Thinking Travel

I just found out that a way cool photo that my way-back-when-friend Dana submitted to the National Geographic website was selected as part of their Daily Dozen.

It’s a beautiful yellow/orange photo of people standing in fog at Yellowstone.

Dana’s photo is in the running to be published in the actual National Geographic magazine — you can vote for his photo here!

It’s my last day in Eugene, my hometown (where the Olympic track and field trials were recently held).

In an hour the ‘fam will drive me to Portland and drop me off at Reed College for my week-long workshop at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Training.

I’ve been too busy enjoying summer and my family to write or upload any photos. But I have a couple good pics from the Oregon Country Fair, so I’ll upload those to Flickr when I’m back in Carrboro.

What a fun week it’s been — swimming every evening, drinking iced coffee at 5th Street Market, biking/walking to the duck pond next to the Willamette River, spending a windy day at the coast, baking cupcakes — but now it’s time to grab my clothes out of the dryer, stuff everything into my travel backpack (which, by the way, I love so much that I’d marry it, if I weren’t already hitched), and drive the teal Loser Cruiser north to Portland.

After spending a week with people who are as crazy as I am (i.e. the family), I’m looking forward to spending a week with people who are as crazy about intercultural communication and training as I am. On to Portland!

Hey. I’m at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Montego Bay — a quick trip for work to deliver the pre-departure orientation for Jamaican teachers coming to the US this year.

Flying time to MoBay is under 3 hours but the two times I’ve come here I’ve arrived exhausted. That’s probably because my flight left Raleigh at 6:50am, which meant getting up at 4am to catch at taxi at 5am.
Then there was the three hour lay-over in Miami that turned into 4 hours.
And then there was the announcement from the pilot, “Folks, we’ve started our decent into Montego Bay but they’ve closed the airport due to heavy thunderstorms. We’re going to circle for about 30 minutes. Then we’ll re-evaluate the situation.”
Good thing they added extra fuel to our flight before we left Miami!
I wasn’t much looking forward to landing during a thunderstorm so I was a tad on edge. But fortunately, the airport opened and the pilot flew us the long way ’round to avoid most of the storms. The landing was one of the smoothest I’ve had recently.
We visited a private school this morning in Montego Bay. Besides visiting grocery stores and coffee shops, my favorite travel activity is visiting schools and learning about education in other countries. This morning, my colleague and I thought we’d chat with the principal and observe a few classes but we were thrust into a grade six class of 30+ bright-eyed smiling kids as their teacher informed them that “our visitors are her to interact with you!”
If we had known they wished for us to interact with the kids we would have planned a cool activity but as it was we had to make something up on the spot. I taught the kids some German words (stand up, jump, turn around, sit down, very good) we asked them which Jamaican foods we should try. Nearly all of the kids had been to the US and many of them had summer travel plans to the US, Europe and beyond.
I took a few photos of the kids hamming it up and a video of them waving and saying hello from Jamaica. I’ll post them here soon, as well as other photos of the school (and photos of my Caracas trip from a week ago).

Until then, take a look at the photos of the Jamaican school I visited last year.

What’s new at thinkingtravel.com? Video! Yeah.

This one is from Costa Rica. Zip lines rock.

A few days ago I decided to make cupcakes. Then I discovered that I had no boxes of cake mix. And no eggs. I couldn’t even find the spatula.

But I was dying to use my new KitchenAid mixer, and I craved something sweet.

So I found a from-scratch cupcake recipe online, replaced the eggs with coconut milk and a mashed banana, and used a cool-aid stained wooden spoon to scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl.

My coconut-lime cupcakes with coconut-lime icing turned out pretty delicious, even though they ended up tasting more like banana more than anything else.

Why am I telling you this?

Because this baking experience made me think about the times I’ve reacted poorly to unexpected inconveniences while traveling. Instead of getting creative, I’ve gotten mad when things didn’t turn out the way I’d planned.

But I’ve realized that sometimes you just have to move forward, working with what you have, when you don’t have what you think you need.

Sometimes your restaurant bill turns out to be twice as much as you’d expected. Or your Spanish train takes off without you, leaving you stranded in the middle of nowhere at midnight. Or your husband has emergency surgery the night you arrive in Berlin.

It happens. (The above have all happened to me.) And if you get creative, instead of getting mad, you can have some great stories to tell the grandkids.

The lesson I’m still learning: Enjoy the banana in your coconut-lime cupcakes.

Somehow I broke the FlickrSlidr that created nice little slideshows from my Flickr photos.

Arg.

So for now I’ll have to simply post a link to my Istanbul photos.

Have you been to Turkey? Tell me about it!

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I’m back from Istanbul!

Man, jetlag got me good on the return trip. Every day this week I felt like I could have fallen asleep while walking. I’ve conked out every evening at 9pm. While I in Istanbul I had good reasons to be sleepy — I presented at a conference, walked several miles each day exploring the city, and walked up 6 flights of stairs to our rented flat. Now that I’m back home and doing far less physical activity I feel I have little excuse to be soooooo tired.

Anyhoo, I’m currently sorting through my photos and will post a slideshow very soon.

Update:

I had a FlickrSlidr slideshow here until I moved around some Flickr fotos and somehow broke my slideshow.

You can still see my Costa Rica photos — just click here.

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Here are five tips culled from my recent 10-day work-and-vacation trip to Costa Rica:

1. Bring Sturdy Shoes. If you plan to hike through the rainforest or over lava rocks to a volcano make sure to wear shoes with soles thick enough that you won’t feel every little pebble with every step you take. Don’t bring cute black-and-red plaid “sneakers” with traction so minimal that you slip while climbing lava rocks and cut your hand open.
2. Do the Canopy Tour. Best. Thing. Ever. If you’re in Costa Rica and there’s a zipline canopy tour, sign up immediately. Enough said.
3. Rainforests are Humid: Bring Lots of Shirts. Doing laundry at your hotel will be expensive because you’ll have to pay for each shirt, sock, and pair of undies you hand over to their laundry services. And the new t-shirt you fork over could come back a tad smaller and more raggedy than when you originally forked it over. So either spend an afternoon hunting down a laundromat (hint: there’s one in La Fortuna) or bring extra t-shirts you don’t mind sweating in.
4. Stop at a Soda. A “soda” is a Costa Rican fast food restaurant. They’re easy to
   find because there’s one in every town, village or string of 3 houses. They’re considered fast food because sodas can dish out a “casado” of beans, rice, meat, plantains, and some type of salad quicker than you can say “Let’s stop at a soda for a casado.”
5. Don’t Tip. Don’t tip extra, that is. Here’s what I learned:
   1. Restaurants: A 10% tip is generally included in the bill so there’s no need to add anything additional, unless you want to.
   2. Taxis: In San Jose it’s not expected that riders will leave a tip. But feel free to round up when paying.
   3. Tours: I don’t know what the guidelines are but there are tip jars everywhere. We tipped each of our fantastically knowledgeable nature guides and the shuttle driver who picked us up from the hotel, gave us bottles of water, and answered our many questions — in English and Spanish — on the 3-hour ride to Volcan Arenal.

One last tip.

If you find yourself packing at 11pm the night before your 7am flight and you own two pairs of the same sandals — but one pair is a raggedy 3 years old and the other nearly brand new — make sure the two sandals you grab are the same age.

I speak from experience.

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Wow.

We had a fantastic time in Costa Rica. I’m preparing several posts about the trip.

In the meantime, click here to see the photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

Update: Click here to see a slideshow of photos.

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