Today is blog action day and this years focus is climate change, so I’m doing my little bit. Hopefully climate change is on the mind of every traveler. We play a part in making climate change happen, and we also need to be aware of how the world is changing as we make our travel plans.
I’ve been on 24 flights this year – and that’s likely to get up to 30 by the end of the year. Heck, I’m flying tomorrow. Though it breaks my heart to say that I should travel less this coming year, I know that’s the biggest chunk of my carbon foot print and if I’m going to honestly do anything about climate change, then cutting back on the number of flights I take is the first step. So I’m going to to do even better than the 10:10 pledge to reduce my footprint by 10% in 2010. I’m going to cut my impact by at least 25%. I’m going to do this by trying to keep my number of flights down to around 15-20 in 2010, and ride my bike to and from work at least four days every week.
So what, my fellow intrepid travelers, are you going to do?
There are scores of companies that are willing to give away something fairly valuable in exchange for giving them your email address and touch of demographic information. I’m not really a gambling mad, but I’m willing to hand out my email address (my spam address of course) in exchange for a slight chance to win a trip. If you’re of the same mindset and have an hour to burn, you might want to enter all of these:
I’m sure there are other travel sweepstakes out there, so if you know of any, please post them in the comments. And less cross our fingers that someone in the Questing for Adventure communty scores one of these trips!
I’ve heard of restaurant week, a pretty common week in citiesaroundtheworld. All the good restaurants in town have a fixed menu for deal of a price. Chocolate week is a similar deal except there are it’s also loaded up tastings and samplings. Excellent.
When you’re scoping out a big city, make see if there are any weeks like chocolate weeks or restaurant week so that you can get in on the action. I’m sure that you can be somewhere and not know that something was going on, I suppose I even missed Chocolate Week last year. But it’s well worth a little research, as these quiet special events really make a trip that much more special.
CBS’s David Price is on an interesting seven day adventure across America with only $50 and an arsenal of hand-held technology to connect to every form of social media which he’ll use to find rides and lodging as he goes. I should make for an interesting week, and of course because mainstream media loves social media – hours of television.
Call me old fashioned though, but it seems like it would be a much cooler challenge to do that trip without the social media help and the notoriety of being on TV. Just hitching and couchsurfing your way across the country. Not that the social media way of doing it isn’t cool, It’d be a great trip and a cool way to involve other people in the journey. But perhaps a bit selfishly, I think it would a cooler trip just talking to folks along the way and seeing how far you can get.
To follow along with David’s trip, you can check out his page on CBS, Twitter, or Qik.
Ode to you mini-bar at the James Hotel in Chicago. If you be called ‘mini’ then I can only wonder what a ‘grand’ bar in a hotel room would look like. You were stocked with five bottles of high quality spirits, a fridge full of mixers and other liquors, and all the equipment necessary to mix and enjoy any cocktail imaginable. Yes, your prices were high, but you’re a “mini-bar”. But comedians need fall back jokes, and if you weren’t expensive and airlines didn’t serve peanuts, then what would they joke about? The greatest shame was that I couldn’t take advantage of your bounty. I was in Chicago for work, and lacked the opportunity to imbibe you delicious nectar. Next time James mini-bar. Next time.
