Affordable Travel

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want to visit the birth of American punk rock, go to the CBGB club at 315 Bowery Street, where such bands as the Ramones and Blondie got their start on the stage of what was once a rather dingy, seedy, and unknown little club. Punk poet Patti Smith, the rocking band Television, and groups including the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls were all regulars at the influential little hole in the wall. Now CBGBs attracts people from all over the world, not only for its high historical value but to pack the house for cutting edge bands that are still the bread and butter of the club. Back in the 70s and early 80s, the entire downtown of NYC was rather neglected, and as Joey Ramone once pointed out, those who went into NYC pretty much had the whole place to themselves because nobody else wanted to be there. Things have changed, and now any real estate even remotely near the city is sky high in price. Similarly, the old neighborhood of CBGBs club has “come up” a bit, and nearby tenants have begun to complain about the club’s noise and crowds. The landlord for the club has raised rent to keep up with the current real estate boom, and after the owner of CBGBs missed about $100,000 worth of rent payments, they ended up in high profile court case that caught the attention of music historians from around the world. For the time being the club is able to say open and continue its nightly music shows, but in the near future it may be forced to close down if the owner is not able to make the rent payments.

If you visit the farmlands of Pennsylvania, known for prize winning dairy cattle and rolling landscapes, you will eventually encounter the Amish people who were among the first to settle this part of the USA, and have been the last to change their original methods of living. Although around them the land prices have gone up, technology has changed the way the agricultural business is done, and the centuries have passed, the Amish people themselves have stuck to their roots and their old, religious lifestyle. They are one of the most self-sufficient communities on earth, and are skilled crafts people and excellent farmers. They generally avoid using electricity or motorized machines, instead doing their chores with hand tools and traveling by horse and buggy. Some of the old school carpenters still use block and tackle weights and drawing knives, instead of modern power tools, and the Amish not only grow the animals and crops they use to make their yarn and thread, but they also make their own clothing. You can visit their farms, buy fresh produce, home made cheeses and other dairy products, furniture that is hand made, and add books about Amish arts and crafts to your library, while touring the Amish countryside of Pennsylvania. Along the way you will enjoy viewing the state’s old covered bridges, tasting the hard pretzels that have long been a staple of Pennsylvania, and you can stay in one of the many old inns that dot the rural countryside.