wander the globe to be comfy and snug. I travel to know I’m alive.

Rarely do I feel more alive than when I travel. At home, it’s so easy to fall into a rut, to drive the same roads every day and eat the same dish from the same Chinese joint every week. Frankly, after a while, home can get kind of boring. Routine does not stimulate my brain in the ways that travel can.

I just had to check in with the guys over at the Great American Road Trip.

I first wrote about them a few days back. They were three guys hoping to road trip through every state in the U.S. of A. in just five days.

Turns out, they were successful. It took them 106 hours and 43 minutes. According to their blog, they made it the entire way without getting pulled over once, even though they saw 90 cops.

They also claim they managed to win three girls’ phone numbers from the road!

Here is a blog except from Josh, one of the road tripping guys. He offered this reflection:

I have been asked if I would do it again, without reservation the answer is yes! It was rough at times, sleeping in a car is terrible, but all the sites and people were amazing. The good far outweighs the bad. I was living a dream.

Last night, Lisa Ling made a stop in Minneapolis and I went to hear her speak.

Ling is probably most recognized as a former host of The View. She gave up that gig a while back, however. Now she works for Oprah and National Geographic.

She travels the world doing investigative journalism. She delves deep into topics and subjects that make most of us squirm. For example, she has investigated female suicide bombers, puppy mills and gang rape in the Congo.

Ling credited her first trip abroad as a pivotal experience in her life, as an experience that pushed her over the edge and convinced her that traveling and telling stories was for her.
At the age of 21, Ling went on assignment to Afghanistan for Channel One, a news source that brings current events into high school classrooms. After that trip, she was never the same.

Traveling, Ling said last night, makes a person more intelligent, more curious, and more human. I agree with all of that!

Last night, Ling shared a poem she wrote after traveling to Africa and investigating the lives of child brides, of girls who are married off to much older men when they are just 6 or 7 years old. Her poem was both touching and tragic.

After passing two hours listening to her speak, I was so intrigued with her life that I sought out her web site this morning.

While there, I ran across a report she did about forced child labor in India. It’s quite a long video clip – an hour – but it’s very interesting.

The report focuses on the forced labor of girls and it reminded me of the interview I did with Patricia McCormick, the author of the young adult novel Sold that is featured in this premier issue of Global Roam ink.

There are these three guys called Joey, Josh and Adam and they are doing something kind of crazy.

They are trying to drive through all 48 contiguous states in just 5 days.

They’ve got a plan: Start in Vermont and finish at Four Corners where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona meet.

Their path through the states is a little strange and loopy. They are hitting a lot of corners to tick off the most states in the least amount of time.

Can they do it?

They’re trying. They pushed off at 7:30 am on Sunday, May 4. Check out their blog to chart their progress. At the time of this posting they were in Louisiana.

Their Great American Road Trip will cover 7,500 miles. They are hoping to beat the current best known time, which is – apparently – 5 days, 7 hours and 15 minutes.

The nightly news has been reporting world wide rice shortages. There have been riots in Haiti because of a lack of food.

The country of Vietnam , one of the world’s top rice producers, recently announced it was cutting off exports of rice, preferring instead to keep all the rice it grows inside its own boundaries to feed its own people.

Closer to home, just this week Sam’s Club announced it was rationing the number of bags of rice that customers can buy – only four bags of rice per trip.

Even my local news crew got in on the story, interviewing the owners of popular Asian restaurants and asking whether or not the global rice shortage will affect their menu prices. Their answers – so far – were no.

So why all the fuss over some tiny grains of rice?

Well, a lot of people, the world over, count rice as a daily food staple. They relay on cheap and available rice so that they can continue to eat. If rice suddenly becomes scarce and expensive, then people will go hungry.

In fact, people are already going hungry. According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day from hunger. Most of these people are children.

And even though there is a rice shortage right now, there is still something you can do. You can play a really fun and addictive computer game.

The game is called Free Rice. Every time you answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question correctly, you earn grains of rice. The rice you earn gets donated to people who desperately need free rice in order to survive.

The site is supported by advertisers, which is how the site, which is operated by the United Nations World Food Program, is able to buy more rice to distribute.

Visit the site and give it a try. I dare you. It’s impossible to just answer one question. Before you know it, you’ll have passed 10 minutes on the site!