Why am I blogging?

I kicked off this BLOG by jumping right into the Saba and St. Maarten island stories from our travels, but I did not explain why I am doing the BLOG. I have been fortunate to travel to many parts of the world. Most of it has been in association with business travel, but recently it has been personal travel.

Why do I travel? Because I agree with Benjamin Disraeli that Travel teaches tolerance. When I travel to new places I invest time to study the history, current events, cuisine, and language before we embark on our journey. I do not want to be a visitor of this world just ticking off the cool places to go. I want to experience and understand as best as possible the host country I am visiting. It is common for me to continue my research even when I return home through additional reading and cooking the cuisine.

To save money I book my own arrangements but have made some mistakes along the way. We have been really lucky to recover from these errors. In fact sometimes the oops situations have been the most positive and memorable parts of our journeys. I hope it might be valuable to other travelers to learn of our little surprises along the way. Traveling through various countries via airports, I have my favorites and some that have ahhh shocked me. Example: arriving at the New Delhi airport in India at 2:30 AM we learned that the luggage handlers might (and did) decide to go home without unloading all the luggage. Hmmm, that was annoying. After traveling from San Francisco via Dubai for about 24 hours we now had to deal with luggage issues in a smoke filled airport (more about the "smoke filled" issues in future postings about India).

Being aware of the negative carbon impact we make with air travel I do other things to try to compensate. I want to share ideas about recycling, free cycling, and repurposing items to prevent our landfills with perfectly usable items. An excellent URL to calculate your carbon footprint is at http://www.conservation.org/act/live_green/carboncalc/Pages/default.aspx?gclid=CJ3N3pKli58CFSgtawodhjs1Zw. Check it out and learn. I will share some of my actions to save our planet along with this BLOG and hope you, dear reader, will contribute to these ideas, too.