Whether you're driving across the plains or in the mountains, for two hours or for eighteen, music is an essential element of a road trip. It's a time to plug in the iPod and listen to all our favorite bands. However, let's not forget about the unique opportunity a road trip provides us to turn the stereo OFF and sing what can only be described as cheesy travel songs.
In my experience, singing Cheesy Travel Songs during a road trip is a great way to teach children some great American folk songs. Additionally, they serve one of two very important purposes: 1) to express common excitement and joy, or 2) to make the children in the car stop bickering or complaining.
During my adventure travels I keep coming back to two central truths:
It's amazing what you can get just by asking
A little kindness goes a long way
This post will focus on how to upgrade your vacation with a little negotiation.
I'll start with a few over-arching negotiation principles that apply across many facets of life. These should be no-brainers, but are often minimized or forgotten in the heat of a negotiation.
It's fall - that can only mean one thing to a midwestern girl like me....
I was born and raised in Iowa before I left for the ski slopes of Colorado, but having spent all of my youth and college years in Iowa, I feel I'm a pretty good expert at judging corn mazes either because I've eaten my fair share of corn on the cob or because I spent a lot of time playing hide and seek in the cornfields.
Before you head out with the family to your nearest farmer's maze, you can either brush up on your map reading skills, study a few of the ancient labyrinth's, or do as I do - just go and enjoy getting lost and finding your way out again. For those of you not familiar with corn mazes, they are carefully planned out in a pattern and the idea is to navigate your way through a series of paths which go around the entire pattern to either end in the middle or find your way back out again. I found that finding my way in and out of a maze much easier and less hyperventilating during daylight hours but if you're an adrenaline junkie, you might try a maze during Halloween - at night. I did, twice; first time I jumped so high I lost my cell phone and they had to temporarily shut it down, turn on the lights and search for my phone. The second time, I was running away from the zombie carrying the chainsaw so fast, I fell and seriously hurt my ego.
So, in the "spirit" of Halloween and fall, here are some great corn mazes to check out with the family or friends in the next month or so:
Taking your pets on vacation is becoming more common with more pet friendly hotels and travel policies. Here are some tips and ideas to consider for pet travel.
On the Road - Pet Travel Tips
Carefully plan your route. Schedule regular stops to give your pet water, food, a bathroom break and general exercise.
Keep your pet secure in a safety harness or carrier while driving. Don't allow your pet in the front due to the risk of front passenger air-bags.
Travel on the road with your pet's bed so they will feel more comfortable and at home.
Don't leave your pet alone in the car especially during summer months. Any extreme weather, hot or cold can be dangerous to their health.
In 2002 I set out to climb the tallest mountains on every continent. During my adventures around the world I found myself needing the same things over and over and over again.
10 items to bring on your next adventure:
Baseball hat - sometimes it's easier to grab a lid than a shower.
Audio book - allow you read a book without missing the view. Audible.com and Itunes.com have the best selection.
Unassuming watch - you want the date and time but you don't want to attract unneeded attention. Tangential tip: if you visit the Masai in Tanzania they will happily buy your watch for gorgeous handmade objects.
Headlamp - useful in dim trains and dank tents. The ZIPKA Plus by Petzl is portable and cheap. This tiny headlamp was bright enough to guide me up the tallest mountain in South America, and reliable enough to help me change a flat on my Jeep.
For those who embrace the "life's too short, eat dessert first" mantra, traveling just provides another reason to please the pallet. I scoured the 50 states for the best pastry shops and came up with a handful that you won't want to miss. Who knows, you may even need to plan a vacation around them.
Chocolate Pink Pastry Cafe on 905 Juniper Street NE in Atlanta, Georgia http://www.chocolatepinkcafe.com/
While brides may flock here for architectural wedding cakes, the rest of us come to savor Pastry Chef Christian Balbierer's signature chocolate mousse. Seconds? I do!
"Ladies and gentleman, today's flight, flight 29 with service to Los Angeles International Airport will be departing on time."
What? How can this possibly be? Why on earth would a flight take off on-time. I almost broke into a cold sweat when I heard the announcement come across the P.A. I pinched myself when they came on again as we began our descent and announced that we would be landing 15 minutes early.
I had decided earlier in the week that my most recent business trip to Los Angeles would be the perfect opportunity to break out the stopwatch and track the most important and potentially time consuming parts of the trip. I mean we all know travel is a hassle, time-consuming endeavor. But what would the numbers say? Admittedly, all week I had been preparing a scathing manifesto in my mind to the airlines, airport security, the airport shuttles, and the hotel front desk about delays and poor customer service. Years of business travel have left me numb to 45 minute delays, cancelled flights, and hotel rooms that "weren't quite ready". Much to my astonishment, in my much anticipated quest to document the pains and hassles of travel, I was proven wrong in all facets.
I let my 5-year-old daughter, Paris make the call to her friend Tomo in Portland, Ore. "We're coming to visit you! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" Paris excitedly screamed over the phone. I could hear Tomo cheering on the other end of the line.
Before Paris starts kindergarten at the end of August, I decided to take her on a special getaway to Portland, Ore., where one of her best friends recently moved. We had a busy summer with little time alone together and Paris was anxious about going to a new school. She seemed to need a few days away with just the girls.
This isn't our first vacation together. She tagged along on my work trip to Waikiki, where we swam with dolphins, took a hula lesson, and ate lots of pineapple. I find that mother-daughter getaways renew relationships and create lasting memories. Paris is always saying, "Remember in Hawaii when we..."
Here are some tips on how you can plan a mother-daughter vacation and make sure things go smoothly on the road:
I love the serenity and the who-knows-what-will-happen opportunity of a journey on the open road. Last week I began a 3000 mile roadtrip from Philadelphia to San Francisco. I'd just graduated from a school on the east coast and was setting out to start a new job on the west coast. My trip could have been a straight line coast-to-coast, but I took a few detours to spice it up. I visited my oldest relative in Iowa City, went for a mile-high bike ride in Denver with my friend Adam, and was totally amazed by a sweltering and lifeless hike in the Utah salt flats. The roadtrip lasted five 8-hour days and cost $882 in gas, yowza! It would have cost me more in food, gas and accommodation if I hadn't done some advance planning to find nice hotels and inexpensive gasoline stations along my route.
Here are a few tools/tips that I used...hope they're helpful for your next roadtrip.
I was at a local fair the other day and noticed that they were serving deep-fried Twinkies at one of the booths. I'd heard about this phenomenon before, but this was my first hand experience with the practice. I seem to have lost my taste for Twinkies somewhere between the age of 12 and 16. And a deep friend version didn't necessarily add more appeal. But I got thinking...if you can deep fry a Twinkie what other wonderful concoctions are people throwing in the deep fryer?
Donuts, scones, and variations of French fries are all standards. I was interested in the exotic. Here's a list of some of the things people are putting in the vat.
The Deep Fried Mars Bar
Like the legend of Loch Ness, this deep-fried delight has its origins in Scotland. If you are lodging in some of the more tourist areas like Edinburgh's Royal Mile or areas around Glasgow you should be able to pick one up. To deep fry the bar, it has to be frozen prior to dropping the bar into the hot liquid. This allows the bar to fry without turning into a gooey mess. The more American version is the deep-fried Snickers.
This time of year is great for three reasons. For starters, this early in the season everyone still feels like a winner (or at least that possibility is still on the table). Second, the start of college football is really the spoonful of sugar that helps us swallow the fact that summer is over. Third, who doesn't want the opportunity to sit in the autumn sun, stuff their face, and cheer themselves hoarse for their favorite teams. The college football season also brings out the need to reconnect, and maybe for the lucky few, make a pilgrimage to their favorite stadium and relive all those great memories of seasons past.
Last week, the kids and I escaped to California's Sierra for two nights. We stayed with friends at their cabin on Silver Lake, a quiet spot tucked behind Kirkwood Ski Resort. Here, we made homemade fishing poles from sticks, paddled a canoe to an island, and feasted on fresh rainbow trout. We also did a whole lot of nothing.
The trip was peaceful because we were amidst nature and even more so because we were without Internet or phone service. In fact, the cabin didn't even have electricity. After three technology-free days, I realized that a vacation is much more relaxing when you're not receiving calls from your boss or reading news stories online.
Reaching the final stretch of summer has the ability to cause a minor panic attack in those that are less than prepared. "Summer is already coming to an end? I didn't vacation. I didn't get out enough. I didn't live life to the fullest and another season has swept by as I sat at my computer toiling away" (ok, that last one is just me). If you can relate to these feelings, trying to plan and execute a full blown summer excursion at this point may feel unrealistic. But there is still time to suck a bit of marrow out of life, so to speak.
For me, I have daydreams of an exotic beach location, hundreds of miles away from email and phones, clear blue water and white sand. Then in my daydream I realize I am not single anymore, I have kids...and they are running around my beach chair wanting to know when we are going back to the hotel pool (apparently water in the ocean isn't cutting it these days) and how close is Disneyland and could we stop there on the way back and this is kind of boring and are we really just going to stay here the whole time?!
In 2003 I set out on a 15-day adventure in Africa and it totally changed my environmental outlook. I traversed Mount Kilimanjaro from west-to-east and watched the Furtwangler Glacier melt and crumble. For me it was a dramatic example of global warming. It's hard to disbelieve what is right before your eyes. The ice fields on Kilimanjaro have lost 82 percent of their ice since 1912. I literally watched house sized chunks calve from this glacier a few hundred feet from me. It was cacophonous, traumatic and sad.
Like I said, this totally change my environmental outlook. This includes the way I travel and stay in hotels. Here are couple things I'm doing to green my travel.
Turn off lights and air conditioning when gone from the room (a no brainer). The whole "we'll leave the light on for you" advertisement campaign is so 1980.
Change linens only when needed. When I stay at hotels I ask the maids to do it every third day. They save time and I save the city some water, everyone wins.
Refill water bottles. The energy we waste in America using bottled water is crazy; it's enough to power 190,000 homes. There is a great campaign called Refill not Landfill, www.refillnotlandfill.org.
Be a green advocate. Ask the hotel manager about their energy usage, such as energy-saving bulbs and recycling. You might be pleasantly surprised to hear what is going on behind the scenes to make Best Western hotels sparkly green. The point is, the more that hotel guests express concern the greener the hotel operations will become. Hotel managers are very responsive hosts and will take notice to innovate green operations.
Talk to us. Have you had an experience like mine that totally changed your environmental outlook?
What are you doing to green your hotel stay?
What can we be doing to green our hotels even more?
Time for some summer refection. Memories of barbeques and kicking back with some good friends. Remembering late nights and early mornings because no one is watching the clock. But there is one key to making any summer memorable... road trips. This summer no road trip was complete without a playlist full of great music. What you will discover is with the right playlist of tunes, you will always have a trigger to remember your getaway. I still play Milan 2006 with longing and relive the thrills of Grand Canyon Adventures 2004 thanks to my travel tunes.
Keep your destination in mind when creating your hodgepodge of melodies. Pick music that will get you pumped up for the vacation ahead and keep the memories flooding back when it is over. Here are a few sample playlists for creating your own vacation soundtrack:
San Diego, California
If the beach is what you are looking for then put on some laid back tunes and get ready for some relaxation while soaking in the rays.
1. Amazing - Josh Kelley
2. Dani California - Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. Banana Pancakes - Jack Johnson
4. Yellow - Coldplay
5. Love Soon - John Mayer
6. New Shoes - Paolo Nutini
7. Fun, Fun, Fun - Beach Boys
8. Buffalo Soldier - Bob Marley
9. Bubbly - Colbie Caillat
10. Everything - Michael Buble
11. Steal My Kisses - Ben Harper
12. Where are you Going - Dave Matthews Band
13. Upside Down - Jack Johnson
14. Californiacation - Red Hot Chili Peppers
15. Island in the Sun - Weezer
Nashville, Tennessee
If you are a country music fan then this is the destination for you! Nashville is the "home of country music" and you can bet that is what I centered my playlist around.
1. Never Wanted Nothing More - Kenney Chesney
2. Life is a Highway - Rascal Flatts
3. That Song In My Head - Julianne Hough
4. Wherever You Are - Jack Ingram
5. A Feelin' Like That - Gary Allen
6. Summertime - Kenney Chesney
7. So So Long - Dierks Bentley
8. Wide Open Space - Dixie Chicks
9. Chicks Dig It - Chris Cagle
10. Last Name - Carrie Underwood
11. You Can't Take the Honkeytonk Out of the Girl - Brooks & Dunn
12. It's Good To Be Us - Bucky Covington
13. Playboys of the Southwestern World - Blake Shelton
14. Mud on the Tires - Brad Paisley
15. Walking In Memphis - Lonestar
16. Fast Cars and Freedom - Rascal Flatts
17. Something Like That - Tim McGraw
The best part of this time of year is soaking up the last few weeks of summer. But as much as you may want to soak up the rays, one thing certain to put a damper on your vacation is a sunburn.
When everything that touches your skin makes you cringe and you suddenly resemble a gigantic tomato, that's when you know you've overdone it. Not only is it an unpleasant situation for you on your vacation, but the long-term effects of over exposure to the sun is an even bigger problem. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, sunburn is not the only consequence faced by lack of sun protection. Pre-mature aging, wrinkles, skin cancer, and eye disease, such as cataracts, the leading cause of blindness, are all directly related to over exposure.
Before you reach tomato status, make sure you are following these three main lines of defense.
Every year great travel publications and travel writers write up a list of the best sights to see and experience. With the launch of this new blog, we couldn't resist and came up with a list of our own. Here is our MUST SEE TRAVEL SIGHTS in NORTH AMERICA (to start, because taking on the whole world is a bit ambitious for our first round of posts). Here's what's top on our list, in no particular order, submit your own list and we will expand it over the next few weeks.
Golden Gate Bridge and Bay in San Francisco
The Grand Canyon in Arizona
Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
The Statue of Liberty and Manhattan Skyline in New York City
Three Sister Mountains near Canmore, Alberta - Canada
Na Pali Coast in Kauai, Hawaii
Tulum Ruins, Mayan Ruins in Quintana Roo, Mexico
St. Louis Arch and the Mighty Mississippi in St. Louis, Missouri
Big Sur Coast line in Southern California
Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming
Grafton, Vermont
Sea of Cortez, Baja California, Mexico
What else should be included on the list? Let us know.
Seek off-peak destinations and shoulder seasons. Ski resort towns make great summer retreats and often at lower rates.
Save time searching for low, low air fare rates by using InsideTrip.com. Not only does this helpful site find great airfare prices, it also uses a quality score to help you determine the right flight options that meet your travel needs. Plan ahead, book at least 14-21 days in advance.
Save some green this summer on travel! With a little planning and creativity you can have a great time without breaking the bank. Here are some common ways to save; next week we will feature some travel saving options you haven't considered before:
When visiting new locations, look for free summer concerts, movies, art shows, festivals and more. Plus this gives you more of the local flavor of your destination while saving money.
Be flexible with your travel plans - offbeat vacation spots and weekday travel generally offer better travel deals.
As the World's Largest Hotel Chain, we know it is a big world out there with lots of places to see and experience. Best Western's You Must Be Trippin' travel blog offers travel tips, ideas and feature destinations to make your next trip a success. We are also interested in where you've been trippin' and invite you to share your travel ideas, tips and destinations with us.
Keep the laptop with you always. With the growing problem of identity theft, there is a good chance there are things in your computer that are as valuable as things in your wallet or purse.
To be extra safe, while on an airplane, place the laptop under the seat in front of you. Do not place it in the overhead storage area as it could easily get bumped and damaged there.
Whether you're driving across the plains or in the mountains, for two hours or for eighteen, music is an essential element of a road trip. It's a time to plug in the iPod and listen to all our favorite bands. However, let's not forget about the unique opportunity a road trip provides us to turn the stereo OFF and sing what can only be described as cheesy travel songs. 
As the World's Largest Hotel Chain, we know it is a big world out there with lots of places to see and experience. Best Western's You Must Be Trippin' travel blog offers travel tips, ideas and feature destinations to make your next trip a success. We are also interested in where you've been trippin' and invite you to share your travel ideas, tips and destinations with us.
