How I Solo Travel

 

Today's post is not meant as a how-to, in fact I suspect very few people will find my way of thinking on travel to synch up with theirs. This is merely to document my thought process for posterity, with all of this summer's trips in the rearview to draw from as reference. Please note these are musings about solo travel; when I travel with others I do try to be mindful of what works for them, which may or may not be my first choice, whereas today's musings are about how I roll when it's just me. 

Where to Go

I've shared at length how I arrived at my world travel bucket list so I won't repeat anything here. I'll only add that this summer's choices were influenced in part by convenience (where's close that I can get to fast to maximize fun and minimize travel time) and in part by what would be fun to do with those I was traveling with (Singapore since Jada was already there, Cabo because Asher loves mangoes, Manhattan with Amy because we could just walk and talk to our heart's content).

What to Do

There's infinite help online for what is must-see, so I research there but not exhaustively, meaning I could delve deeper about what's really worth it and what's a dud but I choose not to, and in fact sometimes I know little to nothing about a place as I'm arriving at it, just that it's been recommended to me. I also tend to want to cluster multiple things per day based on what's near what, so sometimes a site gets dropped if it's a "maybe" but out of the way, and sometimes a site gets added if it's a "meh" but near other things. I guess I'm thrifty too, so while I'm happy to pay for entrance to gardens and museums, things that are free are not likely to be dropped.

Spending Money

Besides travel and accommodations, food, shopping, and entertainment are the other major travel budget categories, and for those I tend to be way below average. A lot of what I like is free, namely taking pictures of city architecture and nature settings, so while I'm more than game to pay for admission to museums, zoos/aquariums, and gardens when worth it, my entertainment spending tends to be pretty low. I love to window shop but rarely buy, not even souvenirs, so my shopping spending is even lower. And food is very low too: a typical day on the road might be free hotel breakfast, for lunch it's fruit and snacks that I procured at a grocery store, and so the only other spending might be an affordable dinner or a drink/dessert splurge along the way.

How to Get Around, Where to Stay

Maybe later in life when I travel more I'll be more brand-loyal to rack up the points and be treated like a VIP. For now I'm driven by price and convenience, so any airline or hotel will do if it's cheap and works for my itinerary (the right time for a flight, the right location for lodging). Since I pack my days, the quality and size of my accommodations matters very little to me as I won't spend much time there, and in fact I'm toying with trying those "coffin" places in big Asian cities where all you get is a small capsule for your bed and belongings and everything else is communal.

How to Pack

Unless I'm bringing my golf clubs, I try hard to go light. For Singapore, I packed 3-4 days' worth of clothes along with supplies to hand-wash in the sink, which I did three times on my 12-day trip. So, between clothes, workout gear, laptop/chargers, and bathroom supplies, I could fit everything in a medium-sized backpack that didn't even need to go overhead let alone get checked in. I also carried a second, smaller backpack, which had a bunch of food for the long flight there, as well as things I needed on the go, namely meds, hand sanitizer and wet wipes, sunscreen, and water bottle.

The Benefit of Cross-Training

 

Whether it is college students in my professional orbit (being involved at Penn, meeting up with the kids of my colleagues) or supporting the two college students whose tuition I pay (Jada at Drexel and Aaron at Kansas State), a common exhortation I offer is to try new things and dig into different perspectives. 

To give a tangible analogy, in the sports world, it's well-established that, even and especially in an era of early specialization, kids should not go hard in their core sport all year round, but should either rest, cross-train, or play other sports. It reduces injury risk, keeps things fresh, and provides body and mind with varying angles to enhance whatever your primary sport is. 

And so it is with careers, that even if you're dead set on a particular professional track (e.g. nursing, business, engineering), it's good to take classes and do internships and seek out knowledge in lots of different disciplines. For one, most teenagers aren't dead set on a particular professional track, and if they are it's not likely they have an understanding of what else is out there that might be even better for them. Even if you're one of the rare ones that knows what they want at a young age and end up in that very profession, your success in that profession will only be enhanced by having connected with content and people in other professions.

Innovation, after all, lives primarily on the edges of multiple disciplines, and is rarely found solely within one field. My favorite example is one of the first I was aware of, in which my freshman year statistics professor at Penn, a true renaissance man, was responding to some of my hotshot Wharton classmates who knew they were going to go into finance and so why bother with science classes while in college if they could just load up on all the finance offerings this great institution could offer.

Our prof told us to look up the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives, which was first expressed in the 1970s and which would eventually bring Myron Scholes and Robert Merton the Nobel Prize in 1997 (Fischer Black had passed away two years prior). It turns out that Black got his Bachelor's in Physics (and his PhD in Applied Mathematics), and when he and Scholes were creating models for valuing options, he recognized parallels between formulas that physicists had already discovered concerning thermal diffusion, specifically that just like heat from a big temperature spike dissipates gradually over time from source to surrounding areas, so do puts and calls exhibit similar behavior in reverse (at expiration the value jumps to either 0 or 1, but going back in time from there it smooths out). Black's collaborator, Scholes, had a classic finance and economics background, but Merton was also an applied math guy like Black, and Black was also influenced early in his career by a guy named Jack Treynor whose finance innovations stemmed from his engineering background.

In other words, one of the most famous and fundamental formulas in finance, which literally was Nobel-worthy, came from a group that was able to see across disciplines, borrowing insights that had been generated in one field to innovate in another. 

Which is why I cringe at the binary argument nowadays that either the liberal arts are useless or they are paramount. One side thinks the future is technical so why should we read Shakespeare. Another side thinks those who learn to use AI are evil and useless, so employers should only hire humanities majors. What we need is people, and groups of people, who have been exposed to lots of perspectives: hard sciences and classical literature, Wall Street internships and outdoor excursions, learning to code and observing a city council meeting.

An 18-year-old has so many choices before them to do just this. What classes you take, what summer experiences you seek, who you make friends with - these are all things you can do with intention, regardless of how strongly you feel about what you're good at and what you want to do in life. As a middle-aged, mid-career person, I have my own set of choices. Who I reach out to to get to know better, what books I read, what organizations I pledge my time and money to. Wherever you are in life, you will be richer, as will our society as a whole, if we diversify in these ways. 

To return to the sports world, think of Wayne Gretzky, Steve Nash, and Steph Curry, three elite athletes who have succeeded at the highest level without immediately recognizable physical talent. Gretzky (lacrosse) and Nash (soccer) played similar sports to their primary sports, which trained their minds and bodies to operate in different ways - spacing, angles, pace. Meanwhile Curry was the son of an NBA star so grew up dribbling a basketball, but an early love of golf honed both his hand-eye coordination and his consistent body mechanics. Imagine a modern-day parent or coach berating any of these dudes when they were kids for straying from 100 percent focus on their primary sport. 

We are better, and more interesting, when we cross-train in these ways. Would that we make choices to do so, and advise the young people around us to do the same.

Collaboration or Condemnation

 

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with an old work colleague who is now an elected official in a hotly politically divided state legislature. She is around my age and we've known each other for many years, during which time I have built up so much respect for the ways she gives her all in serving her constituents and her state. 

One manifestation of this, which is somewhat controversial among her younger followers, is the intentional efforts she puts into getting to know, working with, and at times supporting her fellow electeds who are on the other side of the aisle. To be sure, on most issues, they do not see eye to eye, and my colleague is quite principled and vocal about that. However, as a legislative body and as a group of public servants, they must work for the common good, and so practically what that means for my colleague is that there are times she must collaborate, co-sponsor, and stand with her counterparts.

She sees no character flaw or integrity inconsistency in this, nor do I. She is doing a job, a very public and important one, and fulfilling that job requires disagreement at times and cooperation at other times. Their being very apart on, say, worker's rights, does not prohibit them from coming together on, say, child care.

When I was young, I tended to think that I saw things clearly, dividing the world into right and wrong and pouring my energy into doing right and opposing wrong. I think this is common and good, when we are young, to think and act this way. But I worry that today's youth, like me before them, are quick to pass these judgments, and then having rendered judgment to consider "the other side" not worthy of anything but condemnation, let alone compromise, collaboration, and collegiality.

Leave aside whether the passing of judgment is correct, because for sure it is a good thing to feel strongly about an issue and to be upset when people in power act against what we see as progress on that issue, so let me give folks the benefit of the doubt and say that when they believe about an issue is righteous and that they're feeling angry is appropriate. Let us also assume that folks who raise their voice do so out of a genuine concern for themselves, others, and society, and a commitment to see the hard work through to make progress, rather than grandstanding to look good or feel good with no regard for connecting with the people or issue in question.

With all those caveats in place, I want to say that I feel strongly that in our democratic society, "the other side" is a group of people who deserve our recognition of their humanity and voice, not to be shot down figuratively or literally. And, as an elected official like my colleague, "the other side" is a group that must be recognized, cultivated, and worked with, if that elected body is to get anything of substance done. The alternative, which I don't think we're close to but I will say I'm starting to worry about, is that public discourse devolves into making and winning arguments through violence, and that the ebb and flow of democratic government consisting of more than one political party gives way to one side dominating and then power lurching over to the other side to dominate next.

If you're a politically active young person or a parent raising one, hats off to you. I hope you'll see the commitment and openness of my colleague as a good thing to be emulated and not a cowardly thing to be denounced. I certainly hope more of our electeds, and citizens in general, are more like her.

My Job Search Update is That I'm Still Searching

 

Job search updates are usually for after you find your next gig, where you express your excitement about it and muse about what you learned along the way. I'll cut to the chase: I'm still looking for a job. But, that shouldn't preclude me from musing about what I've learned so far. Although I do hope that the update that shares the news of where I'm landing comes soon!

1. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I am a very methodical, future-oriented, planner type. So you would think I'd have lots of clarity about something as fundamental as where I'm going when I wake up every weekday morning, or if not then at least great desire to find that clarity. But, after a lot of self-reflection (and journaling and prayer and therapeutic conversations), I still couldn't describe for you the perfect job. Perhaps I'm getting closer to non-negotiable elements to my next job, but that's well short of an acceptable answer to the obvious question of, "well, what do you want to do?" And, I'm learning to be ok with that.

2. I can't describe it but I can say yes or no. While I can't imagine what a perfect job would look like for me right now, I do know myself well enough that when faced with a potential opportunity, I have an immediate gut feeling about whether it is worth contemplating or not, and that immediate gut feeling is never wrong. Perhaps you can map this onto specific characteristics, such as "I want to make an impact" or "I want to work with awesome people," but I think the gut feeling is just that, something that is not related to any trait or calculation but that is no less real and no less right.

3. There are clues in what I'm excited to do for free. Perhaps it's my consulting training, or if I want to be charitable about myself perhaps it's my personal temperament, but while I've been unemployed I haven't been disconnected from people and issues, and when I connect with people on issues my first impulse is to think about how I can help, and not just offer to help but really dig in and do something that moves the ball forward. As I'm currently unaffiliated, any help I do provide is disconnected from anything that benefits any organization I'm a part of and offers me no direct compensation. But it is a clear signal that this is something that energizes and motivates me, and in this harsh world there's nothing more important to being sustainably happy and successful than that.

4. Not knowing is hard. We can't help but find our identity in things related to our jobs: that we do something of value day in and day out, that our schedule is full with important tasks to perform, that we're part of a group that's doing something. Not having any of those things, one can't help but feel unmoored, naked, forgotten. Compound that with the anxiety of going from earning money and having benefits to making nothing and paying for benefits, and it can be the perfect storm for crisis mode. It takes intention and perseverance to fight for a place of inner peace, trust in the process, and (as a person of faith) belief in the perfect provision and timing of our Creator. Meaning that feeling stressed and down is the human default, and we have to struggle our way to a better place. I certainly have felt all these feels along the way.

So that's where I am as of today. Will keep you all posted!

Happy Birthday to My Baby

 

I won't say what age Amy is turning today, but I will say we've been married 26+ years, which means a lot of cycles of ups and downs and lefts and rights. Blessed to share this roller coaster with you baby!

The Sun Never Sets on Huang Family Operations

 

 

We have a saying in our immediate family, which is that at any given time, someone among the five of us has to be making money, spending money, sleeping, and having fun. It's not literally true, but it's not far from true, particularly when Jada is 12 time zones away so her day is our night and vice versa.

The saying is usually invoked to emphasize something that is often true in our family, which is that we keep relatively individual and varied schedules. Sure, there's a bunch we do together as a family. But there's a bunch that we do on our own, too. And, our preferences are varied, too, so for example Amy and I are early to bed and early to rise, and we keep Asher on the same schedule, whereas Jada and Aaron are night owls.

I think the saying is also invoked to remind everyone that there is a place for both work and play, resting and striving. Which is to say that, in order to spend money, you have to make money, and also that it's not good to go go go without resting, and it's also not good to not get out there and have some fun. I guess there's a lot to this simple saying of ours!

Travel Log: Florida, July/August 2026

 

Destination: Orlando and Miami

Date: July 30 to August 5, 2026

Party: 4 in Orlando (Anuj, Eric, and Jeremy), 1 in Miami

Itinerary:

Day 1 - fly to Orlando, get groceries and check into unit, pick up 2 friends at airport

Day 2 - pick up last friend at airport, afternoon golf round at Providence, dinner at unit

Day 3 - morning golf round at White Heron, dinner/sightseeing in downtown Orlando

Day 4 - morning golf round at Orange County National, drop off 1 friend at airport, hang out at ICON Park, drop off 2 friends and car at airport, Brightline train to Miami, check into unit

Day 5 - walk Miami Beach, pick up rental bike, bike to Little Haana + Little Haiti + Perez Art Museum, bus to airport, pick up rental car

Day 6 - morning golf round at Colony West, sightseeing north of Miami Beach (Samson Oceanfront Park, Newport Fishing Pier, Oleta State River Park, Bal Harbour Shops, Harding Avenue in Surfside, Brittany Bay Park

Day 7 - morning golf round at Grand Palms, sightseeing south of Miami Beach (Cape Florida Lighthouse, Rubell Museum, Lowe Art Museum, Deering Estate, Pinecrest Gardens, Matheson Hammock Park and Marina, Coconut Grove), return rental car, fly home

 

Spending:

Transportation $1,005

Accommodations $0

Food $251

Entertainment $569

Total $1,825