Affordable Travel

If you like to boat, ski, fish, or just enjoy jetski weekends on great waterways, make your way to Lake Hartwell, one of the world’s largest manmade lakes. Lake Hartwell is like a water highway, and is one of the longest waterways around. You can start here and go all the way into the Appalachian Mountains or turn and head south and go all the way to Atlanta for a wild weekend of big city nightlife. Marinas are available for fueling or year ’round storage, and you can even rent a sailboat or outboard for the weekend. Each year there is a waterskiing show here, and pros form pyramids of people or hit adrenaline-arousing ramps as crowds like the banks to watch them perform their acrobatic stunts.

You can fly into the nearby Greenville, SC airport and find Lake Hartwell by driving due west for about an hour, to the town of Anderson. Don’t worry if you didn’t bring along your favorite fishing gear, because there are plenty of outfitters to help you get whatever supplies you need to make your weekend of fishing and watersports a success. And if you like golf, there are several good courses in the area to help you keep your game up to par while you are away enjoying the life of leisure on the big long lake.

In the popular mountain tourist city of Asheville, North Carolina, there is an international community center, in the heart of the historical district, set up as a non profit agency to help the region’s 30 or more different represented nationalities have a place to get together and share their food, language, culture, and experience. If you want to learn to converse in French, Spanish, or Russian, you can attend weekly lunches and pick up a few phrases as well as some exotic recipes. If you don’t speak English but want to learn about the local area, translators can help you get acquainted and make the necessary connections to find work, a place to live, and friends from your own part of the world. The International Link offers special concerts; craft fairs, and bake sales at different times of the year, to raise money for its many programs and to offer the general public a chance to participate in its activities. The International Link office is located at 87 Patton Avenue, right near the post office and the popular Irish style pub, Jack of the Wood. The storefront is usually opened for a few hours a day, and is normally staffed as many hours as possible on busy tourist weekends or during the city’s many major special events and festivals. You can drop by and pick up helpful brochures, maps, and a calendar of events, free of charge.

The Spanish are not only famous for taking ample breaks in the middle of the day to have siesta time, but they earn the need to have an afternoon nap because of the other thing they are world famous for, namely staying up late at night to party. It is traditional in Spain to eat a late dinner. And we are not talking about an hour or two into the evening. Perhaps because the climate is hot and the air sometimes begins to cool down close to midnight, it is common for Spaniards to sit down to their evening meal - and often a multi course feast is what it constitutes - as late as 10 or 11 o’clock in the night. For that reason, the bars offer plenty of food, and they have learned that because people like to hop from one bar to another, the food should be simple, like finger food and appetizers. Thus the popularity of the “tapas menu” which is a menu of small - often bite sized - but delicious and various offerings, which is usually served on the same bar where you go to order your cocktails. It is not unusual to walk to the bar and see platters with as many as fifteen or twenty different menu items for sale. You just grab what you like, pay for it, and enjoy it with a drink, before moving on to the next bar, where other similar menu items are spread out and waiting for you. For someone who likes to sample lots of different and exciting flavors in one night, it is the perfect way to make a big meal out of lots and lots of bite-sized “tapas” dishes.

Turkey is home to all sorts of people, and has been since the days preceding the Roman Empire. This great seat of the Ottoman Empire is home to people who are Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Italians, Iraqis, Moroccans - the list goes on and on, because the nation of Turkey has been a global crossroads for travelers, traders, explorers, and conquering nations for as long as we have recorded history of this great land.

Lately, Turkey has been caught in a sort of political no-man’s land, and its attempts to be accepted fully into the greater community of European countries have come close but never quite been successful. It has enjoyed a good relationship with the USA, but that friendship was strained when Turkey hesitated to back the USA’s premeditated invasion of Turkey’s neighboring Iraq. After intense negotiations, the nation denied the USA use of its land for massing troops and bomber planes, but later negotiated a compromise in exchange for cash payments and an opportunity to gain from trade agreements after the overthrow of the old Iraqi government.

And there has been a history of conflict between Christians and Muslims in the country of Turkey, where war has scarred the landscape for centuries. But Turkey, with its exotic destinations like Istanbul, remains one of the most interesting and attractive travel destinations. The people are regarded and some of the most open and friendly in the world, the culture is rich and diverse, the food is extraordinary, and for those who are practical and budget minded, a holiday in Turkey with all sorts of wonderful amenities can be had for a fraction of the cost of other popular - and less interesting or historically important destinations. Most professional travel agents who have seen the world will heartily recommend that if you have not experienced Turkey, you have no idea what you are missing.

San Diego, home of the Superbowl winning Chargers, the pennant winning Padres, and some of the best examples of southern California architecture in the USA is on the beautiful Pacific coastline, within a short and scenic drive from Mexico. San Diego has been famous for its zoo for generations, and it is still home to a rare collection of wild and wonderful creatures and is a sure-fire way to please your kids if you are looking for an easy family outing. The city of San Diego is tropical, and the special look of the city, known for its colorful stucco buildings with tile rooftops and wonderful gardens, has spawned a whole style of decorative interior design and outdoor landscaping known as “San Diego style”. The town is part USA urban center, with towering and glittery skyscrapers and major computer industry giants, a substantial port, and plenty of opportunities for shopping or entrepreneurial businesses.  But it is also - as its Spanish name suggests - a gateway to the south, and is a bastion of much south-of-the-border Mexican culture. Beautiful parks, interesting museums, plenty of amusements for people of all ages, and a bustling international airport make San Diego a very attractive tourist destination, and the climate is mild enough that you can enjoy everything the city has to offer, during every month of the year. Even in winter, the beaches are pleasant for strolling, and there are diehard surfers who take advantage of the rolling waves even on the coldest days in February.

Florida’s south beach was not so popular in the 70s and 80s, but now it has become one of the most popular beaches in the country, and is ritzy and expensive, attracting the kind of people that would normally be found on the luxurious beaches of Club Med or Monte Carlo. The fabulously wealthy live here in high priced condos and beach houses, while throngs of ordinary tourists swarm to not only enjoy the water and the beach, but to scope out the beautiful people who can afford to live here all year round or own hideaways that they might use for annual holidays. People speaking all sorts of different languages frequent the trendy bars, restaurants, and hotspot nightclubs of South Beach. There is even a diet named for this place, and the assumption of most readers is that if you can go on a diet and end up looking like some of the supermodels who hang out on South Beach - which allows topless bathing, another magnet for sightseers - then the diet must be an incredible one. If you visit Miami and want to get a taste of the exotic, take a ride down to South Beach and stroll around. It is not like being in the USA, but is more like being in some cosmopolitan world city where the super rich and famous people of the world - the Paris Hiltons of the jet set scene - come to play and frolic while spending obscene amounts of money. But it can be a fun place for even the ordinary tourist on a small budget, just because it affords such glamorous people watching possibilities, great restaurants and bars, and of course a beautiful beach for swimming and sunning.

Off the map and out of the way of most tourist-oriented tours is one of the more historically significant spots in the whole of North Carolina, at the John A. Baptist church property in the Kenilworth neighborhood of Asheville. Behind this small and simple wooden church built in the mid 1800s is a small tract of land of about 4 acres, where in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, slaves, Indians, and other poor and disenfranchised persons were buried in the so called “slave cemetery” of south Asheville. But the burial ground, where people who were so poor that their families could not afford to bury them in standard caskets or with tombstone markers, does not look like others you may be familiar with and can be easy to miss. Disguised as it is in the wooded area, it can be altogether overlooked unless you realize that when these people died their resting places were only marked by a planted tree or a placed natural rock. Now, more than 100 years since the cemetery was at its peak of usage, the ground is swollen with heaved clay from the shifting earth, and the former field is now a wooded area of pines and oaks. Here and there a tombstone can be found, but most of the markers of graves have become the trees that are now mature and form the woods where the cemetery lies. Perhaps someday, with enough attention from the interested public, the place will finally be declared a protected historical site by the local and state governments.

In Southern India the ancient temple of Jagganath Puri is visited by literally millions of people per day during holy seasons, and throughout the rest of the year it is home to thousands of daily worshippers who flock into the pyramid-like tall granite building - said by some devotees to be millions of years old - to observe the rituals of incense burning and serving of opulent offerings of food to the wooden Jagganath deity on the altar. The temple priests are born into their role, and generation after generation of such Brahmin priests have maintained the high religious standards for rituals, cleanliness, and festival observances at the monumental holy site.

The city of Puri is popular not just because it is the site of this famous Hindu temple, however. The city is on one of the rare beaches in that part of India, and many people visit Puri not just for religious reasons, but for summer fun. The waves on the Puri beach are fun for body surfing, the sandy beaches are nice for long strolls, and the weather is hot, but the coastal breezes make it much more tolerable than the scorching heat of other parts of India. Many people combine their pilgrimage to the holy sites around Puri with a family vacation, renting rooms in nearby hotels or guesthouses, so that they can spend a weekend or more in and around Puri. Sweet shops, souvenir shops, and restaurants are abundant in the town, so no matter what your motivation for visiting Puri, you should be able to enjoy yourself and find plenty to do to entertain yourself.

Aristotle Onassis, the oil-shipping tycoon, often took vacation trips to Monte Carlo in the 1950s while living in Southern France, and the “celebrity spotters” and reporters took notice. Undoubtedly he recalled the glittering city on the rock, from the day when he first saw it from the railing of the crowded ship that took him to Buenos Aires. But Monte Carlo in the early 1950s was a rather dull place, a shadow of its former legendary self. Gone were the times of Diaghilev, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. And the empire of the Prince of Monaco himself was in decline. Aristotle’s mind began to calculate a way to resurrect his business, and soon he figured out that if he invested $30 million in a new port to accommodate ocean liners, the town of Monte Carlo could attract at least 2000 visitors per day. He also felt that an office in Monte Carlo could be much better for his employees than the cramped and inadequate workspace in Paris. The Societe des Bains de Mer or SBM, controlled most of the real estate in Monaco. Thanks to his investments and plans, the city gradually regained its status as a fashionable destination, and the Onassis family became the hottest daily subject for all the European tabloids. Early in life he had fantasized about owning his own private island. He realized his dream in 1963, when he purchased Scorpios, a lush 500-acre tract. The island hideaway in the shape of a Scorpion was covered with cypress, olive, fig, walnut and almond trees, and helped him to easily forget about his previous life in Monaco, although the way he improved Monaco has helped it create memories for visitors to that elegant city for decades ever since.

Walt Disney started out as a cartoon artist and as his cartoons grew, so did the advances in technology. Soon animated pictures were the newest way to project cartoons, and his characters came to life in movies and on television. Before his death, Disney had become as household name around the world, and the empire that he left behind is now a media conglomerate worth billions of dollars, with extensive properties and gigantic mega amusement parks located in various parts of the world. The two best know locations are in California and Florida. In Orlando, Florida, the Disney company has so much of a presence that it nearly owns that whole part of the state, and its considerable influence is felt throughout the political machinery of Florida, where the company enjoys unprecedented tax incentives and favors from the government which makes hundreds of millions of dollars of tourism dollars from the Disney owned attractions. If you visit Orlando, you can stay in a Disney themed hotel and then spend days on end exploring the Disney theme park, along with Epcot, a supernatural science and entertainment center opened to the public. Prices are relatively inexpensive to enter the Disney grounds, but you can expect to pay lots of dollars here and there for such things as snacks, rides, and souvenirs. Although hundreds of different package options are offered, they all focus upon kids who visit Disney World having the time of their lives while mixing it up with such characters as Mickey, Minnie, and Donald Duck.