While daydreaming about traveling can be nice, sometimes you just want to get down to the nitty gritty of it all. Travel Tip Tuesdays is our way of exploring some of the "How To" questions. It's a place where we impart some lessons learned. And, above all, we hope it's a resource for other travelers daring to live their dreams too.

We never book ahead when we travel. Note that I'm not really talking about plane tickets here - that's a interesting topic for discussion, but it will be the subject of another post. I'm talking about hotel rooms, bus tickets, boat tickets, train tickets, event admission... all that sort of stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the second installment of the Golden Hedgehog Awards for Lodging, wherein we recognize the finest and most spectacularly wonderful places we stayed on our round-the-world trip! In this installment, we'll be covering award-winners #6 through #4.

Volunteering locally is often a whole different ballgame than volunteering internationally. When you volunteer locally, you get to drive home to your house, make your own dinner, and fall asleep in your bed. But when you're volunteering internationally? That transportation, that dinner, and that bed are often being provided for you.

Well, we went through and counted everything up, and it turns out we stayed in over 100 different rooms on our trip. Some were great, and some were... well, pretty damn bad. What follows is the best of the best: we hereby designate each one as a recipient of our Golden Hedgehog Award for Lodging.

One of the reasons we love Mexico City so much is the Metro. For a city so massive and sprawling, it's astonishingly easy to get everywhere you want to go... thanks to the glorious Sistema de Transporte Colectivo Metro.