Today on the Menu: Man Quits Job, Travels World With Family, Speaks on Podcast

John Higham is an aeronautical engineer (a rocket scientist, if you will). He and his wife had a dream; once their two kids were old enough, take a year off and travel the world. How good does that sound right now? The trip was 13 years in the making &#151 that’s how long it took to save the money they’d need. And once the trip was set, they took off.

Upon returning, Higham wrote a book about the trip. But this wasn’t an ordinary book. See, along the way, he geotagged the pictures he took. That is, he added longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of his location to the image’s digital memory stamp. Now, when you get to certain parts of his book you can follow a link printed on the page and see what he and his family saw.

The image above, for example, is from Salar de Uyuni, the Andean salt flats that for part of the year are covered in an inch of water &#151 hence the mirror effect. How cool is that? Go travel somewhere, or read Higham’s book, “360 Degrees Longitude“, half of the proceeds for which go to support the micro-lending organization Kiva.

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