Affordable Travel

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.

The Smithsonian institute is funded because a scientist who lived in the 1800s left his entire fortune to the US government, to create the museum in his name and continue to maintain it according to his last wishes.  But he was not, as one might suspect, a patriotic and loyal American. In fact, he never stepped foot in the USA, and as far as historians can tell, he didn’t have any friends or contacts here. The whole arrangement remains an interesting mystery, and some who have studied the story believe that his big gift to the USA may have done to spite his own homeland of Great Britain, because of the way he had been treated in his own country. There are many theories as to why he decided to create the Institute, but for whatever reason, it now exists and thrives - in Washington, DC, the capitol of the USA - more than 150 later, as the most expansive and thorough museum in the world. Admission is free for all Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C, which is the world’s largest museum and archival research conglomerate. 16 museums and the National Zoo in Washington, plus 2 museums in New York City, contain more than 140 million items, including art, music, mummies, dinosaur skeletons, airplanes, movies, clothing, jewels, and just about anything on earth of value to preserve for future generations that you can imagine. So if you plan to visit one or more of the Smithsonian projects, be sure to give yourself plenty of time. There are people who have spent months inside the museum and have only glimpsed a mere fraction of what it has in its many displays.

In the town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, where the popular television show “Andy in Mayberry” was based (Mayberry being the fictional version of the actual town of Mount Airy), there is an annual music festival that attracts larger crowds and more musical performers each year, although the premise of the event is the celebration of old fashioned and traditional style acoustic music, played primarily on the fiddle, banjo, and guitar. Drums are out of place at this event, as are electrified instruments. Instead, hand crafted dulcimers and old fiddles are the more common tools for making music, which takes place on the main stage and also around the many campfires where people pitch tents to spend the weekend in a grand musical convention. But at night few of the festival goers get much rest, instead choosing to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to sit together in impromptu jam sessions, picking and singing tunes and passing bottles of liquor and cups of strong coffee to fuel themselves onward.

The gathering happens each year in the springtime, and if you contact the local Chamber of Commerce for Mount Airy, you can get information on lodging, tickets to the festival, and camping options. Plus, if you would like to compete for one of the prizes awarded to performers, there are many categories of contests and people of all ages can fill out applications and then perform their songs in front of the thousands of audience members for a chance to be recognized as the next great fiddler of the long-standing festival.

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.

In the western part of Virginia, which was one of the first regions of the USA to be settled by European pioneers, there is a wonderful and unique museum dedicated to preserving the history and teaching the traditions of frontier America. This “Frontier Museum” lies on some 100 or more acres of land, just off the main Interstate Highway 85, and has a library of old and out of print books on frontier life, culture, tools, and traditions, plus real working farms or homesteads, where you and your family can watch people in period costume doing things the way they were done by pioneers. In one homestead you can watch bread being cooked in a Dutch oven while women spin yarn from sheep’s wool. And you can even sit and have a taste of the bread once it’s done. On another tract, you can learn how to make fences using old hand tools like the drawing knife and broad axe, and on another one you can pet the horses that used to be used - and at this particular site still are used - to do chores like plowing and hauling firewood. The working museums are staffed by volunteers, many of them students of anthropology or agriculture from nearby universities, and you can spend the entire day at the museum, walking from the Appalachian style cabin to the Pennsylvania style farmhouse to the English style homestead, learning as you listen to the volunteers describe what it was like in the old days. The site is a must-see destination for people of all ages, and is a convenient way to break up a long trip along the eastern seaboard of the USA.

Let’s say you are a big baseball fan, and you want to take a tour of the factory where they make Louisville Slugger baseball bats like the ones that Babe Ruth used to use. Or perhaps you like M&M candies, and want to visit the chocolate manufacturing plant. Maybe your hobby is cigars, and you want to tour a cigar making facility, or you would like to visit a real mine, where they dig coal, gold, or rubies from deep beneath the earth. There is every chance that you can have your wish, if you follow a few procedures and protocols to work out your plan in advance of your excursion.

Try to first contact the main office of the company that owns the facility you would like visit, and get information about how to communicate with someone in public relations or community relations. Most large companies have a department that specializes in working with the general public to answer questions, and if you can get in touch with someone in that department, they may be able to grant you clearance to take a special tour of their facility.

You may have to follow certain guidelines. For instance, you may not be allowed to take photographs, although you might be given free brochures, postcards, and other materials with pictures in them. And you may have to wear special clothing. For instance, if you are touring a mine, you will be asked to wear a hard hat, which they company will supply to you for the time of the tour. And if you are visiting a place like a military base or the White House in Washington, DC, you may have to submit to a search and even a background check.

One of the most compelling reasons for travel, cited in many surveys of vacation travelers, is to visit museums and see art and artifacts. And there are great museums in almost every city in the world, each with its own special collection of rare aesthetic treasures. In London there is for example the often-overlooked Queen’s collection, in Paris there is the L’Orangerie with Monet’s works, and in Houston there is the Rothke museum. But one problem with visiting museums, whether you are going to the Louvre or the MOMA, is crowds. Here are some suggestions for beating the crowds, so that you don’t go to look at your favorite painting and find that there is a whole tour bus full of people ahead of you in line.

Go on “off days” and at “off hours”, not on peak days for museum visitation. If you go on a weekday, early in the morning, for example, you may have the entire museum all to yourself. Avoid going on weekends, when everyone else will have time off from work and school to visit the museums, but if you must go on busy visitation days, try to go during the hours when the museum is least busy. One way to find out the best time to go is to ask a museum guard which times of day are slowest.

If you enter a museum and find that you are behind a large crowd, don’t panic. When buses of tourists unload to visit a museum (and you may be one of the tourists who just got off of one of those buses) they always follow the same procedure. Once they are inside the museum, they move from room to room, from start to finish. So if you want to avoid the crowds, the best thing to do is to immediately go to the last gallery on the top floor of museum, which will probably be empty, and work your way backwards through the rooms of the museum.

Life on Nantucket is like no other because it is situated about 40 miles offshore in the Atlantic ocean, and after living there for awhile on this small island (you can drive from one end to the other in a matter of minutes) you begin to sense that you are not really part of the USA but are on an island that is unique to itself. You can get there by air, by flying into the small airport that until recently would open up again at night as the island’s favorite bar and dance club. Or you can take the Ferry from Wood’s Hole, which is on Cape Cod. The Ferry runs several times a day and flights are available to the Boston Logan Airport, an international terminal with connecting flights to the rest of the world.

Nantucket is a quiet old fishing village, but the shops don’t just offer fishing tackle and salted cod, because some of the most expensive real estate in the USA is also here, attracting the wealthiest people in the world. Throughout the island’s history it has been home to families of aristocrats with names including Rockefeller and Kennedy, and the local shopkeepers cater to the tastes of the elite by selling exotic imports of fine caviar, French champagne, and clothing worthy of Parisian runways.  For decades it has been nearly impossible to live on Nantucket without having lots and lots of money to spend on rent, but the island is very much dependent upon a reliable work force of service workers, who migrate there not to earn money, but to earn just enough to spend the summer there and leave penniless, in exchange for the adventure of living on this interesting island. The island has beautiful white sand beaches, cranberry bogs, blueberry fields, and some of the most interesting Cape Cod style architecture and antiques. And even if you cannot afford to spend a few nights, you can do as many tourists do and go to Nantucket on the ferry, spend the day, and take the ferry back to the mainland by nightfall.

The Nantahala National Forest is the largest one in the state of NC, which is known for its large tracts of wilderness and hiking paths. If you like to camp, hike, bird watch, or visit waterfalls, this is the place for you, as the Nantahala National Forest has more than one and a half million acres of land. The name “Nantahala” is from the Cherokee language, meaning “noon sun”, because most of this region is covered by a thick canopy of old growth trees and the river gorge generally gets bathed in sunlight at high noon, while at other times of day the sunlight is obscured by the forests.

In the Snowbird section of Nantahala National Forest are many trails alongside creeks and streams, dotted with wildflowers. The rare pileated woodpecker, which grows to the size of about two feet tall with a wingspan approaching three feet, can be found here, as can rare plants like mountain ginseng. In this section of the forest are two beautiful falls Sassafras and Big Falls. Although the water from waterfalls in the Nantahala National Forest is ice cold, if you can locate a swimming hole, creek, or calm enough waterfall, you will find that in the heat of summer the bracing water is actually quite refreshing, especially after a long and tiring hike. And if you don’t want to take the whole plunge, you can just slip off your hiking boots and soak your feet to help them get some instant therapeutic relief.

Prague’s Charles Bridge is now made of stone, but was first made of wood back around 900 AD. The first bridge was wiped out by a flood on the Vltava River where it was rebuilt and now stands as a massive stone structure and one of the main tourist venues of this popular city. There are historical statues along the bridge, representing figures from civic and religious life in the time since the Charles Bridge began to serve the citizenry of Prague. Even the Dalai Lama has walked across this famous bridge, which for many centuries was the only way to get in or out of the city of Prague.

One of the most interesting features of the bridge in modern times is the proximity to the old Prague castle and the adjacent cobble streets leading to the castle. It is a great place to stand and watch the river traffic, which mostly consists of small tour boats, and to shop from the many artists and crafts people who sell their wares on both sides of the bridge. In fact, many people visit the bridge just to have the chance to linger and see the mimes, musicians, puppeteers, painters, jewelers, potters, and other artists who have tables or displays on the bridge and entertain tourists for tips or sell wares in exchange for a few dollars.

By all means visit the Charles Bridge, but give yourself an hour or two to stroll and linger, because there is more to do there than just walk over the historic Vltava River.