Baby boomer travel
Whitewater rafting trips are one good option for baby boomer adventurers. Photo from Whitewater Connection
Over the past several years, I’ve had the following exciting, sometimes scary, often challenging, but ultimately exhilarating adventures:
- Summiting a peak in British Columbia, then rappelling down the side of a cliff onto a glacier.
- Whitewater rafting in Nepal on class IV and V rivers.
- Riding a camel in the Sahara and Sinai deserts.
- Hiking for a week over the hills and dales of County Kerry in southwest Ireland.
- Feeling the rush of whales diving directly under my Zodiac and surfacing less than 20 yards away in Glacier Bay, Alaska.
- Biking 45 miles from the top of Maui’s Mount Haleakala to the shores of the Pacific, the world’s longest downhill bike ride.
- Swimming with piranhas in the Amazon.
- Mushing a dogsled team in Finland.
And I’ve done them all after the… Continue reading
Since I just returned from a bike ride in Ocean City, New Jersey, I thought it would be a good time to reprint a post from two years ago about this bike-friendly city, complete with a few updates:
Bicycling is great exercise for baby boomers, who may find running to be too hard on the knees, surfing too fraught with teenagers, golf too pricey and frustrating, and hula-hooping just all-around too embarrassing.
With cycling, though, it’s easy to just hop on a bike and take off. Of course, it’s good to have someplace safe to ride.
Ocean City, New Jersey, on the lower stretches of the Jersey Shore south of Atlantic City, knows how to make cycling safe and appealing, which helps keep people out of cars and improve physical fitness and air quality as well.
Its longtime slogan “America’s Greatest Family Resort” is morphing into “America’s Greenest Family Resort.”… Continue reading
The Grande Mariner also ventures to Central America and the Caribbean. Photo from Blount Small Ship Adventures.
Sixth in a Series
When it comes to cruising, you can usually divide people into two camps: those who like big ships and those who like small ships.
On our recent “Magical Lake Michigan” cruise with Blount Small Ship Adventures, I don’t know how many times I heard other passengers say they would never take a big ship cruise.
The notion of traveling on a floating city of 2,000-6,000 people just didn’t interest them.
Small Ships Vs. Large
Cruising on a small ship — usually defined as one carrying 200 or fewer passengers (though often far less) — does have plenty of advantages:
* Getting on and off the ship takes virtually no time, while on a big ship, you often have to wait in long lines to do either.
The Grande Mariner, Blount’s 88-passenger ship that sails Lake Michigan and beyond. Photo from Blount Small Ship Adventures.
Fifth in a Series
On our recent “Magical Lake Michigan” cruise aboard Blount Small Ship Adventures‘ 88-passenger ship Grande Mariner, we started in Illinois (Chicago), sailed to Michigan, made three stops (Holland, Beaver Island and Mackinac Island), and now were headed to Wisconsin.
The world’s fifth largest lake, Lake Michigan borders parts of four U.S. states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana — and only Indiana is not included on the itinerary.
Lake Michigan is the only one of the five Great Lakes not to share its waters with the province of Ontario, Canada. That made it ideal for some of the American passengers who didn’t own passports. (Though as an aside I would encourage everyone to get one; for example, to take… Continue reading
The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Photo by Catharine Norton
Fourth in a Series
On the fourth day of my recent “Magical Lake Michigan:”cruise aboard the Grande Mariner with Blount Small Ship Adventures, we reached the top of Lake Michigan in early evening.
Dinner, normally served at 6:30 p.m., was delayed a bit while we sailed under the five-mile long Mackinac Bridge, which spans the Straits of Mackinac and connects the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan.
The bridge was opened to traffic in 1957 and is considered an engineering marvel, costing $100 million to build. It’s the fifth largest suspension bridge in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Four million vehicles cross the bridge annually.
We were heading for Mackinac Island, just beyond the bridge, following our earlier stop at Beaver Island. Docking there in early evening, we would have much of the next… Continue reading
The former King Strang Hotel overlooks the Beaver Island waterfront. Photo by Catharine Norton
Third in a Series
I’m sure that many residents of Michigan have heard of Beaver Island, even if they haven’t actually visited there. But when I saw it on the itinerary for my recent “Magical Lake Michigan Cruise” aboard the Grande Mariner from Blount Small Ship Adventures, it had me scurrying to my atlas.
It turns out that Beaver Island is the largest island in Lake Michigan: about 13 miles long and three to six miles wide. But it’s remote and sparsely populated — with only about 550 year-round residents — and it can only be reached by boat or small plane.
Ferries serve the island from the mainland in warm months, but when the weather gets cold and the northern reaches of the lake ice over, Beaver Island residents mostly have to hunker down… Continue reading
Spring tulips on Windmill Island are a highlight of a stop in Holland, Michigan. Photo by Dennis Cox/WorldViews.
Second in a Series
How can you get from Chicago to Holland without crossing the Atlantic Ocean?
Just book a “Magical Lake Michigan” cruise with Blount Small Ship Adventures, a line that specializes in taking passengers along the rivers, lakes, waterways, and seas of the United States, Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Holland, in fact, is a town on the west coast of Michigan, and it was the first stop after embarking in Chicago, Illinois, aboard Blount’s 88-passenger ship Grande Mariner.
For those unfamiliar with Lake Michigan, it’s one of the five Great Lakes that top several states in the northern (mostly Midwestern) tier of the U.S. and together comprise a fifth of the world’s fresh water supply.
As I wrote in my previous post,… Continue reading
The Mackinac Bridge connects Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with the rest of the state. Photo by Dennis Cox/WorldViews.
First in a Series
Having been born in Michigan, reared in Indiana, and then returned to Michigan to attend college before moving to the West and East Coasts, I often wince a bit when I hear friends in the latter refer to the Midwestern U.S. as “flyover country.”
I’ve even been guilty of a bit of snobbery myself when I’ve noted that most of our friends in California and New York originally came from the Midwest — “but had the good sense to get out.”
I’m now officially retracting that statement, which was based on my childhood memories of bitterly cold winters, hot, humid summers, and what I perceived as a lack of cutting-edge cuisine and culture.
After spending last week cruising Lake Michigan with Blount Small Ship Adventures in the company of… Continue reading
OK, so it’s still July as I write this. But it’s never too early to start dropping broad hints for Christmas, especially for a super-cool travel-related gift. This one is a jacket with 15 different pockets and features ranging from a built-in neck pillow to drink holder to phone case and much more.
And yet it looks like an ordinary jacket. How do they do it? I have no idea.
It’s currently featured on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, and the company (BauBax) has raised more than $3 million for development, out of an initial goal of $20,000. The jacket won’t be ready for shipping until November or so, making it ideal for Christmas gifts.
I like it in blue.
Check it out below.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597538543/the-worlds-best-travel-jacket-with-15-features-bau
In our last post, we posed ten questions that might affect your health and well-being as a traveler. Here are the answers:
What are possible ways to counter jet lag?
1. The direction in which you fly may influence the severity of your jet lag. Other conditions being equal, which direction is most likely to produce bad jet lag?
Answer: B, West to east. When flying west to east, especially across America, you’re more likely to encounter darkness when you arrive, which helps disrupt the body’s “inner clock” (jet lag is caused by disorientation by crossing time zones, which exposure to light seems to ameliorate). Assuming no time zones are crossed, there’s technically no jet lag at all flying north-south or south-north, though you can still feel the ill effects of a long flight.
2. One good way to counter the effects of jet lag is to:
Answer: D… Continue reading
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