Affordable Travel

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.

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.

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.

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.

A trip to Hershey, especially if you have children or just a grown up sweet tooth, is like visiting the fabled chocolate factory in the children’s story - but this one is an actual town, with a real factory, where you can go and see how chocolates are made while tasting samples to your heart’s content.  One of the most popular pastimes for visitors is to take a tour of the Hershey facilities, which are fascinating for children and adults alike. Just watching the process of melting, pouring, shaping, decorating, and packaging hundreds of millions of bites of chocolate per day is enough to entertain anyone, and you will walk away with as many sweet treats as you would score on a really busy and lucrative Halloween trick or treat outing.

You can go to the Hershey’s Chocolate World exhibit, see the largest Candy Kiss in the world, or relax in the Chocolate Spa, where Cuban style body work and therapy is available to pamper you all day long. For less food-oriented activities you can play 18 holes of golf on the town’s excellent courses, visit a 10-acre wildlife zoo, or tour the historic and picturesque downtown. Hershey is considered one of the most desirable small cities to live in, and if it grows on you and you like the idea of smelling chocolate scented breezes all year ’round, you might check out the local real estate market with a view toward moving to the candy bar community

There have been songs written about, television shows about it, and even board games and souvenir postcard collections named after it - there is in fact a whole line of blue jeans that has co-opted the Route 66 name, but along the way, as it became more and more famous and its legends grew larger and more colorful, the actual two-lane American highway all but disappeared into oblivion.

No, Route 66 will not show up on your modern GPS coordinator, nor can you print it out using a computer program like Map Blast, because although we all want to find adventure on that old highway, it just doesn’t appear on modern maps anymore. To find it, you have to be part history buff, part maphead, with a dose of road warrior tossed in for determination. But you will have lots of help. There are something like 150 different clubs, websites, blogs, and publications dedicated to keeping Route 66 alive, at least in our nostalgic memories. Here’s a hint to help you get started: You need to find a vintage 50s or 60s era muscle car or sports convertible, preferably in cherry red. Then get some cool sunglasses, tank up on gasoline, and if you start asking in Chicago, you will eventually discover the leftover bits and pieces of Route 66 that snakes to Tulsa, Amarillo, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles. But be sure to take along a camera and a scrapbook, because one of these days the Route 66 you traveled will be only a distant and legendary memory, replaced by Interstates and shopping centers. Meanwhile you can help to preserve the character and legend of the road, by doing your part to ride it in style.

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.

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.