Nowadays there are thousands of articles that promise to spill “top-secret” travel tips, tips that will have you blending in with the locals on your next vacation.  However, many of these tips make our pocketbooks soon beg for relief and send us crawling back home without much more than we started and not any new memories.  Two years ago, my best friend and I made a discovery that would change our lives: that we knew nothing about our own hometown. Sure, we knew where all the staple points were like the mall and the beach but that was it. I had gotten so caught up in my travels that I never…