Baby boomer travel
Hapag-Lloyd’s Europa 2 is one luxurious way to cruise Europe. Photo by Clark Norton
After posting my recent piece on repositioning cruises, I received this guest post entry from reader Suzanne Meades, offering some reasons why baby boomers might prefer taking a cruise ship to flying to and around Europe.
And for those boomers who have the time, I couldn’t agree more.
Both ocean and river cruising are big with boomers. A transatlantic cruise — fairly rare these days, except for repositioning cruises — evokes particular nostalgia for me, since a Spanish steamship took me across the Atlantic on my first trip to Europe in college. I even have a medal for winning the shipboard table tennis tournament, no easy task since the ship was rocking and rolling through the waves during my final match. At least, I think that medal is hiding around here somewhere…
As for seeing… Continue reading
The Tablift lets you read your tablet lying down or sitting up. Photo from Tablift.
I’ll confess: My wife can always tell when I’ve been drinking out of a particular glass by whether or not it has greasy fingerprints all over it (mine).
Same with who used our tablet last — my fingerprints are everywhere. Maybe it’s the chips I like to snack on. Maybe it’s because I have long fingers. Maybe it’s…well, who cares, I leave fingerprints. Fortunately, I’m not a burglar by trade.
But I do like to read, look at photos I’ve taken, and write and watch things, etc., on our tablet, and I especially like to do these things when I’m traveling, which I do for a living, so if I can spare getting fingerprints all over… Continue reading
Repositioning cruises can be some of the best bargains at sea. Photo by Clark Norton
Every fall and spring, a number of ocean-going cruise ships leave one area of the world — say, Europe, Canada, or Alaska in the fall — for another, such as the Caribbean, South America, or Hawaii, to take advantage of the warmer winter waters in the latter spots.
These are called repositioning cruises (repo cruises for short), and they tend to be longer — sometimes quite a bit longer — than a typical cruise.
The cruise lines don’t want to run the ships empty, of course, so they sell the cabins often at much-reduced rates, especially considering the length of the voyages. You might find a 17-day October repositioning cruise from Italy to Brazil, for example, for about the same price as a regular 10-day cruise.
In the spring, you might find a… Continue reading
Multi-generational travelers might opt to sail away to Alaska aboard the Disney Wonder. Photo from Disney Cruise Lines
Multi-generational travel is hot.
So hot that it’s up 30 percent over the past year. And boomer-led family groups are spending an average of $1,000 more per year than other travelers, according to findings at a recent family travel summit.
The second TMS Family Travel Summit, organized by TMS Family Travel and Family Travel Consulting, brought together 38 travel journalists, editors, publishers and marketers to hear the latest research, discuss travelers’ needs, and determine marketing strategies for family groups led by retiring boomers.
The multi-generational travel phenomenon presents both challenges and opportunities for those in the travel industry.
But what, exactly, constitutes multi-generational travel?
One speaker defined it as a travel party comprised of at least one traveler over age 60 with at… Continue reading
Seats don’t recline on Spirit Airlines — a possible solution? Photo by Spirit Airlines
You’ve probably heard about the recent spate of airline seat reclining wars.
One passenger wants to recline his or her seat. The passenger sitting behind the first passenger doesn’t like the intrusion into his or her space — or possibly getting hit in the knees, head, or having a beverage spilled all over him or herself, or being unable to comfortably work on a laptop.
Tempers flare, and heated words are exchanged. Various rights are invoked — “my right” to recline versus (in the case of the other passenger) “my right” to have what little space the airline allots me to myself, without having your head practically lying in my lap.
Sometimes gadgets are employed. In one recent case, a “knee defender” — which prevents the person in front from being able to recline —… Continue reading
The Tuvalu flag. The small island nation lucked into the countru code .tv. Photo from Dreamstime
Until I read about it in The New York Times, I had no idea that Tuvalu — a small South Pacific island nation previously best known as one of the most likely to sink below water as the oceans rise (“Toodle-oo, Tuvalu,” goes the sardonic refrain) — has been making millions of dollars by selling its Internet URL suffix .tv to companies that stream videos and the like.
Every country and a number of dependencies has been assigned a country code, usually based on its name, and Tuvalu lucked into the .tv designation years ago.
I salute their entrepreneurial spirit, even as their low-lying atolls threaten to become the next Atlantis.
It turns out Tuvalu isn’t the only country doing this sort of business.
According to The Times, Colombia has been doing boffo biz… Continue reading
Craving a Hawaiian honeymoon? Let Fundly help.
“Help us get to Hawaii,” plead a pair of honeymooners. And a variety of folks have chipped in $2,400 for it.
“London is longing for Jesus,” writes another, and $1,070 has been donated for one woman to help bring him there, or so the implication goes.
Meanwhile, someone named Renie wants to go to Rome — that wish has brought in $730 — while another $435 has been kicked in for a woman whose “lifelong dream” is to move to France.
All the above and plenty more would-be travelers have opened campaigns on Fundly.com, one of the world’s top crowdfunding sites, to try to convince other people — be they friends, family, neighbors, or complete strangers — to donate to their travel funds and bucket list destinations.
If you aren’t familiar with the term crowdfunding, it’s really just what it sounds like: getting… Continue reading
First, the recipe:
Chocolate Chicken
Ingredients:
Two boneless chicken breasts, cut thin
1 tsp. unsweetened or semisweet cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp. paprika
a dash of cayenne pepper or chili flakes
Chocolate, a key ingredient in Chocolate Chicken.
lemon juice (enough to make mix “goopy”)
some cilantro or basil, chopped
melted butter (you choose the amount)
optional: cumin or garlic powder
whiskey for flambeing
Instructions:
Mix above ingredients together (except whiskey if flambeing).
Wash chicken and coat thoroughly with mix.
Let sit for awhile while you figure out what to serve with it, or have a cocktail (optional, but if flambeing, don’t use up all your whiskey).
Cook chicken — grill it, fry it, bake it, saute it, stir-fry it, flambe it, whatever you like, but do make sure to apply sufficient heat that it isn’t raw and you get sick from it. I don’t want that… Continue reading
Washington Irving’s Sunnyside cottage. Photo from visitsleepyhollow.com
Most everyone remembers the great Washington Irving tales “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” both dating from nearly 200 years ago.
In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane, the stork-legged superstitious schoolteacher, was frightened into fleeing the area by a rival who posed as the Headless Horseman. (Johnny Depp starred in a movie about it.)
In “Rip Van Winkle,” Rip — a resident of a small village in the Catskills while New York was still an English colony — unwittingly had a drink with the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew and slept for 20 years, right through the Revolutionary War.
As some of you know, I’m a resident of the Catskills myself, so I’ve put together a little Washington Irving themed literary legends tour of the area.
You can start your Irving legends tour at the… Continue reading
One of the covered bridges in Putnam County. Photo from coveredbridgecountry.com.
Just about every writer has tried to mine his or her high school reunion story as some sort of transformative journey into the past that sheds some kind of brilliant new light on the present or future.
So much so that some magazine editors have proclaimed, “Please, no more high school reunion stories.” But that’s the beauty of a blog — I can write what I want, and you can choose whether or not to read it.
Having just attended my, ahem, longtime reunion with 46 other high school classmates (of a class of around 114, 27 are deceased, and 40 didn’t show, so the majority of those still alive did come), I’m naturally inclined to do the same, mulling over headlines like “You Can Go Home Again” or “You Can’t Go Home Again,” depending, I guess, on which… Continue reading
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