Traveling is all about teamwork.

I think that every travel team/relationship breaks down into different roles. Zev and I seem to split responsibilities pretty evenly, but sometimes we take turns in different roles. Are you the planner, navigator, negotiator, photographer, communications manager, hostel booker, instagrammer, or postcard author?

Driving in Bali, I’m not as confident as Zev on the scooter.

Zev drives a scooter in Burma.

Today we tried a walking tour from a new guidebook, Rick Steve’s Budapest city guide. It nearly resulted in a riot. Rick Steve’s guides have a very strong voice, with plenty of editorial opinions thrown in. We’re not used to our guidebooks adding so much personal input to the landscape of a place. We’re no strangers to guidebooks, we have tried Footprint, Rough Guides, Fodor’s, and finally settled on Lonely Planet as our preferred travel bible.

The whole experience was a funny reminder that everyone develops their own unique travel style, which can be molded by which guidebook you choose or vice versa.

I remember I abandoned a certain high end guidebook back when I was backpacking through India and trying to figure out how to get to the next town. I flipped through the book and read the phrase ‘tell your driver to take you to the next town 3 hours down the road…’ I looked around for my driver, and seeing none, pitched the book in the trash bin and hopped on the nearest public bus.

This also got me to thinking about what roles you take on during travel. In our travel relationship Zev is the scheduler and logistics man, while I prefer to do all the communications (yay for blogposts and postcards), negotiations (my family calls me ‘the angry shopper’), and navigation. In Bali, when we go on roadtrips I sit on the back of the scooter with my camera slung across my body and the map carefully opened across Zev’s back. I feel I’m in my element taking photos of roadside attractions and keeping us on the right route.

Zev is tops with a hatchet.

Face buried in the Lonely Planet.

McDonald’s drive-thru on a scooter in Sanur, Bali.

Stuff from around the web:

One of my favorite bloggers, A Cup of Jo, thinks every relationship has one planner and one spontaneous personality. Personally, we take turns being the instigator and the planner.

Nora Ephron was one of the most inspiring comedic authors, the way she created comedic material out of the most tragic personal events was remarkable. Nora Ephron’s son, Jacob Bernstein, writes a heartwrenching piece about his mother’s final days.

An excerpt from Sheryl Sandburg’s new book Lean In. The fascinating ‘can women have it all?’ debate continues to rage. (Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, was the article that sparked this fire)