Traveling the world one color at a time.
Feathers and leather and fur … oh my!
As my time as a Digital Vagabonding Roads Scholar draws to a close, I am prepping for the ultimate meeting of nomads on the roam—Burning Man. Held every year in Black Rock City, Burning Man is a gathering of approximately 50,000 people who meet in a forum of radical self-expression and self-reliance. This will be my first time at Burning Man, and as I prepare for this final trip, I’ve learned that it is nothing like prepping for “just another road trip.”
In Great Basin National Park—one of the few national parks without an entrance fee—there is a cave. You have to pay for the cave tour (either 60 or 90 minutes), which caps at around 20 people and takes you into the depths and history of what should be a truly spectacular natural creation. Lehman Cave—one of only 70 caves in the United State with formations called shields—has nine tours each day. That’s a lot of feet that trek through the cave. Though the rule now is not to touch anything, Lehman Cave’s history consists of breaking formations for souvenirs and burning initals onto the cave ceiling as a form of graffiti. In the past, dances have been held here and Boy Scout troops have camped. The lights that mark the way throughout the cave are so warm that algae is growing near them (the good news is that they are starting to replace standard bulbs with LED lights). Once a year, the park gathers volunteers to pick lint and skin cells, which cling to the cave walls as they naturally pass through the air.
Sounds like a “natural” kind of place, huh?
Nevada isn’t known for its national parks, but beyond the endless desert landscape, stunning sunsets and glittering casino lights is a natural environment begging to be explored. Great Basin National Park, a half-day’s drive north of Las Vegas on the Utah border, is home to the second highest peak in Nevada, pristine alpine lakes, a rainbow of wildflowers, the darkest sky in the lower 48 states and miles of quiet hiking trails.
It is an underrated, serene national park that I hope to visit again someday. Three days doesn’t even begin to give this hidden secret in the Silver State the justice it deserves.
Despite the haze from the California fires, every view in Great Basin National Park is a good one.
Class was over and work beckoned, but before he settled into the corporate life, there was something else Klaas Langeveld had to do. In August 2008, Klaas, then 25, packed his bag for an around-the-world trip. For nine months he made his way around the world, pushing the adrenaline envelope, learning words in new languages, sampling foreign cuisine, meeting fellow travelers and mingling with the locals.
I met Klaas on the Inca Trail in Peru, and he changed my outlook on travel and life. Now back in the Netherlands, Klaas is settling back into the daily grind, but he recently took a few minutes to answer six questions about his around-the-world travels. I hope his story inspires you the way it has me.
One of our favorite stories from serving in the Peace Corps happened to a friend of ours. At dinner one night, Josie was served a heaping plate of rice, beans, ugali … something starchy. The details of what was on the plate are foggy, but the point of the story is that it was stacked high, and, as is common when visiting many countries, it is impolite not to eat what is on your plate. Josie told us that the copious amount of food was daunting … definitely more than she could eat in a sitting. Noticing her wide eyes examining the overstuffed plate in disbelief (maybe even fear?), Josie’s mama told her, “Pole, pole. You will climb the mountain.” Pole translates to slowly … and bite by bite Josie conquered that plate of food.
As we embarked on our latest adventure—this time in Great Basin National Park in Nevada—these words swam through my head, and rightly so. We were actually climbing a mountain … and it was definitely a slow and tedious process.
If site visits and comments are any indication, people are interested in finding interesting travel experiences through backward thinking. The first thought to come to mind is not “I should go to …” but rather “Where should I go?”
Standard travel websites insist that you know your destination first, but that doesn’t help travelers who are more interested in the experience than the place. Sometimes it’s more fun to plan a trip around a certain type of activity or unique local festivities or random weirdness that makes a place appealing. The problem is we know we want to travel, but we always don’t know what we want beyond that.
In an attempt to find a way to feed that hungry travel bug who can’t decide between the spices of India, the ugali in Kenya or the vegemite in Australia, I’ve hunted down five more websites that inspire travel—even when we don’t know where we want to go. (If you missed the first six websites that inspire travel, find them here.)
Sometimes I know exactly where and when I want to travel. In those cases, I hop onto a commercialized website, plug in my destination and arrival and departure dates and I book a trip.
But more often than not I get an itchy travel bug telling me I need to travel, but I’m not sure where, when or for how long. How to start searching for my next getaway then? In my search to find ways to inspire travel ideas, I’ve found a selection of websites that encourage user interaction and fun and interesting criteria to help create the ideal vacation dream. While many of these sites encourage vacation bookings directly on the website, I’ve come to use them primarily as trip ignition, which sends my travel bug running in mad circles, excited by the brilliant ideas which I can then research more thoroughly elsewhere and book in other places that work better for my travel plans.
Below you’ll find six great sites that travel inspire. Perhaps you, too, will find that these sites excite your itchy feet.
Think Las Vegas is only about flashy casinos and glitzy shows? In actuality, the city has a very active community that seeks out the opportunity to cycle, hike and run whenever possible. As such, Las Vegas also has companies that support these outdoor adventurers with high-quality products serviced by high-quality employees.
Whether you’re a local or visiting the fine city of Las Vegas, if you are in the market for a new pair of running shoes, look no further. Don’t trust your own judgment on yet another pair of boxed department store shoes. Instead, trip on down to Red Rock Running Company where employees are skilled runners and trained to help you find the right shoe.
I can get by with one pair of socks for nearly a week. A bandana is nice but not necessary.
As travelers become more seasoned and seek out reasons to hit the road, two things usually happen. First, they learn to pack lighter for longer durations of time. Second, they discover their travel essentials.
These travel essentials range from the mundane (a baseball cap for my dad) to the sentimental (a necklace my mom gave me before I joined the Peace Corps) to the fundamental (a pair of sturdy, breathable, multi-use shoes for my husband) to the technological (an iPod touch filled with road music and an e-book, again for my husband).
We’ve hiked the trails in Zion. We “did” Bryce. We’ve visited the Grand Canyon—both rims, one in the winter and one in the summer. When it comes to the spectacular parks of the Southwest, we’ve made a dent.
Utah, in particular, is filled with gorgeous national parks. You leave Zion just to enter Bryce. When you leave Bryce, it’s easy to head for Capitol Reef. Drive just a touch further and you’ve reached Arches.
With all the excitement of bouncing back and forth between these national parks that are frequently cited as “must sees,” it’s easy to forget a small gem located only 56 miles to the west of Bryce and an even shorter drive north out of Zion’s Kolob Canyons area.
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