Affordable Travel

If you are traveling to another country, health care can and should be a concern. You can visit some places like Canada and the UK that offer some of the best public health care policies of any place on earth, especially compared to rather tight-fisted and exclusive plans in places like the USA, where we have known friends who died due to a lack of urgent health care, because they didn’t have insurance or cash on them when they were in need. You certainly don’t want to run that kind of risk, and there are insurance companies that will offer you health coverage for travel, but you have to check the small print on their rules very carefully.

Some will arrange for you to be flown back home by an air ambulance, others will cover your hospital stay and surgery wherever you are, and some will do both. Others will say, “we will cover one trip to the doctor and one emergency room visit put that’s all.” The first thing to do before you travel is to contact the place you’re going, and find out how their health care system can help you if you are in need. For instance you may have no coverage in Guatemala, but the cost of a hospital visit is about 7 times less than what you might pay in the USA. Then again, the nation of Guatemala has 22 official hospitals, and only 4 of them have even simple X ray equipment. Many don’t have medicines.

Do your homework ahead of time, pack your own meds, and get whatever inoculations you need. Then travel and have a good safe trip.

Here are a few tips to help you take better photos while you on your next trip, so that when you return you can be forever reminded of the people, places, and fun things you encountered along the way.

If you are more than just a novice at taking photos, consider taking two cameras, a digital and a manual style camera that will give you the flexibility to adjust your F stops and zooms, etc. for various conditions of light and composition. If you have only room for a single camera, we would suggest a point and shoot camera because it is easy to pack a small one that can give you professional quality pictures and reliability in various circumstances.

For others, we highly recommend a good digital camera, and a protective case to keep it clean and free of moisture, dust, and damage from impact. With a digital camera you can carry hundreds, even thousands of great photos and never worry about buying film, which can be a big problem for a traveling photo bug. Plus, you can email your photos back to yourself for safe keeping, to your friends and family to share your trip in a way that is immediate and clear and enables them to see exactly what you’re seeing, and you can also post them on your own travel journal web site or blog, to share with anyone you want to.

Let’s say you want to tour the Blue Ridge or Smoky Mountains. You are interested in knowing more about the old mountain people and their culture, their historical sites, and their old fashioned ways of looking at the world. In essence, you want to take a tour of what some have stereotyped as “hillbilly culture” but you don’t want to just go as a tourist seeking out Hollywood’s version of the people - often depicted like Lil’ Abner, Daisy Mae, and the characters from the Robert Mitchum film “Thunder Road”. You don’t want to see the Billy Bob Thornton film about Appalachia or read the book “Cold Mountain”, even. You want to dive into it in a much more intimate and personal way, as you wander through the backroads of little mountain towns. Where do you go for reading material to help you prepare for your trip in a holistic way? Try the Foxfire Books.

The Foxfire Books are the result of a project that was started in the 1970s by a schoolteacher in rural Appalachia. He wanted to get his high school students interested in the old culture, even as it was threatened with extinction. So he had them start a school paper, based on interviews with older people about the way they used to do things - the old mountain culture, music, food, agriculture, folklore, and medicine. Soon the interviews blossomed into one book, then two, and before long there was an entire series of Foxfire Books, which have been reprinted many times since. Everything you could want to learn about authentic mountain culture is included in these fine books, as spoken by the Appalachian old timers themselves.

Hendersonville has always been a popular tourist destination, boasting elegant B&B’s like the Claddagh Inn (listed in the National Register of Historic Places) the Melange Inn and Gardens, and the Copper Crest Resort and Spa on Osceola Lake. And in a recent poll, Hendersonville was voted one of the best places in America to retire. Although it looks like any other quaint little town on the surface, it is actually a rare melting pot of people and cultures. To its credit, Hendersonville managed to enter the 21st Century without sacrificing the charm and authentic personality of a 1950s Appalachian town.

The Callddagh Inn is an elegantly appointed house, built in the late 1800s, and it was the very first bed and breakfast inn in Hendersonville. The current owners have restored it to an immaculate condition, and it is close to all the local attractions of historic Hendersonville. The Malange Inn has great gardens, and guests can be found strolling in them from early morning to late in the evening, especially on lovely summer nights when the magnolia blossoms scent the air. The Copper Crest, on the outskirts of town, is a magnificent place resembling a castle, with a 40 acre lake next to it. And Hendersonville also has campgrounds, cabins for rent, summer homes that rent by the week, and several chain style hotels and motels, to accommodate visitors all year around, especially during the peak tourist season of autumn when apples are harvested here.

Photography and ancient temples seem to go hand in hand, because a photographer with a good eye can capture so much essential artistry while shooting pictures of one of India’s old sacred temples. Close-ups reveal the fine attention to hand carved detail, long shots explore the awe inspiring size of the temples that must have required so much labor to build, and interior shots allow one a glimpse of a mysterious, almost secretive world that is the refuge of sages, mystics, and devotees.

But some of the old school practitioners of these religions - the fundamentalists if you will - consider it an intrusion for a non-devotee to enter a sacred space. Even in those temples where you may be invited with open minds and arms, there are very old superstitions at play that involve photos. After all, photography is a rather recent invention, especially for people who live in a place that resembles medieval times in terms of culture and consumer goods. Many devotees believe that if you photograph the gods in their temples, you steal the spirit of the god. Beware. Many innocent photographers who were simply sightseeing have been physically attacked in order to “save a god from being stolen” by a tourist. And countless tourists have at least been the subject of embarrassment and verbal abuse because they failed to follow the local code of never entering a temple with a camera around the neck.

Admission to this museum at 400 North Main St. is free, but volunteers raise money to keep it going by selling the rough looking stones that are guaranteed to contain a cluster of gems. Children who purchase a dull-looking rock for a nominal fee can then have it opened to reveal a natural treasure. In addition to stunning examples of gems and minerals - like a six-foot tall Brazilian amethyst - the museum has Indian artifacts, fossils, and a dinosaur egg nest. There are large petrified wood logs, replicas of the Hope diamond carved from zircon, and case after case of native gems and minerals of all colors, including ones that glow in the dark.

Larry Hauser, who founded the museum in 1997, is a knowledgeable and well-traveled “rock hound” whose personal collection is part of the museum and includes rare specimens from around the world. He opened the museum as a way to share his hobby, hoping to attract as many as 2,000 visitors a year. “Now about 30,000 visitors per year sign our guest book,” he reports, adding that the busiest week for the museum is during the Henderson County Apple Festival, one of North Carolina’s most vibrant small town celebrations. “That’s our big festival,” he explains. “We get lots of tourists coming through the door for that week, and we’re happy to have all the visitors.”

This is apple country, first and foremost. Hendersonville’s official Visitor Center even provides a list of 16 different “apple harvest dates”, so that you can mark your calendar and plan your pies around the many species of apples that grown on nearby farms.

Historic Hendersonville, North Carolina is a town of curious contradictions. The retro USA atmosphere of Main Street resembles a Norman Rockwell painting, until you overhear German tourists on the sidewalk pointing out landmarks. A young couple walks out of New York deli, carrying a bag lunch while talking in Spanish. You get the feeling that you’re in a cosmopolitan city, but at the same time you aren’t surprised to look up and see an old-fashioned barbershop, with its pole spinning just as it probably has for decades. On the sidewalk in front of it is a huge shoeshine throne, where you can rest a while and get your boots shined while you wait your turn to “have your ears lowered”. Farmers recline in antique leather barbers’ chairs as a woman - in a male dominated business as a barber, gives them a trim.

Across the street is Mike’s, an authentic soda shop where you can order a root beer float or a banana split with all the trimmings while listening to Nat King Cole or Buddy Holly on a vintage jukebox. A few doors down the Flight Wood Grill & Wine Bar serves vintage wines in genuine crystal, from its temperature controlled vault, to accompany dishes including blue oysters, grilled artichoke with spinach and goat cheese, lobster, prawns, pan fried Carolina trout, and wood-oven roasted duck. The town is old school and looks like a scene from the 50s but the cosmopolitan amenities are everywhere.