Affordable Travel

We have all face the problem at one time or another, and some of us face it every single time we open and shut the luggage: how do you get all this stuff in there? Of course there are those who know how to pack for an overnight trip, but are overwhelmed by the logistics of trying to fit enough into a suitcase for more than a couple of nights away from home. Interestingly enough, and not surprisingly, these same people who never have enough luggage space also have pretty packed closets back home, and are the kind of people who shove everything under the bed once the closets are stuffed to the brim. But there are solutions for travelers who want help packing, and they mostly require a little planning and patience to implement.

At travel stores there are many tools - some of them are basic gimmicks - to help in this regard, and some of them actually work. For instance you can buy a number of “caddies” to help you pack your personal grooming items - shampoos, razors, make-up, and such - and when you get ready to unpack, you really don’t have to. You just hang the caddy up and use what you need from it and then close it or roll it back up and toss it into your bag.

But one of the most useful things for packing is free, and that is the method of rolling things that you don’t worry about wrinkling, such as tee shirts and towels, into right rolls, the way you might roll up a carpet for storage. Just by tightening the way things are rolled, you free up an enormous amount of hidden space. For instance, roll your socks and then pack them inside the space in your shoes, to save space.

Traveling the coastal areas of North Carolina, one experiences a complete variety of sights and activities, historical and educational opportunities, and good old fashioned fun in the sun. From the Outer Banks, where natural wonders of the sea meet those of the inland fresh water marshes, to the massive dunes of sand at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers flew their first manned airplane air voyage, the coast of N.C. is an abundant treasure of tourist adventures. You can visit the nautical museums and art exhibits of Wilmington, and tour film studios where some of your favorite movies have been made on location. Then you can head north to Topsail Island, where many vacationers rent homes to enjoy the placid township and quiet beaches. In the middle of Topsail is the little fishing town of Surf City, where many visitors return each year to look for antiques at Jinx Taylor’s shop, or watch her husband Trapper paint his glowing and larger than life murals of the natural scenery below as well as above the surface of the ocean. Off the shore of North Carolina, you can enjoy deep sea fishing expeditions, by renting your own gear or hiring a guide with an inboard fishing boat to take you out off the shores of Arapaho or Nag’s Head. Crabbing from the piers often appeals to youngsters, as does a trip to the tour the Flight Museum. After all, one of the mottoes of the state is “first in flight”. So take the first flight out to the coast of North Carolina, rent a car, and go exploring in the region that was once explored by the famous pirate Blackbeard.

If you are traveling across the old and elegant state of Virginia, where the first president of the United States lived with his wife Martha, and where now tourists flock to the state that came up with the sexiest tourist slogan in America, you can kick back with class. The Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon, Virginia - a gorgeous town in the state known by the motto “Virginia is for Lovers” - is a fitting place for lovers, honeymooners, or anyone who appreciates the finer things in life and wants to enjoy them in a four star hotel. The Inn is on Main Street, and is a stately and treasured Virginia historical landmark, within the historic district of Abingdon, directly across from the Barter Theatre. With attention to detail and amenities galore, combined with highly professional personal service, the Inn offers old world charm in a 21st century setting - with great infrastructure to handle large corporate conventions, and small and intimate settings to allow you to get away from it all. The 6,000 square foot mansion has nearly 100 suites and rooms, two fabulous restaurants, and is a great place to book a large formal wedding or a small and casual party before or after taking in the show across the street at the old Barter. Enjoy the spiraling and winding wide staircase, the vaulted ceilings dripping with chandeliers, and the wide, Southern style colonial porches, where you can count fireflies in the springtime or snowflakes in the winter. Valet parking service is available, and members of travel awards programs and clubs like the AAA club are welcome and are entitled to special discounts when available.

Many photographers ask the burning and essential question: should I worry about my film being ruined when I put it through the x ray machines at the airport. And usually the airport authorities give the same answer: probably not, but it just depends. So if you are a shutterbug and want to preserve your film, do some preparation ahead of travel, and stay on the safe side of the ambiguity surrounding the problem. It is true that some films can be exposed and wrecked in the machines. Other machines, especially those made within the past decade, are sophisticated enough to detect what’s in your bags without obliterating your film. Some travel and photo shops sell their idea of a remedy, a lead-lined bag or pouch. You pop your film inside and then it is protected. But if the authorities want to, they will open the bag anyway and run the film through by itself. Of course if you go digital, you don’t have to worry about film at all, because there is none. But many photographers prefer real film, and for them, it is best to call airports ahead of time and find out exactly what kind of machinery they use, and then check with the company that makes your film. If you are into taking slight risks, though, like most non-professional photographers, don’t worry. We rarely hear of people having their film messed up by x ray machines anymore. Well, then again, it all depends. Someday somebody will solve this dilemma, once and for all. Meantime, it’s unlikely anything will go wrong, but not a foolproof situation.

In the San Andres Valley of Mexico, you can escape into a geographical and cultural world that is able to draw you back into previous centuries, in the same way that a good book by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes can, by invoking the vivid colors, smells, tastes, and complex history of the place. The people here are down to earth, friendly, and proud of their long heritage in the San Andres Valley. Tourists can explore for days or weeks, and in the words of Hector Diaz, a Puerto Rican national and celebrated chef “the place is so alive and romantic, just like the people who live there.” You can find the legendary cigar factory by the name of Te Amo here. In Spanish, Te Amo means “I love you”, and in the cigar world, the name is also another term for excellence in hand made long filler cigars, like the style of cigars that made Cuba famous for its Havana smokes. You can also find the world class and famous tequila known as Patron here, named after Don Patron, the senior member of a family whose skill at making fine tequila has made it the most renowned in all the world. Although the spirits are made in small batches and there is a limited supply produced each year, it remains the “cream of the crop” of all the world’s tequilas, selling for as much as $15 an ounce in some bars. The cuisine is spicy, exotic, and tasty, and one woman’s recipe for a simple meat dish so inspired Hector Diaz that he included it in a list of his favorite recipes from around the world, adding that when he prepares the dish for his own patrons, it steals their hearts.

Wilmington, North Carolina is on the southern coast of the state, where it borders South Carolina. Wilmington has long been an important port city for North Carolina, and in recent years its attraction as a great city to live in or just visit has increased thanks to the local revival of interest in old historical architecture, a booming film industry, and the presence of a popular university in the state educational system.

But one of the most interesting and colorful aspects of the old town is a fellow who has lived there for the better part of a century, Bob Jenkins. Mr. Jenkins, who wears a pith style helmet and carries a walking stick to point out sites of interest or to whack the sidewalk in order to emphasize a point he is trying to make, gives walking tours of the city, laced with lots of history, a good amount of humor, and plenty of eccentric and expressive personal opinion. He is known to just wander into buildings, even homes, unannounced, to greet whoever might be inside and then begin explaining the historical significance of the place. He stops along the way to swap gossip with neighbors, letting the tourists who have paid to take his walking and educational tour get more than their money’s worth of inside information.

If you want to learn serious history lessons, but don’t want to get stuck in a too-serious tour group, join the folks who follow in the footsteps of Bob Jenkins, and get to know not only the inside scoop on the town of Wilmington, but also one of its most colorful and enthusiastic representatives.

The Musee d’ Orsay in Paris is a fabulous museum, within an architectural building that is itself a beautiful and elegant work of art. The building is an old train station in the heart of Paris, and inside are floor after floor of gallery rooms, housing some of the greatest works of art in the world. You can see the work of former Paris businessman Paul Gauguin, who dumped his family and his corporate job back in the late 1800s to expatriate to Tahiti. “And the Gold of Their Bodies” for example, painted in 1901, one of his last paintings, hangs at the Musee.

For lunch, there is a wonderful small and simple caf‚ located in the museum, where you can pause for a bite of French cuisine before diving back into galleries housing the original works of Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and others. The museum has a very good bookstore and gift shop, and offers dozens of beautiful prints of paintings in the Musee collection, that can be shipped to your home to help you with the logistics of trying to figure out how to get them back on the plane. Also available are art books, souvenirs, and one of the best collections of picture post cards in all of France. Many visitors tour the museum, then buy cards in the gift shop and retire to the caf‚ to write cards to friends over a cup of coffee or a glass of refreshing French wine.

Not only is the Chelsea a hotel, but it is and has been in the past a full time residence for artists, musicians, and writers in the Chelsea neighborhood NYC. In fact, although it operates as a hotel and you can stay there, it mostly caters to people who live there all the time. There is a whole community going on within the walls of this old hotel, and if you stay there for a few days you will begin to observe the quirky rhythms of this funky dwelling. It was here that Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote about his affair with Janis Joplin. Here is the hotel, opened in the late 1800s, where rock and roll rumors have it that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols punk band stabbed to death his girlfriend. Here Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and countless other musicians stayed. Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg, and probably fellow poet Jack Kerouac, as well as writer Charles Bukowski, all spent hours drinking and philosophizing within the famed hotel. When the Blue Rags band signed to the nearly defunct Sub Pop Label, which was best known for signing Nirvana, they visited the Chelsea while recording their record in NYC. “Oh yeah, that place was a trip” commented the drummer, with a grin. “You could spend a night there and wind up living there for the rest of your life.” Whether you plan to stay a day or a lifetime, visit the Chelsea and enjoy adding your own name to the long list of Bohemians, artists, writers, and rockers who have slept there before you.

So you have spent the whole day or more traveling across country, in dirty and dusty buses or without adequate chances to shower because you were camping or sleeping in your car, and you are in hot tropical locations where it would be so refreshing to finally take a real nice long hot shower. You book a room for the night with a private bath and are anticipating the shower as it is was a tryst with a long lost mate. You crank up the knobs and the water pressure is powerful, but just as you step inside the shower you notice some really whacky looking electrical work around the shower head and you begin to have serious second thoughts about putting your toe into the water, because you have seen enough movies and read enough novels about electrocution by having a gadget like a radio or hair drier fall into a bathtub.  Plus, others have warned you since you were just a little kid about the possibility it could happen to you and fry you to a crisp with your hair standing on end. That is the same reason why near kitchen sinks or in bathrooms in places like the USA, it is a building inspector code - now always enforced - that electrical outlets have to emergency shut off mechanisms to prevent death by jolting 110 or 220 voltage.

Here is the deal: in many places where they can’t afford fancy hot water systems, they just put a little electrical gadget on the shower head and it heats the water as it travels through the shower head, making it at least warm enough to be comfy and sometimes making it actually very nice and steamy. But the wiring job often involves some simple red and black wire and lots of cheap black electrical tape. There is water everywhere, so the possibility does exist for getting shocked if the wires aren’t properly grounded or are exposed. What to do? Well, that depends on your level of risk versus your level of wanting a nice shower, most of the time. If you are not an experienced electrician, you wind up trusting fate in most cases. They wouldn’t have the gadgets if people got killed all time, right? Personally this writer avoided the first one and then used others for months on end, and only once did he get a little buzz from the water…not enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel juiced up without drinking espresso.

The Biglerville Pennsylvania food factory has been in operation for an entire 100 years, and was begun as a community cannery, in the middle of the prosperous and fertile agricultural land of Pennsylvania. Local farmers as long ago as 1910 would haul their produce - by horse drawn wagon, then model T trucks, and finally by modern transport, to the Biglerville Canning Company, which at first didn’t look like it would survive until the next harvest. It was only open a couple of years before it almost went broke and was sold to the Christian H. Musselman family, who are known today as the family that bottles all sorts of apple products like apple juice and applesauce.

About 40 years ago, the company became part of the PET Foods Corporation, and continued making juices along with various culinary sauces, jellies and fruit products. The company kept changing owners, but stuck to the thing it does best, which is bottling and canning Pennsylvania apples. If you want to tour the plant, it is open to visitors who can be guided through it and watch the production of apple juice, cider, canned apples, pie fillings, apple cider vinegar, and old fashioned apple butter. Nowadays it is owned by the Knouse Company, last we heard. But if you visit the old plant and call it the “Biglerville Plant” the old timers who have been there for decades will grin with appreciation and then show you around the historic plant. You can even get yourself a bottle of apple cider to help you quench your thirst as you continue your road trip through the curious little towns and historic places of the USA.