As of today, July 13, all fees associated with getting or renewing a USA passport have gone up.

New adult (ages 16+) passports have increased from $100 to $135. New minor (15 and younger) passports have gone up from $85 to $105. Renewals have gone from $75 to $110.

You can see the official fees for all passport and passport cards at Travel.State.Gov. You can also see the fee increase for all other services in this chart (my favorite – renouncing your USA citizenship has gone from free to costing a whooping $450!).

If you do not have a passport at this point, even with the new fee increases, I would go and start the process to get one soon. Here’s why: the reason cited for the fee increases.

According to CNN.com, “Officials recommended the hikes after a study found the current fee structure wasn’t covering the government’s costs for the services, the State Department said in the proposal outlined in the Federal Register.”

Folks, those costs are bound to keep increasing with inflation, so another fee hike cannot be too far away in the future. There already was a more tame one in 2008; consider that one a trial for this more aggressive increase. Now take that scenario and place this new increase as the tame one; you sure you want to wait a couple more years now?

I have to agree with the general consensus: it bites. Even I, because of procrastination, will have to shell out $110 to renew my passport, something I’ve known I have to do before it expires next year, so I’m preaching to myself as well. But here’s the thing: it’s worth it.

I wouldn’t be caught dead without my passport up to date, and I cannot stress enough how important I think it is for everyone to have their own passport. Maybe you think you’ll never travel out of the country, but the truth is you never know. If the opportunity comes up, you’re already set to go. Remember you also need it even to go into Mexico and/or Canada (though, in the Department of Awesome, remember that you do not need it to go to Puerto Rico). Besides, it’s about the most official and irrefutable form of identification there is. Yes, $135 is not chump change, but this is a document that will last for 10 years, so it’s an investment.

To sum up: the fee increase simply sucks, but getting a passport, and having it up to date, is still a good investment for everyone, including all gamer travelers.

In order to help out all the thousands of gamers descending upon Indianapolis, Indiana in August for Gen Con Indy 2010, the Gen Con team has partnered with Expedia to create the Gen Con Travel Support site.

From the news release:

Gen Con LLC has partnered with Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN) to provide attendees with a convenient, reliable, and affordable means of arranging their personal travel. The new service is dubbed “Gen Con Travel Support”, and can be accessed online on the right-hand sidebar of the Gen Con Indy Home Page. Users of the new site will enjoy the convenience of booking a broad selection of flights, rental cars, travel packages, and supplemental lodging.

Gen Con Travel Support runs on the Expedia search engine, so anything Expedia has access to (and they are one of the biggest travel websites) you should be able to get access to through this site as well. This is an affiliate site, so anything you book through the Gen Con Travel Support site gives a percentage of the sale to Gen Con LLC.

So what can you get via this Gen Con Travel Support site? Air tickets, rental cars and “alternate housing,” meaning hotel rooms outside of the Gen Con housing block and subject to regular hotel rates for the dates.Rooms at special Gen Con rates must be booked via the Gen Con Housing Bureau; you will need the housing access code provided at the time of registration in order to book inside the Gen Con block (though those rooms sold out at record time back at the beginning of the year).

If you need to book airfare and rental cars for your trip/stay at Gen Con, give it a whirl.

Note: I am of mixed feelings here because I like Gen Con and want to see them continue to succeed, but I have no desire to support Expedia. I have had a couple of really bad experiences with them in the past 8 years (as in leaving-me-stranded-in-Ireland-with-no-way-to-get-back-home bad) and neither use them myself nor recommend them to anyone. Granted, there are thousands out there who have used Expedia with no issue whatsoever, so it’s up to you to make the decision to use them.

This is just a quick post to let you know that I will be closing and deleting the @GamerTraveler Twitter account. The change will go in effect on Sunday, March 7 (at some point during the day).

The blog isn’t going away; this is only an administrative move. I have a personal Twitter account, @Highmoon, that I have gone back to using exclusively since late last year as I seek to unify my online presence. Keeping two accounts is no longer something I can do while paying attention to them both, so this one’s going away in favor of my primary one.

If you have enjoyed being a follower of @GamerTraveler, and wish to remain connected, go ahead and follow me over at @Highmoon. It’s still me, tweeting about the same stuff (games & travel), plus some other things as well.

I hope to catch you there.

Yikes, blink a couple of times and suddenly February’s on the downhill towards the 28th! Let’s get this blog carnival roundup going, then.

The participants were few, but the posts they wrote were fan-tas-tic and everyone should check them out for the good info and advice they provided.

From Stargazer’s World we get two entries: How to make travel in your games more exciting, in which Michael offers some advice on making travel an integral and fun part of an adventure; and “We travel light. Let’s hunt some Orc”, in which we get some thoughts on traveling with our copious roleplaying equipment in real life. I especially liked this one a lot.

6d6 Fireball shares 5 Travel Related Hooks for GMs.

Mad Brew Labs writes about A Well Traveled Gamer, in which he draws on his own travel experiences to give some advice to gamers.

Campaign Mastery gathers us round the fire and gives us My Favourite PC Travel Game: Campfire Chats, a simple mini-game-in-game that can be used to simulate travel and enhance character development.

Fame & Fortune shares Places To Be, which has a very detailed list of suggestions to turn real places you’ve been to into memorable locations for your games.

Travel in the Sea of Stars has a post packed to the gills with links to travel-related entries made during the month of January. Seriously, check this out; it’s like 10 posts in one!

Held Action asks a very basic and important question: How Far Will You Travel to Game? Well, how far?

Worlds in a Handful of Dice talks simply about Travelling, finding new game stores, meeting and playing with new people, hitting museums and couch-traveling. It’s like 3 posts in one.

The team at Dice Monkey brings it to a great close with Travel in my Star Wars and D&D Games and Fueling Imagination By Exploring Your Own Backyard (an activity I heartily endorse).

Thanks a lot to all the participants. I am amazed by the great posts you all shared. It was my honor to have hosted this month’s blog carnival.

Welcome to 2010 and to the first blog carnival of the new year. Unsurprisingly, in this month’s carnival we’ll be tackling the topic of travel from two perspectives, which will hopefully mean everyone will have something to say on the subject.

Travel in Games

Thinking of pseudo-medieval fantasy roleplaying games, travel is something that happens fairly often but that is given rarely the proper attention. Think about it: adventurers go from cities and towns across uncivilized wilderness, impassable mountains and dense forests to reach long-abandoned ruins in search of the unknown. That sounds almost like my trip to Europe! Yes, there are encounters along the way, but travel is almost an effect; how about if it was the cause instead, the focus?

In modern/futuristic games, travel is more present, but also even more so matter-of-fact. Characters zip from New York to Tokyo in a sentence, from Earth to the edge of the galaxy in a couple of Piloting dice rolls. Movement is far more common, yet even more invisible than in the fantasy genre.

What if we were to change this?

Tell me stories of how travel affected your games. Maybe you have an anecdote of an adventure where travel was the focus (Call of Cthulhu’s Horror on the Orient Express, anyone?), or rules to address travel in your games? Maybe a review of a travel-oriented game, be it roleplaying (Ribbon Drive!) or board game. Surprise me, and surprise yourself.

Gamers Traveling

If you are a gamer, and you have traveled, then you are a gamer traveler. Gamers cannot help but look at the world through the gaming lens, storing all that inspiration for a future game: the Eiffel Tower becomes an eldritch antenna transmiting ectoplasmic waves into the netherworld; the Arch of Titus becomes a cursed gate that floods the minds of those that pass through with the horror of the sack of Jerusalem; Mt Rushmore becomes the resting place of four gargantuan stone golems built to protect the US from the inevitable alien invasion. See what I mean?

Or perhaps in one of your travels you encountered a new game, one that speaks of a culture other than your own. Maybe you played some games with folks wherever you were visiting. And I know for a fact there’s quite a few gamers out there with respectable air mileage totals just from visiting conventions all over the country.

Tell me your stories.

To My Fellow Travel Bloggers

Don’t think that because you aren’t gamers you’re off the hook! Games are universal fun across all cultures, so even if you are not hardcore into them, chances are you have a story about games and travel to tell. Share it with us!

The Details

• The Games & Travel Blog Carnival runs through the month of January, with a final roundup showing up within the first 15 days of February.
• Any and all bloggers are welcomed to participate.
• Leave a link to your blog post in the comments section.
• Any questions, ask them in the comments.
• If you’d like a graphic for your post, you can use one of the two below:

RPG Blog Carnival

Games & Travel Blog Carnival

Have fun!

Though there are two parts to the name of this blog, I tend to focus pretty heavily on the Gamer over the Traveler half. Though I see The Gamer Traveler as travel writing for the gaming community (hmm, new tag line?) the blog has followed the same formula that I established when I started the podcast, which means the travel gets filtered through the gaming lens. I’m fine with that, but I would also like to expand the travel-writing part of TGT in the future.

Earlier this year I joined the Travel Bloggers Exchange (TBEX), a social network meant to bring together travel bloggers of all levels and scope. Back on July 26, they held the first TBEX event in Chicago the same weekend as BlogHer 09 Conference. The one-day con (and really, that’s what it was, they just didn’t have any gaming – yet) was a success with over 100 bloggers dropping in from all over the US and from international locations as well. The #TBEX hashtag was flying like mad that Sunday (imagine a conference room full of bloggers most of which are on Twitter as well) with comments, tweet-by-tweet transcripts, pics and general chatter that, much like when #GenCon was around, made me wish I was there. Good news have come my way.

TBEX 2010 has been announced for the weekend of July 26-27, 2010 in New York City!

The venue is still TBA, but NYC is a great location for this conference, not only for the fantastic tourist attractions for all the visitors, not only for the great meeting spaces the city boasts all over the place, but also because my sister-in-law lives up there so I can bring my wife along and she can spend time with her while I geek out on travel blogging goodness all weekend.

Though June 2010 is still a while away and I’ve no idea what the future will bring, I believe I will be pre-registering for the conference at the early-bird rate. Worst case scenario, I can’t go and my fee helps fund this con, from which I still derive benefit through the video recordings of the seminaries and such. But I’d love to go. I haven’t been to New York in about 4 years and that’s just too long. Besides, NYC has really improved their bicycling infrastructure in the city and I’d love to go check that out for myself.

You can find TBEX on the web, on Facebook and on Twitter.

[[ This story originally published at The Gamer Traveler - http://www.thegamertraveler.com ]]

The Gamer Traveler only travels with Geeky Clean soaps.

I told the tale of how I came across Geeky Clean soaps in a previous post, and I promised that I would do a review as well. Here we go!

Just from looking at them, Geeky Clean soaps are unique; they look good (when was the last time you said that about a soap?), and are packaged simply but nicely with themed wrappers and clear cellophane. They are something you can feel good about giving as a gift because they look luxurious. At about 4″ x 2″ in size, these are hefty pieces of geeky hygiene.

When you open a Geeky Clean soap, the scent is overwhelming, and the three soaps I had the pleasure of trying out–Mana, Health and Barbarian Scrub–smelled just amazing. And of course, let’s not forget or ignore what makes these soaps geeky, the embedded d20 die right in the center, floating in a sea of colored and scented glycerin (and all the other not-animal-tested, Vegan-friendly ingredients). It’s a basic, solid-colored die like the ones gamers already have hundreds of, but that did not diminish my glee at knowing I’d have 3 more dice once the review process was done!

I loved all three soaps I used. They each had individual scent profiles that set them apart, but they were all just fantastic. Health has a sharp Nag Champa scent that really revitalizes (I used this one after a long day of plane travel and it perked me up) with a hint of coconut somewhere in the background. Mana brings the coconut oil to the forefront and makes for a very crisp, refreshing shower. Barbarian Scrub has spiced orange as its primary scent and the citrusy kick was just great, not to mention the apricot seed scrubbies floating in the soap which felt just so good. If I had to pick my favorite of the three I tried, I’d go with Barbarian Scrub.

I know, it’s hard to review soaps without wandering into TMI land.

Each soap lasted between 10-12 washes (consider I am 6′ tall and of portly size when figuring out how many washes that would translate into based on your size), and I’m happy to say that from start to finish, each soap held its scent wonderfully. I had no problem using the soaps, but my wife found them way too big for her hand and kept dropping them until they’d shrunk to about 2/3 of their original size. The d20 die does not interfere with the soaping process at the start, but about 3-4 washes in, it would start to protrude from the surface of the soap. Personally I did not mind; the die kinda gives you a massage as you lather up, but my wife hated it and I’d always end up pushing it out about midway through the soap’s lifespan. And while I have no complaints about the soaps in general, I did not feel at all the exfoliating spheres supposed to be in Health, and found myself wanting more apricot seeds (and better distributed throughout the whole soap) in Barbarian Scrub.

Priced at around $5, these aren’t soaps for day-to-day bathing, but they make a perfect and utterly geeky gift that’s useful as well.

Days of Wonder wants to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their train travel boardgame by hosting a Ticket to Ride World Championship in Paris, France on June of 2010. There will be eight National Championships (North America, France, Germany, UK, Benelux, Spain and Poland), yielding the top eight players in the world, plus two alternates per region in case the National champion cannot make it.

Each National champion will receive air/train fare to and hotel accommodations in Paris, a National Champion trophy and a set of gold-plated Ticket to Ride train game pieces with a matching score marker. The World Championship winner will receive a trip for two on the legendary and luxurious Orient-Express Train, from London, England to Venice, Italy, including a two-night stay at both ends of the journey. If that prize alone is not reason enough to play in this tournament, I don’t know what is!

Check out the Days of Wonder site for full rules and Regional Championship information and bust out those Ticket to Ride boardgames and start practicing!

I was watching a show on castles on History Channel, and they said something that really stuck with me: “Castles were some of the most imposing structures ever built and they inspired awe in the population.” I was immediately transported back to York, England, back in 2001.

We’d been in England for four days, spending three of them in London. I’d seen Westminster Cathedral, Buckminster Palace, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge – all of them structures of impressive grandeur full of history. But I had taken them all in stride, something I attribute to the general “wow-I’m-in-Europe” factor. Then we took a train ride north to York, and the moment I entered the city through its medieval gate, something shifted. As we later walked up the main street and York Minster Cathedral came into view, I had to stop; I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything but stare. I was in awe.

Awe is a feeling of wonder, reverence, amazement and/or dread (or more accurately, all those at the same time) experienced when in the presence of something that transcends us. In looking at York Minster, I suddenly realized I was standing in front of a 500-year old structure (and that’s only in its finalized form; parts of it date back another 200 to 300 years), in a town that is still surrounded by its original medieval gate, in York, in Europe. I saw York Minster not as a tourist, but for a fleeting moment, as one of the lowly residents of the city must have back in the 1400’s, imagining this imposing structure rising into the heavens, one of the largest buildings I would ever seen in my toil-heavy life. It inspired awe, in all its connotations, and I was so thankful for that wonderful moment that lasted maybe a couple of minutes yet remains one of my most treasured memories of all my travels.

Awe is not something we get to experience a lot on our daily lives, but I have found that travel comes with a healthy supply of it. I experienced it various times after than in Europe; later in Ireland looking over the Cliffs of Moher and the Giant’s Causeway; in Paris, the Netherlands and Belgium; and even in Seattle, especially in the Olympic Peninsula, at the top of Hurricane Ridge. Pure awe, the kind that shuts down your conscious mind and simply lets you absorb the grandness of what you’re witnessing. When we travel we are removed from our familiar surroundings, out of our element; this lowers the barriers and makes us vulnerable to moments of wonder. Be on the lookout for such moments and when they happen, surrender to them.

I have managed to bring that ability back home with me as well. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I am open to it and have experienced it in the form of a beautiful sunrise glimpsed while riding my bike or when contemplating the city skyline from afar. When you travel, leave your jadedness at home and be open to awe, and when you get home, do your best to retain that ability. You will see your home in a whole new way.

In Your Games

There is nothing that annoys me more than having a fantastic description of a site, like a castle or a large cathedral or a majestic spaceship, to be brushed aside by jaded gamers. These characters you are playing are seeing something that may be of an unique nature, I try to remind them. Even characters that are exposed to certain situations on a daily basis–nobles that know a castle inside and out, a spaceship captain that has seen dozens of different ships of all shapes and sizes–experience moments of awe. Perhaps the noble has never seen this side of the castle, or precisely because she knows them so well, this new one they are visiting impresses her so much. The starship captain may have seen a lot, but that new prototype spaceship makes him look out the transport window, completely ignoring his officers.

Bring awe back into your character’s portrayal. If playing a fantasy game, unless you are a world-weary adventurer, monsters, magic and imposing structures will have an effect on you! It doesn’t mean your character stands catatonic like I did in York when he sees an orc for the first time, but a dragon? You bet. A wizard casting a gigantic fireball spell? Yup. The king’s three-times-as-big-as-those-in-the-real-world castle with towers rising a mile into the air and squads of griffin riders patrolling? If you don’t roleplay the awe, you are doing a disservice to yourself, your Game Master and the game.

Note: This post was originally up at my personal site, Highmoon’s Ponderings, but it has now been moved here.

Gen Con is next week and as I’ve said here and on Twitter before, I won’t be attending. It’s by choice (even though by now finances also play a deciding role), though that doesn’t mean I’m not sad I won’t be going; trust me when I tell you that I could use those four days of non-stop gaming awesomeness like a desert nomad needs water.

All that said, just because I’m not going to Gen Con doesn’t mean I am not excited as hell that is almost here. Thanks to the wonders of social and new media, I am fairly sure I will be able to get a really good virtual experience of the beautiful madness that overtakes Downtown Indy when Gen Con is in town. For this vicarious 4-day event, I have two main weapons in my arsenal.

Twitter

It would be hard to beat the amount of information flying about Gen Con on Twitter, and that’s just the week before the con! Though there is an official @Gen_Con Twitter account, the main channel is the hashtag #gencon (as you can see in the title of this post, done that way so that when this posts to my Twitter accounts, it registers as part of that search string), where folks have been chatting up a storm, tweeting about everything from their pre-con plans, what they’re most looking forward to, arranging games and generally hyping themselves up for their time in Indy.

I have the #gencon tag set up as a search column on TweetDeck so I get auto updates of every tweet with that tag (most Twitter clients that support search or groups should be able to be set up in a similar fashion). Even if you don’t use Twitter, you can follow along at the Twitter Search page for #gencon, though if you want to join the conversation you’ll need an account.

I set up yesterday a Twibbon (a Twitter ribbon, a small graphic that overlays on top of your avatar) for “Going to #GenCon Indy!” and in the last 24 hours it has gathered 175 followers (and it keeps growing), making it one of the front-page trending groups. Yes, it is kind of sad that I cannot use the Twibbon I created, but it’s all just part of my general excitement about the con. If you’re on Twitter and going to Gen Con, why not add it to your profile as well? Click on the widget below and voilà!

Even more interesting, there’s been some instances of using Twitter and the #gencon tag for promotional purposes: @Gen_Con has given away free generic event tickets to followers using the “Going to #GenCon Indy!” twibbon and Design Matters (@DMbooth1834), an indie/small press boutique is doing daily PDF giveaways combining it with their own #designmatters tag (see below). This is fantastic use of the features of this social medium, and I want to see more like this done by other gaming companies.

Yeah, Twitter is the epicenter of Gen Con info this year, straight from the folks at the con, right from the middle of the action, with peanut-gallery comments from all those of us not there.

This Just In… from Gen Con! Podcast

My second source of information comes thanks to the podcasting stylings of Master Plan’s Ryan Macklin, who is bring back for a second year the one and only right-from-the-con podcast, This Just In… from Gen Con! Twice daily on each of the four days of the con (with pre-con preview shows as well), Ryan brings the con right into your MP3 player of choice, with commentary, news, interviews and general shenanigans.

The podcast debuted last year at Gen Con 2008, hosted by Ryan and Paul Tevis (of the 2007 Best Podcast ENnie Award Winner show Have Games, Will Travel), and it was an instant success. Not only were people not attending the con downloading it every day, people at the con were listening in as well! The hosts heard from quite a few people that they would download the show, drop it into their digital players and listen as they walked from their hotels to the convention center and back. I know I listened to a couple of episodes right from my laptop in the hotel room, even finding out about things I had missed while on the exhibition floor.

Doing a twice-daily show, even if they are 15-to-20-minute episodes, takes a lot of work and a lot of commitment. Ryan and Paul sacrificed a good chunk of their time and energy at Gen Con for the show, and I thank them for that. This year Ryan is doing hosting duties by himself, though he’ll be roping in fellow podcasters for each show in addition to any interviews he may do, so up front I want to say to him, thanks for taking on this madness again and allowing us not-attendees a chance to share in the magic.

You can subscribe to This Just In… from Gen Con! at their website or find it in iTunes. Remember you can also listen to the shows right from the website as well. If you do subscribe, let other people know about the show and help spread the word! You can already listen to two preview shows to whet your appetite:

1. This Just In…From GenCon 2009! Pre-show #1
2. This Just In…From GenCon 2009! Pre-show #2

So there you have it, my two main sources through which I will live vicariously next weekend. I cannot wait! And if you have another way through which you plan to experience the con from afar, let me know in the comments.