Oct 22, 2007 9:46 - By: Gudrun Enger
For those of us here on the West Coast of the U.S., leaf peeping is something we have only really heard about, but not experienced. Most of our trees change color and lose their leaves all in the same 24 hour period. Over at CNN.com, Eileen Ogintz has a great article on leaf peeping in Wisconsin. That and cheese curds almost make me want to move there. However, for now I am staying here and thought I would throw out some suggestions for experiencing the wonders of Northern California in October:
What is your favorite fall activity? I would love to know what folks outside of the Bay Area do to celebrate the changing seasons!
Oct 15, 2007 10:32 - By: Gene McKenna
At home we take for granted recycling programs. It has become easy, part of our daily routine. And when we can’t do it on vacation, it almost makes us feel dirty and out-of-sorts. Its like when you live in a city (or state) that has banned indoor smoking and then travel to state that doesn’t ban indoor smoking. At least with smoking you don’t have to contribute to that gross smell and feeling. When your travel destination doesn’t recycle, it’s hard to avoid making garbage.
The sheer enormity of the problem is mind boggling. I visited my time share in Cabo San Lucas last year. Fortunately it has its own desalinization plant, so I wasn’t using up lots of bottled water. But I was using tons of glass bottles and aluminum cans for juice, a lots of paper in the form cardboard cereal boxes, local newspapers, flyers, advertisements, promotional brochures, etc.
Every time I threw something out (or pretended I wasn’t really throwing it out by leaving the item next to the trash can in the hopes that the recycle fairies would rescue it) I’d get that dirty feeling. I would mentally calculate the number of articles I threw out that day that I would have normally recycled, times the number of rooms at this large time share, times the number of days in the year, times the number of similar large hotels/time-shares in Cabo San Lucas (pictured). It was staggering.
From our experience in the US, we know it is tough to institute recycling programs. Tough but doable. It takes commitment and it takes a few large groups that are committed to providing enough volume of recyclable materials to make it worthwhile. In large resort towns, this means if the large resorts don’t recycle, then no one in the town or the whole area will recycle. But it also means that once a critical mass of resorts starts, it can and will spread. A local market for the recycling inputs, outputs and services can be formed and sustained. It means more local jobs. And it sends the message that those visiting tourists do care about the local environment.
So herewith is a suggestion. If you’d like your timeshare to institute a recycling program, let them know. If your timeshare has a recycling program, leave a comment here and share with others readers. Let’s work together and encourage recycling programs to protect the environment in those very places whose environments are so beautiful we want to visit them. And for more discussions on eco-friendly travel, visit Simple Green Choices.
Sep 20, 2007 22:09 - By: Gudrun Enger
SFMOMA from Martin Luther King Memorial
San Francisco has many wonderful museums, some within walking distance of each other. The mother of them all is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a architecturally fascinating building across from Yerba Buena Gardens. Interestingly enough, my kids enjoy the building almost more than the exhibits. Last time we went, we spent a long time on the suspension bridge on the 4th floor, running back and forth, looking down to the lobby below.
Around the corner, on Howard Street, is the California Academy of Sciences in temporary digs while their Golden Gate Park home is being retrofitted. The Steinhardt Aquarium is fascinating all by itself, but my 5 year old thinks the Nature Nest was created just for her!
Across town, near the Palace of Fine Arts, is probably our favorite family adventure in San Francisco, the Exploratorium. We can go and spend the entire day here! My favorite has always been the cow eyeball dissecting exhibit. When the kids were little, I could hardly pull them away from the giant bubble maker; nowadays, my son is fascinated with the science of sports, especially skateboarding, while my daughter likes to spend all her time in the tactile dome. As I said, an entire day’s worth of activities!
Photo courtesy of David Paul Ohmer.
Aug 10, 2007 0:40 - By: Elliott Ng
So Travel-Betty has the honor of being the first one to comment on our blog! So I thought I’d highlight her point of view on camping…namely pampered camping in the Bay Area, between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay on the Pacific Coast, in Pescadero, CA For those of you who don’t want to sleep on the hard ground, there is a better way. Its called Costanoa with Kango reviews here.
Travel-Betty does a nice writeup and breaks down the options as follows:
- The lodge – for people who need to stay in a hotel
- Douglas fir cabins – for people who need solid walls around them at night and a bed to sleep on.
- Tent bungalows – for people who want to feel like they are going camping, hear the crickets outside, but want to sleep on a bed with electric light and an electric blanket too!
- Bring your own camping equipment – for people who want to actually camp but also want it to be less crowded and with much nicer bathrooms than typical campsites. From the Costanoa website:
“Comfort Stations are specially designed bathroom facilities that include a central courtyard with fireplace, sauna, heated concrete floors, private indoor and outdoor showers, sinks, flush toilets, and skylights.”
I’ve stayed at Costanoa in the Lodge for a corporate offsite when I was working for a Fortune 1000 company with $s to spend (sigh…miss that). I even paid for my team’s massages at the spa (I didn’t do one myself, but they looked pretty relaxed after the massages!)
Rates vary from $140 – 365 per night for the various lodging options, depending on time of year and day of week. If you just rent a tent site or RV site, its $40 – 65 per night. This may seem expensive relative to other campgrounds, but for a family of 4 its just $10 per person per night for 4 star bathrooms and saunas included. Hey, why aren’t we going here instead of Pescadero SP?
Do they have kids activities and babysitting?
