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Hong Kong | Join The Adventure | Travel Pictures Videos and Tips https://valerieandgriffin.com Travel Pictures Videos and Tips Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:45:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Looking Back: Our First Year Of Marriage https://valerieandgriffin.com/looking-back-our-first-year-of-marriage/ https://valerieandgriffin.com/looking-back-our-first-year-of-marriage/#respond Thu, 20 Jan 2011 03:00:50 +0000 https://valerieandgriffin.com/?p=2194 Just wanted to share a video of some pictures from our first year of marriage and also let you know how you can make a similar video.  First, enjoy the video.  Most of these are pictures of places we have been together. A few actually have us in them. It has been an amazing year!

How To Make One Yourself

To make your our video similar to this one, go to pummelvision.com as you may have guessed from the video.  There you can pull pictures from Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox and a few others.  You’l have to authorize pummelvision to allow access to the account you choose and then also let it know if you want to publish to Vimeo or YouTube, so you can instantly link it to anyone on Twitter, Facebook, etc. After that, put in your email address and wait a few hours to a couple days and pummelvision will email you when your video is ready.

Bonus Video!

Griffin has been taking pictures every couple of days and posting them to his Facebook account.  Here is a video of all of them.  These are taken and edited on an iPhone.  Enjoy!

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Otherworldly Landscape : Guilin, China https://valerieandgriffin.com/guilin-china-travel-video-pictures-hd/ https://valerieandgriffin.com/guilin-china-travel-video-pictures-hd/#respond Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:00:16 +0000 https://valerieandgriffin.com/?p=1506 We recently enjoyed an amazing visit to China which was a first for both of us as far as visiting mainland China goes.  We have both been to Hong Kong, but expected and were glad to find mainland China very different.  The first place we visited in China was a place called Guilin.  You may have never heard of Guilin, but chances are you have seen pictures and paintings depicting its unique landscape with limestone mountains reaching up like fingers from the ground.  I never knew where all those China buffets in the States were getting such cool pictures until our friend Matt posted a link to some pictures on Facebook.

If you ever get the chance to visit China, we would highly recommend a trip to Guilin.  The beautiful and unique landscape and the kind and genuine people have made it one of our favorite travel experiences yet.

We will be posting more updates from our trip to China soon, but in the mean time, you can see some pictures from our trip here.  And, a video of the Li River Cruise in timelapse below.  Enjoy!

Highly Recommended Tavel Guide Service

While looking for information and recomendations on Guilin, we came across a great tour guide and decided to try him out. I’ll let our Trip Advisor review tell you the rest, but the main point is, if you want a great experience, book a tour of Guilin with Jack at Yangshou Private Tours.

Trip Advisor Review:

Between me and my wife, we have traveled to over 30 countries and more than 100 cities. Our experience with Jack, his guide skills and travel arrangements have been the best either of us has ever experienced!

We usually don’t use tour services as we enjoy finding places on our own and trying to explore some off-the-beaten-path locations, but for this trip, because we wanted to see a lot in a limited time and also as we needed some bookings done in advance, we decided to book a private tour with Jack! That turned out to be best decision we made in our trip! Easily worth triple what we paid for his services!

We told Jack what we would like to see and asked him if he had any other suggestions. He then put together a custom package which included everything we had asked for and more and sent us the proposed itinerary the next day!

We were blown away by the amount of planning and detail Jack provided in the itinerary and how he was able to fit in everything we wanted on such a tight time table. We could not have been happier and he even took care of all of the booking and some of the pre-paid expenses for us. This was great and the opposite of what all the other places we had checked with said they would do. They said we could book when we got there, but we were arriving at midnight and needed to be on the boat for the Li river cruise by 9AM, so having it booked in advance gave us the piece of mind to know for sure that we would make it to the boat at the time we needed.

When we arrived, Jack called our hostel to make sure we had arrived safely and confirm with us the next day’s itinerary. We enjoyed a great Li River cruise, taking in the breathtaking beauty of the Guilin/Yangshuo area and then met Jack at the dock where he took us to a great hotel with a beautiful view of the city! He even took care to book the room with the best view of the sunrise.

Throughout our traveling, we not only enjoyed Jack’s superb planning and execution, but also his great personality and friendship. One of the things that Jack did a couple of times for us in the villages we visited, was talk to the locals who would usually allow us into their home and, on more than one occasion, offered us food and drink. These experiences, we agreed, will be ones we will never forget and allowed us to see a side of China, and it’s people, that no other tour package could allow.

Jack took care of us and had a great itinerary planned for us from the moment we arrived all the way up to the time he said goodbye to us at the Airport. If you are going to Guilin/Yangshuo, do yourself a favor and make an investment you will not regret by utilizing Jack’s Awesome Private Tours!

We were so grateful for not only having met a great, capable and organized guide, but also in gaining a friend whom we hope to visit again, and in the mean time recommend to everyone we meet. Thanks again Jack! Hope to see you again soon!

Sincerely, Valerie and Griffin https://valerieandgriffin.com/

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How To Get Free Air Miles and Save $600+ https://valerieandgriffin.com/great-travel-hacking-resource-free-frequent-flyier-miles/ https://valerieandgriffin.com/great-travel-hacking-resource-free-frequent-flyier-miles/#respond Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:07:00 +0000 https://valerieandgriffin.com/?p=1085 We have been living abroad for about 8 months now and we have been finding some great resources for travel hacking.  What is travel hacking you ask?  Travel hacking is a popular term used to describe traveling and enjoying once-in-a-lifetime experiences for less cost or less effort.  For example about three months ago we were able to get a free round trip flight to Hong Kong added to our already planned flight to Japan due to a travel hack we discovered in Frequent Flyer Master!  Frequent Flyer Master is an e-book written by one of our favorite bloggers Chris Guillebeau.  Chris currently has over 1 million frequent flier miles which he is using to travel to every country in the world.  The best part is that he usually pays no more than a penny per mile and often gets as much or more than 50,000 for no additional cost regularly!

This book is packed with useful information on how to get free frequent flier miles, how to find the lowest fares, and planning for and purchasing round-the-world plane tickets.  Chris also guarantees that you will earn at least 25,000 air miles in the first 90 days or get an instant refund.  It’s the best ebook I’ve bought in terms of instant value both in knowledge and return on investment and has already saved us about $600!

Frequent Flyer Master

Frequent Flyer Master is a full e-book, a 20-minute audio, and a 4-page Priceline specific guide  on the art of hacking airline miles. Click for a full description.

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Related Products

Here are some other products Chris Offers.  We have not tried them ourselves yet, but based on our experience with his blog and the Frequent Flyer Master product we feel they would be a great investment as well.


Social Web……………Working for Yourself Guide……………Unconventional Guide to Art and Money

Click the picture for a full description.

Please let us know what you think of these resources if you decide to get them.  We’d love to hear if your experiences with them are as good as ours.

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At The Shrine Of Ten Thousand Arches https://valerieandgriffin.com/at-the-shrine-ten-thousand-arches/ https://valerieandgriffin.com/at-the-shrine-ten-thousand-arches/#respond Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:40:29 +0000 https://valerieandgriffin.com/?p=803 We just returned from two fun weeks of touring around Hong Kong and Japan.  It was such a blast.  The biggest part of the trip by far was spent in Kyoto, a city full of amazing history, culture, people, and, of course, hundreds of shrines, temples and historical buildings.  We are planning to post more pictures and video later, but wanted to share an informative video of one of the places we visited in Kyoto, now for our readers.  Hope you enjoy…

Tucked away in the hills just South of the bustling city of Kyoto are many brightly painted arches along a path through the woods. These arches and adjoining shrines make up the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine. This is a short video with pictures and information about the shrine.

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