Spending the last few weeks on the street once again confirmed my general approach to slower travel. While other location independents call themselves “professionals” – and, certainly, deservedly so – I am more a location independent dilettante kind of guy. Give me six months in Cartagena and (some) work will get done. Give me a motley month of Northern Germany, England and Cologne, and I won’t even read my e-mails anymore. So yes, I certainly need to make sure to travel as slow as possible – and, when I can’t, get into some kind of connection habit on the road.

Other take-aways from these weeks:

1. I didn’t miss the web – again. As on my Amazon adventure nearly a year ago, I could perfectly well disconnect from all those beeps and blinking messages and didn’t miss them at all.

2. I actually did miss some people from the web. My group of online peers and friends has grown quite a bit since 2009. As little as I care about most news, blogs and tweets out there, I really missed your updates, guys.

3. Days get short if the breakfast starts at 1pm and lasts six hours. I’m actually considering implementing a four hour breakfast week in my life to have more time to get stuff done.

4. You cannot live here without having an income. While it’s perfectly possible to spend a great month in the Caribbean on a $200 budget, Europe is just too expensive. I’ll have to consider this when creating my retirement plan for … well, the rest of my life.

5. 23° F (-5° C) is way too cold to camp. There was ice on my tent. Nuff said.

6. If you want to save somebody’s life, make sure their airways are open. (I did a first aid course and feel ready to save you if you’re into trouble. Just call me.)

7. Two suns are better than one. See attached photo.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They may reach 314 words on some special occasions, but just to create an exception to prove the rule. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. They may not get published on some Tuesdays, but just to create an exception to prove the rule. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader. Really, there’s no exception to this. I may also tweet about them, but there’s no guarantee for that. If you need a nice disclaimer some day, be sure to hire me.