New York Traveler.net

Don’t Borrow for Your Vacation

The travel season is upon us! Some people are actually thinking (and have even done it!!) of going into debt to go on vacation. That makes me terribly nervous. The economy is so shaky, and consumer debt (as well as national debt) has grown to such heights that I’m afraid it will all come crashing down. And consumer debt is so hard to pay off. A vacation is a wonderful treat, but is it really something you should go into debt for? There are better ways to manage money and debts, IMHO.

Just about everyone I know has some kind of consumer debt. It’s time for us to get smart about our debt management, which, simply put, is don’t go into debt any further, and pay off what you owe! Easier said than done, I know– believe me! First thing we can all do is be wise with our credit card spending and choosing. Compare credit card rates and always check for annual fees or other slippery charges. There are some good articles about debt management: Advantages and Disadvantages to Getting a Credit Card, and Credit Repair Do’s and Don’ts. You can compare credit cards at the site, too.

Sometimes, we go through hard times and cannot avoid some debt. But remember, a vacation is not a necessity, it’s a luxury. Going into debt for a vacation is risky!

And there you have it. My humble opinion.

The Boring Traveler

The New York Times has a colorful travel section online, but I’ve generally avoided it because it revolves a world apart– a higher echelon– from me. I just can’t make myself get excited about wild nightclubs in Slovenia (the new liberation) or “Hawaii on a dime” (face it, if you’re going to vacation in Hawaii, you’re going to want to spend more than a “dime.” Money is relative to the New York Times jetset crew, I guess).

Perusing the section today, one headline did catch my eye, “The Frugal Traveler.” Aha! Perhaps this was a worthy travelogue, filled with heart-warming homilies and inspirational photos of the wide open spaces of the Land of the Free! Unfortunately, I became disappointed.

Now before you write me off as being overly critical, remember, I’ve seen some outstanding travel blogs out there, so I am drawing from a good deal of experience. And some of the stories were truly interesting (like the car failure in South Dakota and accepting an invitation from a local family to stay with them– all the while concealing the fact that their new guest– this Frugal Traveler– is a NY Times reporter). Actually, the segment on South Dakota was the most entertaining, in my opinion.

But the Zen meditation and joking with locals in Colorado about getting drunk wasn’t terribly frugal to me. It had “New York Times” plastered all over it. The stories never got beyond my head and into my heartstrings, which is how I feel about the New York Times in general. Moreover, I failed to see how this travel was particularly frugal, besides the “mingling” with the unwashed masses and driving a beat-up old Volvo across the continent.

Though frugal travel has required me to embrace certain Buddhist conventions — shedding attachments to luxuries, for example — the closest I’d ever come to spiritual enlightenment was drinking bourbon from a silver Tibetan flask I bought in India.

Oh yeah, when I go frugal, I never leave home without my Buddhist conventions, not to mention my Ming vase and silver Tibetan flask I bought in India for those religious moments.

I am easily bored and, I assume, so is the typical travel blog reader. I like stories short, I like lots of “play by play” photos, and I love the historical aspect of the places I visit. And I must have some kind of inspiration, whether it be in the scenery or in the journey or in meeting new people. I think this element was missing from the narrative. Like I said, it never left my head to touch my heart.

And when I travel to “Middle America,” I don’t consider it “Middle America.” That’s a name given to us by “Upper America.” One segment has the author wandering into a Utopian society and calling the residents “pretty normal.” I wondered what “pretty normal” meant?

But from what I could see, Dreamtime’s residents were pretty normal: mIEKAL’s 19-year-old son, Zon, had just graduated from the Waldorf School in Viroqua, a couple of towns west; Camille, whom mIEKAL had married after he and Elizabeth divorced, was a cheerful, inquisitive filmmaker who had moved there from Romania only a few years earlier (Elizabeth, who had renamed herself Lyx Ish, died in 2004); and Ken, a handyman who’d been in West Lima longer than anyone, was quieter than the others but so what… and the sun was warming the town’s sole remaining business, a Pepsi machine (50 cents a can).

College, divorce, Pepsi. “Pretty normal.”

Face it, most people go “frugal” because they have to. Rubbing stories of grimy trailer parks and shady hotels in the faces of readers (who, like me, practice frugality as a lifestyle not for a story written to titillate Manhattanites) is depressing. The true frugal traveler looks for expensive stuff inexpensively (good deals), not cheap (non-Manhattan) stuff and calling it frugal.

I don’t think the author was intentionally condescending, but the overall story seemed to mock the average non-Tibetan-flask-drinking American. The segment seemed more like a travel story about the “little” people, for the “big” people to read, done with typical sneering New York Times style. Who likes that?

Is Travel Going South?

There’s a mildly entertaining (and slightly scary) post I found, called 8 Things Travelers Should Expect in 2008. It holds no bars and gives us the down and out ugly. Increased gasoline and airlines prices, longer lines, more fees and taxes (no surprise to us in New York), and more gridlock. And the nonsense pushed on travelers by greedy, lying companies trying to steal us out of a buck. Check this!

Higher energy prices always send travel companies into an opportunistic frenzy. In December, the cruise line Star Clippers slapped an $8 fuel surcharge on future bookings. There’s just one little problem: Star Clippers operates a fleet of sailing ships. The Jamaica Hotel & Tourist Association in December also encouraged its members to impose an energy surcharge on its guests because of “the ever-increasing price of crude oil and the consequent threat to the profitability of hotel businesses.” Huh? Since when is crude oil — or any kind of fossil fuel — used to power a hotel? Point is, the fees often have little or nothing to do with the actual energy costs of the cruise line, hotel or airline. If they can get away with it, they will (and they are).

This sounds like a job for Chuck Schumer, to combat this new evil scourge of hotel room gouging and sailboat gouging.

Seriously, I shake my head, dismayed that crooked companies would stoop so low to rob us blind; yet this is so predictable. I’d like to hope that travelers would fight back and refuse to give their money to such sheisters; but consumers are so predictable, too. I am always surprised at how much the consumer will tolerate to get his goods. As with the preposterous and embarrassing “security” checks at airports and border points, as with the outrageous gasoline prices filling millions of SUV tanks, as with endless and mindless surcharges on everything from toilet paper to energy use, I really have to wonder if the traveling consumer will finally put his foot down and say ‘no more of this.’ Actually, I lost faith with the consumer with the toleration of those airport x-ray machines that expose a traveler’s every naked crevice. As for me: No thanks; I’ll stay in New York.

These restraints can only bode well for the short-term, local traveler (aka, me!). There’s a lot to discover within one’s own region. I always hear talk about how travelers will “save” the world, but how about saving your neighbor or your neighborhood? It’s pretty easy to make small talk and hand out care packages to strangers in Australia or Thailand; how about on Main Street? If anything, economic restraints can be a blessing, making us have communities again. It’s like I’d said when I first started my blogs on New York travel: everybody blogs about world travel– why not blog about local travel? This may become the new trend, especially if the traveling consumer finally puts his foot down. If.

In Search of the American Traveler

Over the summer, I had borrowed an audio version of the John Steinbeck book, Travels With Charley; In Search of America. It was very good listening while I pulled weeds and planted squash on those monotonous summer days. I have since remembered the anecdotes of the book from time to time (when I have quiet moments of reflection). It is a very good book.

Actually, I never liked John Steinbeck novels very much. I was forced to read them and write reports on them in school. His stories were dry, depressing, and dark. I was a vivacious teenager looking for adventure, and I found it not on the demoralizing farmsteads of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. If only my English teachers had passed on Travels with Charley!

The book is non-fiction, a rare work for a renowned novelist like Steinbeck. The year is 1960, Steinbeck is nearing 60, and he feels he has lost touch with America and the American people. He decides to take a year-long road trip across the country in his customized camper (named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s trusted steed) and with his poodle, Charley. It’s a wonderful story of re-acquaintance with flavorful American customs, American thought, and especially the enigmatic and peculiar American people. Steinbeck does a marvelous job of simply describing his journey. It is American travel at its best: traveling for the sense of adventure and the wide-open roads. No politics, no “save the world” or socialist-style mantras, no moralizing. He just writes what he sees. And what he sees is the undying optimism and pure gumption of a free people, thrilled with life and opportunities in a free nation. His stories of the people he meets and the experiences he shares with them are all so wonderfully unique, yet a distinctly common thread flows through them all. Steinbeck’s pen flows with American pride as he narrates his journey.

The country has changed a great deal since 1962, when the book was published. We are not so optimistic, so simple, and so daring. Materialism has choked off our sense of American adventure. Cynicism has stifled our friendliness. We aren’t as happy a people anymore, and we have lost our religious and spiritual moorings. The tables have turned– Steinbeck novels no longer depress America, America depresses Steinbeck novels.

Why must the American traveler have a “polemic” when traveling? Why must we travel for money, for recognition, or to change how the world perceives us? Why can’t we travel just to meet new people and make new friends and spread the joy of being free in this country (or abroad)? Moreover, I fear our developing surveillance society will kill travel altogether. Who today can hop in a Rocinante and go barreling across the country, sharing food and stories with someone you meet on the road? Sure, it still can happen, but as everyone knows, you do it at your own risk in these modern times.

John Steinbeck went in search for America those forty years ago. Today, we desperately need someone to search for the American traveler. We’ve not only lost our way, we’ve lost ourselves.

Expecting Too Much, AKA Travelphilosophism

How Travel Will Save the World is the latest post at Brave New Traveler. That’s a very brave statement. I think it’s taking travel to a level it does not belong:

The belief that humanity is encompassed within a single community is called cosmopolitanism. A philosophy with ancient roots, its lineage begins with Diogenes: when asked where he came from, he answered, “I am a citizen of the world.”

Cosmopolitan has come to mean “worldly” or “sophisticated” (a word itself derived from the love of wisdom), but in the original sense meant a universal love for all people that rejects borders.

Since his declaration, cosmopolitanism has become a banner for the globally conscious – a dedication to preserving dialogue and variety among all ways of life. It has found many adherents throughout the ages, notably in the work of Immanuel Kant, who long ago predicted a union of nations to end war (the forerunner of today’s United Nations).

What? Far too many assumptions, and those are erroneous at best. Cosmopolitan has nothing to do with rejection of borders. If anything, being cosmopolitan requires the full recognition of borders; cosmopolitan is defined as having worldwide international sophistication. Now how can one have international anything without nations? And nations are determined by borders.

I can be philosophical, and I can be a traveler. I can even be a philosophical traveler (and I think I am). But this travelphilosophism (a newly invented word, thank you) is a ridiculous assumption. It breaks down the very essence of travel, which is to visit a different place filled with different people, events, traditions, etc.

After going off on numerous platonic tangents, the post wildly continues.

There are endless opportunities for the discovery of new and mutual cultures on the roads that bind us together – for every stone in the walls of fear and apathy, there’s a traveler to break it down.

Cosmopolitanism is a fluid, tenuous idea, threatened often by patriotic fervor and the blindness of dogma.

But it is also a bold and optimistic statement – one that declares citizenship to a state which defies supremacy, transcending any one nation to close the spaces between us.

The traveler nation is the global echo of Diogenes, the actual moment of cosmopolitanism. It is the thrill of finding oneself among fellow seekers all, on the fringes that compose the City of Humanity.

Do you see what I mean when I detect underlying assumptions? If we are all the same and all the same is us, why travel? There is a deficient view of the basic definition of “nation” here. People in groups are often defined by their borders, specifically, their geographic borders. It is within these borders that culture, tradition, dress, food, and etc develop.

And people within nations do not war because they “misunderstand” each other. They don’t even war because they “hate” each other (hate usually comes later). They war because of conflict or greed. World travelers will never change that, because world travelers will never change the heart of mankind (which is bent on conflict and greed).

I dislike posts like this because it makes the simple and enjoyable adventure of travel into a “political” action with “political” repercussions.

I’m still forming my thoughts on this. Stay tuned for the continuing saga…

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