Valentine's Day isn't big in our house. Hubby tends to be contemptuous of what he calls "Hallmark Holidays." But that doesn't mean romance is dead, despite the two dogs, two cats, one lizard, two teens and all their friends who regularly get in the way.
Traveling without your kids can be a great opportunity to teach them some valuable geography and social studies when you return home.
I'm often on very long plane rides, breathing in germs and stale air and suffering from jetlag. It's the life of a travel writer and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I've disembarked from a 20 hour flight to go straight into a business meeting having only had a few hours of sleep, and found comfort in short 2-3 hour flights that I've come to affectionately call "nap time." In all my years of travel, however, I've found a few secrets that take away the aches, pains and ugliness that can ensue from long flights and longer nights. Whether you're traveling to the next state or to another part of the world, take these five items with you on your next trip and I guarantee you'll see a difference!
Sometimes things on the volunteer road have a strange way of working out. This past month I was slated to volunteer in Haiti. My second attempt to work in the impoverished Caribbean country was timed to coincide with the one year anniversary of Haiti's tragic earthquake. In coordination with Ecoworks International (www.ecoworksinternational.org), I planned to help teens create a community newsletter/journal at a small youth center in the town of Ganthier. Sounds like the perfect volunteer task for a journalist and all-around creative gal, right? Plane tickets were booked and ground logistics were locked and loaded until a pesky Presidential election gone awry and the subsequent response of gunfire, barricades, riots, police confrontations and a run off election slated to take place during my stay deemed it unsafe for me to go. Yes, I was disappointed, but I've encountered enough close calls over the past many months of volunteering to recognize that safety must come first.
Left without a volunteer project for January, the eighth month of service in my year-long project, The Global Citizen Project, I scrambled to find a replacement. A travel writer friend recommended that I meet her in Guatemala to volunteer at ANIMAL AWARE, a no-kill shelter that focuses its efforts on the rescue and rehabilitation of domestic animals (www.animalaware.org). ANIMAL AWARE also takes a proactive approach to population control with its spay and neuter programs - refreshing initiatives to see in Latin America, where stray cats and dogs rampantly roam the streets.
Very often when we speak to our friends, we shower them with compliments, praise and approval. It makes them feel proud, valued and respected and makes us feel good as well. We recognize the benefit of positive speech, we see the happiness it brings to our friends and we feel good about bringing this joy to others. So if we know all this, why is it so hard to speak this way to ourselves?
For many of us, negative self-talk is a way of life. "I'm so dumb/lazy/fat" can be how we define ourselves. We place ourselves in a particular category and limit ourselves from ever expanding beyond it. It's like we're willingly putting ourselves in prison while we hold the key. It's bad enough we may feel this way about ourselves but the damage is multiplied when we share these negative thoughts with our coworkers, friends, partners and our kids.
Kicking off 2011 at full speed, I recently returned from a business trip to Hong Kong for the Toys and Games Fair. The trip was wonderful, enlightening, successful and exhausting! While I felt prepared for the trip, it took much more planning, research and flexibility in comparison to the standard US business trips that keep my frequent flyer accounts stocked, allowing for family vacations that get more "worldly" every year (this summer takes us to Turkey).
Planning the trip was relatively easy with a conference website offering accommodation and transportation information. Travel plans were also easy, until I missed my flight in Tokyo. Thankfully, I had scheduled an extra day for "cushion". An overnight stay and rearranged flight plans delayed my arrival, but didn't wreak havoc on business meetings. Researching the work and play activities and sightseeing was a breeze, with so many travel websites and blogs.
