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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

It doesn’t matter if they call it a bucket list or a wish list or don’t even have a physical list at all: everyone has certain things that they want to do or see before they die. Some are very personal, such as telling a certain person they love them or resolving a fight or dispute from their past. Other things are so common that they are practically universal. Visiting the Grand Canyon falls into that latter category.

It is recognized as one of the seven natural wonders of the world on most lists. Every year Grand Canyon hotels are filled by around five million visitors who trek to the Canyon. Over 80 percent of those visitors are from the US. The UK, Canada, Japan, and Germany lead the rest of the world’s tourists.

The Canyon itself stretches for 227 miles and is 18 miles across at its widest point. Overall it covers more than 1.2 million acres. Most of the Canyon is located in Arizona. It was formed by the Colorado River in a process that took between three and six million years. The Canyon is deepest at the North Rim , where it measures 5,400 feet below sea level.

Facts aside, the Canyon is a stunningly beautiful vista. Most people have seen images of the Canyon in photos, film, and artwork, but nothing does justice to seeing it in person.

A trip oversees can be an exciting and wonderful time. It can also be fraught with dangers, both obvious and hidden. The best way to deal with the fears associated with those risks is to be financially prepared. This either means becoming independently wealthy so that you can afford to handle any situation that comes your way or it means you will need to purchase TATA AIG travel insurance — or some form of visitor insurance — before you leave home.

Travel insurance should protect you from the unknown. With any luck, you won’t need to use it. If, however, something bad does happen, you want the assurance that you have access to the resources you will need to recover. This may mean financial assistance to cope with transportation cancellations or logistical help in replacing lost travel documents. It may also mean having the ability to walk into a foreign clinic in order to get medical treatment for a sudden illness or injury.

You can find information about travel insurance on many places online. You may also want to contact an insurance agency to speak with an agent about your particular needs. The policies that are available online can be customized to suit most situations. You can find policies for student, business, and leisure travel and that cover you for a specific country or continent or get global coverage that is good almost everywhere in the world.

Canada is a great place to go for vacation. There are large, metropolitan areas that rival the urban centers of the world. Places like Montreal and Toronto have amazing architecture, arts, dining and entertainment options as well as lots of parks, zoos, and museums. There are great for cosmopolitan travelers as well as families with small kids.

The great open spaces of Canada are also wonderful to visit. There are Canada vacation packages that highlight the wide plains of central Canada as well as the spectacular Rocky Mountains. These areas are perfect for wilderness lovers as well as those who enjoy outdoor recreation. Coach and train tours are especially popular as they allow tourists to soak in the gorgeous views between destinations as well as explore the many beautiful, wild sites across the country. The coastal regions of eastern and western Canada have their own sea-faring attractions and historical sites to visit.

Wildlife is a popular draw of Canadian vacations. Visitors can book special tours to watch whales, sight grizzly bears or, thanks to Canada’s Arctic regions, even encounter polar bears. And the northern location of Canada means that it has lots of glaciers rising majestically above the horizon. There is a vast icefield that can be visited as well as the Icefields Parkway which offers a 140 mile drive by some of the most stunning and famous glaciers in North America.

Kids are an excitable and rambunctious lot. They rump, skip, and jump everywhere and all the time. The number of cuts, scrapes, bruises and minor sprains that they get in a week’s time is nearly impossible to calculate. The number of these that occur during visits to theme parks must be astronomical. Yet, these rarely appear in official statistics of theme park accidents because parents don’t bother reporting them.

Some of these accidents occur when kids trip or bump into everything from buildings and benches to other kids. It also happens when they are on rides or attractions. It’s not worth interrupting the family’s enjoyment of the park to sit in some office and fill out an accident report for something that doesn’t even require a band aid or ice pack. And even those that need band aids usually just get taken care of by Mom so that everyone can move on to the next ride.

Another group of unreported incidents involve sunburns, heat exhaustion and general exhaustion. Most people don’t realize how a day spent in the sun can damage their skin and body until they are back home or back at the hotel. They are certainly not going to trek back to the park to file a report. They are going to put on lotion, drink water, and/or sleep until they feel better. Minor food poisoning, minor allergy or asthma attacks and even things like pulled back or neck muscles in adults are also likely to go unreported.

If you’re planning a trip abroad , whether for a few weeks or a few months, you want to make sure that you purchase adequate traveler’s insurance for your trip. This will start with airline or other insurance to cover you and your baggage en route to your destination. Most airlines offer insurance or you can check your existing home insurance to see if covers belongings in transit. You can then cobble together insurances from car rentals, credit card protection, etc., or you can purchase a comprehensive policy from a respected travel insurance company.

Good travel insurance is going to start with protecting your belongings during transit and while it’s at a hotel, or series of hotels. It will even cover belongings if you’re staying with friends or family. Next it will include provisions for lost documents, such as passports , insurance for travel and transportation delays, and cover catastrophic things such as hijacking and death.

Perhaps the most important element of a travel policy is Visitor health insurance . This will allow you to receive emergency medical coverage in any country you visit. If you’re planning a long term stay for schooling or work, you can get medical insurance to cover preventative check ups as well as ongoing treatment for things like pregnancy. At the minimum, these policies should cover any prescription medications, emergency injuries and illnesses, and medical evacuation back to your home.

Once you’ve purchased your travel insurance from a respected agency and have all the necessary documents and contact numbers to use in case of emergency, you’ll be able to step onto that plane without a care in the world.

The New Orleans Art Market takes place on the last Saturday of every month, located at the Carrolton Park, which is at the end of St. Charles streetcar line. It’s not wise to walk there from any of the five star New Orleans hotels , mainly because the directions can get very confusing, unless you bring a map with you or have a GPS device.

The Art Market consists of over 150 artists from all over Louisiana and southern Mississippi is invited to exhibit their work, however a majority of the work is by local artists. Most of the art isn’t gallery or museum quality work, but it’s all very original, unique and you may find it more delightful than the art you’d find in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art .

Once you’ve thoroughly walked through all the artists tents, you’ll begin to note how much pride New Orleanais have for their local artist and the art. They love their city and they don’t seem to be able to get enough ways to express just how much pride they have of their city. As you walk around, you’ll be able to see it in the flags and banners hung outside of residential homes and on the bumpers of cars. The Fleur-de-lis tattoo is hard to miss, you’ll find someone, no matter where you go in New Orleans, with this emblem displayed in some way; it’s safe to assume that it represents their love for the Crescent City rather than alliance to the Bourbon monarchy.

Don’t be surprised if you end up purchasing something from the market with a Fleur-de-lis on it.

To get about as European as you can get in North America, visit the great city of Montreal. There, they speak French, but are much nicer than their unwelcoming Parisians in Paris. Montreal is distinctly French, not in terms of sites, but in terms of culture. Montreal is Paris’ mini-me sans the Eifel Tower.

All the directional signs are in French and are rarely in both English and French. If you don’t speak French and you’re staying at any of the luxury hotels Montreal provides their visitors, let them know immediately that you don’t speak French, otherwise they will think you know French and will continue talking to you in French. Once they know you only speak English, they will speak English with a great French accent. It’s not that they are like their counterparts in France; it’s just that French is the official language of Montreal.

Montreal is so Parisian that there are bicycle stations on almost every corner of the city that you can rent and most restaurants serve a 5-course meal. The city has a very homey feel to it, so much so, it leaves an impression that you are actually in Europe. During the summertime, there’s a festival almost every weekend. If you happen to be visiting the city during the summer months, try to catch the Festival of Laughs ; it’s one of the most fun festivals of Montreal.

Montreal has numerous parks of varying sizes to be enjoyed by residents and visitors alike. In addition to providing beautiful gardens and scenery, the Parcs offer year-round recreational activities. The easiest to access from the main Montreal hotels are Parc Lafontaine and Parc du Mont Royal. LaFontaine is known for outdoor theatre, boules, and baseball in the summer and lake ice skating during the winter months. Parc du Mont Royal overlooks the entire city and has amazing views of not only downtown Montreal, but the Eastern Townships and the Saint Lawrence River. It contains hiking and bike trails to take full advantage of the various prospects.

For those seeking beach activities, Parc Jean-Drapeau is situated on two islands in the St. Lawrence while Parc Maisonneuve is home to the Jardin Botanique de Montreal, one of the world’s largest botanical gardens with 16 themed greenhouses and gardens, an Insectarium, and the First Nations Garden. Parc Jeanne-Mance features baseball diamonds, tennis courts, beach volleyball courts, and a soccer/football pitch. In the winter, there’s an ice skating rink. Parc de i’lle-de-la-Visitation is a regional park the offers a cycling tour along the Riviere-des-Prairies. The site of the city’s first water reservoir is Square Saint-Louis with beautiful trees and a charming fountain.

Those willing to venture further out can explore Parc Angrignon and Parc des Rapids in Le Sud-Ouest or Parc Rene-Levesque which features river surfing and extensive bike paths.

The art scene in Scottsdale is one that behaves according to waves, like any art scene possibly, with ebbs and flows that respond to many unpredictable factors. Yet for all the urban centers in the metropolitan Phoenix area, Scottsdale has always enjoyed a bit more economic activity than other areas. The luxury hotels Scottsdale offers are one sign of its vital presence, where visitors come from all over the world. Some come to enjoy the lovely climate when the winters are hard most everywhere else, and some come to see the art.

There are local and international artists whose works are represented by some of Scottsdale’s most exciting galleries, and for new developments in contemporary art, Chiaroscuro has a curatorial staff whose eyes are set on the future, and this makes it a lovely place to visit in the present.

One might have the chance to see an exhibition by the Phoenix-based Paticia Clark . She works as a professor at ASU, and her video installations have been shown widely. Her main theme is Cuba, which is something of an obsession for this visionary artist, and her work often ties local concerns with those of the island off the coast of Florida, and the intersections reveal hidden traces of common and uncommon languages. It, too, speaks of the future, firmly and with compassion to those occupying a very complex and compelling present moment.

The USF Contemporary Art Museum will be presenting an exhibition by Carlos Garaicao, beginning August 23, 2010 and runs through December 11, 2010. Garaicao is Havana-born and is internationally known for his contemporary study of the city.

The exhibit: Carlos Garaicoa: La emnienda que hay en mi (Making Amends) will be visually stimulating and will exemplify his commitment towards a moral obligation with society with which he lives. The USF exhibition will include one of his most recognized works, ‘The Crown Jewels, which is a series of 8 cast silver models depicting international places of military authority, surveillance and repression including Cuba’s Villa Marista, Guantanamo Naval Base, the East German Stasi, the KGB and the Pentagon. He has exhibited extensively at venues around the world and his works can be found in many prestigious museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate and the El Museio Nacional de Arte Centro de arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

If you booked a Tampa hotel and be in town August 27th, make plans to visit the USF campus where Garaicoa will not only participate in a colloquium, some of his most celebrated artworks will be shown as well. If you won’t be in Tampa on the 27th, still check out his exhibit and witness some of today’s most important contemporary artwork of this new 21st century culture.