Travel Expert
According to travel writer Judy Grimes 2010 is the year of the travel deal. However, she may be kidding. (video below)
While Grimes is focusing, relatively, her focus on the upcoming year don’t let that keep you from taking a trip this fall or winter. Travel deals are pretty good in 2009, too.
Also, please note that I believe the part about living alone.
Recently on my flight back to Shanghai from the Kango headquarters in Palo Alto, California, I began chatting with a nice lady sitting next to me. She soon warmed up to me and informed me she was the mother of two sons, a college accounting student and an autistic teen. One thing led to another and she began telling me how much the elder boy enjoys putting effort into planning family vacations (i.e. selecting destinations, scheduling itinerary, routing on maps.)
This was my first experience talking to the mother of a child with special needs. I was surprised that she didn’t rant about the inconveniences that accompany traveling with her younger son. I have the feeling that if we can do some research and put up a summary of travel tips for parents of disabled children, we can help make trips better for all involved.
Here are stories and photographs for and about traveling with disabled children— from fathers, mothers, researchers and the kids themselves.
Get Around Guide — a blog by Darren Hillock. Darren is the father to a child who needs a wheelchair to get around. His blog is updated very frequently and he keeps close track of the latest news and regulations about disability travel. He also blogs about destination travel access for parents like him.
Dream Mom, formerly a Senior Account Manager in the healthcare industry, blogging motivation is her son, Dear Son, “who has lost his ability to walk on his knees, sit up and hold his head up (in 2005)“.
Growing up with a disability : David is going to Dominican University this week. Congratulations to him! He has been recording his interviews for people living with disabilities: “Personal, real stories – be they humorous, sad, angry, fun, or … whatever!” He is an active participant of blog carnival for disabilities and has many quality posts (like Top 10 Disability Themes) on his blog.
Ryn Tale’s Book of Days: ROOOOAAAR!: Kathryn is the mother to a beautiful girl Ellie, who is a “27-weeker preemie warrior princess“. I like Kathryn’s Observations from the blogosphere which provides great reviews on the blogs of this interest.
Rolling Rains Report: by Scott Rains: Keywords to describe this blog are: Travel, Disability, and Universal Design. The most exciting part of this blog is the photo sharing about ‘Travel with a Disability’. It is a 286-member group on Flickr. Is there a better way to share a trip than through sharing photographs?
Here are some tips about disability travel from my research:
Jill Browne from Suite 101 writes great articles about air travel guide for disabled travelers. Besides A Guide for Persons with Disabilities: Taking Charge of the Air Travel Experience by Canadian Transportation Agency, UK Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee also provides printable guidelines on its website, Access to air travel: guidance for disabled and less mobile passengers.
Jill Browne also analyzed the Airline Disability Complaints 2006, helping everyone make sense of the numbers in the U.S. Department of Transportation reports. The relative number of disability complaints per 1 million passengers is the best metric by which an airline should be judged.
Jim Lubin started this ultimated resources for disABILITY in 1994. Disability Travel and Recreation Resources provides a list of websites in the following categories:
Updates:
- Scott from Rolling Rains Report suggested Candy Harrington’s travel tips for us. Candy is an editor of Emerging Horizons a magazine about accessible travel and author of 3 books (1 is upcoming). There are some great links on her blog roll. Thank you Scott!
* Please feel free to suggest good resources about accessible travel to us. Email me: min.guo#kango.com.
This is (unbelievably) our first month blogging about Kango and related stuff. A quick thanks to our commenters in August! Here they are, with a link for the top commenter!
Its only our small beginning in the blogosphere. I thought this might be a nice feature of our blog, to thank some of our earliest contributors. Thanks for all your help so far!
I love the idea of Blog Day as a way of featuring new and emerging bloggers. Oh yeah, I guess that’s us! Give us a year to discover the hidden gems out there in the blogosphere. But for now, I want to just highlight some blogs that are each an authority in their own space (yes, helping the rich get richer…sigh) but perhaps never often listed together!
1. Wangjianshuo’s Blog – Wang Jianshuo is one of the pioneering bloggers in China. He writes about his own life in Shanghai and provides great resources to travelers to Shanghai and China. He also has very nice photography on the site. I met him over coffee in Palo Alto, a super sharp and engaging guy.
2. Travel-Betty – Tracy’s mission is to enable “fearless independent travel for women.” Its a great mission, but what I really like is her concept of the 30-second vacation, short video clips that aim to take you away from your everyday. I guess vacations are getting ever shorter here in America.
3. Occam’s Razor – I’ve watched from afar as former colleague Avinash Kaushik was the Peter Parker of Intuit’s Web Commerce Group but then became the Spiderman of Web Analytics. Here’s an example of both great blogging and great analytics, two great tastes in one. This post cured me of my desired to get Dugg. Quality over quantity.
4. HobbyPrincess – Fashion, crafting and technology. I’m neither a crafter nor am I fashionable. I do support my wife’s yarn habit though, so that counts for something.
5. TheSilentI – Glennia has some great tips for traveling with kids. And she has been an inspiration to us for what Kango can do to help parents to travel with their kids, as well as a personal kick-in-the-pants to take my 2 kids to exotic places (like where my wife and I used to go before we had the kids).
5 and 1/2. CreativeThink – I think I ran into the Whack Pack and the Ball of Whacks when I was working at Microsoft a long time ago. Roger’s blog is good for a zen-slap anytime you need one. I guess some people have blogging in their DNA because Alex of Kango fame appears to be the most widely read blogger at the company with his exploring cartograms post.
Lets see, what are the instructions again? Add a link to Blog Day’s site. Now it says to add a technorati tag for Blog Day 2007
I guess that’s it. Now isn’t this an eclectic list?
© UpTake Networks, Inc. 2009
