Utah is one of my favorite escapes. There’s something about sitting on a slab of redrock and watching a black sky dotted with stars. You’re in the middle of nowhere, alone, surrounded by silence, overpowered by the feeling of grandiose canyons.
Flickr user djurma captures exactly that in this nighttime photo of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. You can feel that stillness just by looking at it.
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A new survey by Marriott’s SpringHill Suites brand reveals key statistics about Americans and their vacation habits, and some of what we learned from the report might surprise you. Travelers are more budget conscious than ever, and increasingly inspired by what they’re finding in hotels.
Here’s what we learned:
Vacation Time
While it’s no shock that we could all use a few more vacation days, the survey reveals that, on average, people would like 17 more paid vacation days, and that 22 percent of people don’t get any vacation days at all.
Packing and Planning
If you procrastinate and pack at the last minute, you’re not alone. Around 50 percent of people wait to pack until the day of or day before, with 12 percent just throwing items in a suitcase and hoping for the best.
Bargain Hunters
Flash sale sites and frequent hotel discount codes have made travelers hungry for a good deal. If they could get 25 percent off their hotel, travelers say they would:
give up alcohol (54%)
forego hotel housekeeping (40%)
give up mobile device access (26%)
forgo a camera or ability to document their trip (13%)
Bringing Vacation Home
Over four in five (84%) Americans would miss at least one convenience offered at a hotel after leaving. As a result, two in five Americans have liked something (amenities, sheets, etc.) so much that they purchased it for home use.
We’ll turn the questions back to you, readers. What would you do to have a good vacation? Do you need more time off? A great discount? Leave your comments below.
Eating out three meals a day can do some serious damage to your travel budget, especially when you want those three meals to be as good as possible. Sure, you could self-cater to save a few bucks, but if you’re a real foodie who wants to taste the best a city has to offer, how can you do it without breaking the bank?
Filling up on street food or tracking down food trucks are two tried and true techniques used by backpackers and budget travelers the world over, but those who want to eat at traditional restaurants cut their costs too. Here are five ideas for eating at sit-down restaurants on a budget.
Enjoy a pre-theater meal
Restaurants located in a city’s theater district will usually offer discounted meals to diners who want to get a bite to eat before heading to see their show – but you don’t necessarily have to hold theater tickets to take advantage of this deal. Most restaurants will happily accommodate you, although the catch is you’ll have to eat early with pre-show meal deals usually ending around 6:30 p.m. Cities with a strong theater culture like NYC and London have long lists of pre-theater meal venues to choose from but the trend is catching on in many smaller cities as well.
Seek out prix fixe menus
Ordering from a prix fixe (“fixed price”) menu can work out significantly cheaper than ordering individual items off a traditional a la carte menu. As an added bonus, you get to try out extra dishes you may not have considered ordering, which sometimes turn out to be the highlight of the meal. With a prix fixe menu, you know upfront exactly how much your meal is going to cost so there are no nasty surprises when your bill shows up.
Eat well at lunch
Most restaurants have separate menus for dinner and lunch – with the latter being significantly cheaper. So if you’re traveling on a budget, the midday meal is the perfect opportunity to try out the fancier establishments that would be too pricy to enjoy at dinnertime. There’s usually a fair bit of overlap between the lunch and dinner menus anyway since few restaurants can afford to offer drastically different items for lunch and dinner.
Eat at markets
You’ve probably already heard the tip about heading to a local produce market, picking up some bread, cheese and fruit and making a picnic out of it – but that’s not what I mean when I say you should consider eating at markets. Instead, I’m talking about dining at one of the small restaurants or food booths set up inside many popular markets. You’ll usually have to sit at a counter or in a cafeteria-style setting and there are typically only one or two menu choices at most of the booths – but the upside is that the dishes on offer have been perfected.
You also get to enjoy fish, meat and vegetables that are super fresh and a fraction of the cost they’d be at a typical restaurant. Quincy Market in Boston (see image above) and Kauppatori Market in Helsinki, Finland, are two examples of markets offering great meals.
BYOB where possible
Depending on where you’re traveling, alcohol can put a real ding in your budget. For example, Singapore puts a heavy tax on alcohol so a beer in a bar or restaurant can set you back $12-$20 while a cocktail will leave you with serious sticker shock. You may already BYOB when eating out in your hometown, so why not do the same thing when traveling? Supermarkets are often a good source of reasonably priced alcohol that you can take along to your meal.
I’m almost never game to wait in a long line to eat. But I joined a line stretching outside the door at Xoco in Chicago last Saturday because I couldn’t stand to hear another rave about the place without experiencing what all the fuss is about for myself. Xoco is a fast food Mexican place owned by former “Top Chef” master chef Rick Bayless, whom my colleague Laurel Miller once memorably described as an “all-around culinary badass.”
The place has a whopping 1,662 reviews on Yelp – 897 of them mention the otherworldly churros – and about the only people who pan it are those who can’t get a table. (There are only four restaurants in Chicago with more reviews on Yelp: Kuma’s Corner (burgers), Hot Doug’s (hot dogs/sausages), Girl & The Goat (New American) and Smoque BBQ.) I’ve been hearing about how unforgettably good this place is since it opened in 2009 – the place is a tourist attraction in itself – but was reminded that I needed to try it after seeing a write-up on it from Grant Martin in our budget guide to Chicago in late January.We arrived at 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, which is probably the worst possible time to try eat here. But the line moved fast and I actually needed the half hour or so to study the menu and the daily specials. I knew that I wanted a torta, a Mexican sandwich made on fresh bread from Labriola Baking Company (another great place to eat in Chicago’s western suburbs) that is cooked in a wood burning oven, but I was torn between getting the Choriqueso, which is made with homemade chorizo sausage, roasted poblano, artisan Jack cheese and tomatillo salsa, and the Baja chicken, which comes with homemade chipotle mayo, Napa cabbage/radish slaw and black beans.
I went for the Baja chicken, my wife got the pork carnitas and we shared an order of churros with sides of chocolate and soft serve vanilla ice cream. The bill, with no drinks was more than $40, including a hot chocolate we bought for our boys. My torta was absolutely mouth watering. The bread is crusty, the ingredients are fresh and the rich salsa and creamy mayo are an excellent accompaniment to a sandwich that is just about perfect. My only complaint is that at $11, it should be bigger. In fact, it was so damn good that I easily could have eaten two of them.
But the reason why I’m already salivating at the prospect of returning to Xoco is the churros. Good lord, the churros. Forget about the crunchy, flavorless things you buy from a cart on the street or in a hole-in-the-wall Mexican bakery. Those things don’t even deserve to have the same name as the treats that are served up at Xoco.
They literally melt in your mouth and the flavor is so intensely sweet and cinnamony that it brings a smile to your face. Really, I challenge anyone to walk into Xoco in a terrible mood, eat a churro and see what happens to your demeanor. These damn things could bring peace to the Holy Land for crying out loud. My wife liked to dip them in the sinfully rich, decadent chocolate but I preferred the cinnamon/vanilla ice cream combo. How do you want your Powerball winnings – lump sum or yearly payouts? You can’t go wrong either way.
After visiting Xoco in the city, I found out there was a Frontera Fresco with many of the same menu items a Norris Hall on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, only a mile from my house. I went there with my wife on a Friday at 1:30 p.m. and there was no line whatsoever. Even better, most of the tortas were $1 or $2 cheaper than they are downtown. I had the Cubana, which comes with pork loin and bacon, black beans, avocado, artisan Jack cheese, chipotle mustard, Morita chiles and homemade cilantro crema. It was pretty damn good though not quite as tasty as the Baja Chicken or the carnitas.
But the campus location, alas, has no churros. Damn them! But they do have soft serve yogurt – try the coconut – and some very tasty almond cookies and bread pudding. My verdict: Xoco is worth the hype, especially the churros, but if you hate to wait, head north to Evanston.
With the mountain bike trails around my Indiana home too muddy to ride, I picked up my buddy Jimmy and pointed the Forester south to Nashville. The temperature was about 10 degrees warmer than what we’d been suffering through this Hoosier farce of a spring, and from what I could tell from the Internet chatter, the Tennessee trails seemed to be in fairly decent shape. A little over four hours later, under overcast skies, we were rolling up to the Montgomery Bell State Park trailhead near Dickson, Tenn.
The plan was simple. Since this was our first trail ride of the season, we would stick to the two easier trail systems at first, easing our way up to the two harder levels by the end of the day. A couple of riders we encountered at the trailhead told us the 20-plus miles of trails were marked fairly well, so we knew there was no way for us to get lost. Just to be safe, I quickly took a snapshot of the trail map with my phone, then threw my leg over the Giant’s top tube and pedaled into the trees.
Jimmy was already in front of me, his tiny legs a blur on his new 650B rigid singlespeed. He knew my cautious nature on technical singletrack and was soon launching a few short attacks, trying to get me to breach my comfort zone. As he dipped beneath the horizon, I accelerated, determined to catch his wheel. The oak and hickory trees disappeared behind me as I picked up speed, catching him as he was powering up a short rise. He might be more fearless on the trail, but I had the benefit of 2X10 gearing and could easily catch him on the hills.One of the reasons we came to Tennessee was for the hills, and they did not disappoint. The trails didn’t flow in the same manner as the ones back home, and climbing felt like more of a chore at times. But it was dirt, it was new, and we were having fun.
My biggest flaw as a traveler and a cyclist is my inability to follow even the simplest of maps. If I were born five centuries ago, I would have been the hapless mariner piloting his vessel over the edge of the earth. So it shouldn’t have been a shock when we soon realized we’d ventured into the more difficult terrain we wanted to avoid at the start.
The Esses and Chain Reaction are great fun, with fast, bermed turns and some nice downhills, but by the third time we rode over them, my frustration was starting to show. The terrain wasn’t nearly as technical as we had feared, but we didn’t drive four-plus hours to ride the same section of trail multiple times. Finally, after studying the map harder than my 15-year-old self-examining a dog-eared Playboy, we were finally able to navigate our way onto new trail.
That’s when the sleet started.
The tree cover protected us from the brunt of the storm, but we were still pelted by the slushy hail. The weather motivated to throw caution to the wind and sprint back to the trailhead. Seconds after our tires hit the gravel trail leading to the parking lot, the skies cleared and the sleet stopped. We briefly considered riding back into the woods, but decided beers sounded better.
The next day would prove to be less cartographically challenging. Lock 4 Mountain Bike Park, located on the other side of Nashville in Gallatin, Tenn., is a wonderfully laid out, nine-plus mile trail system that offers a wealth of terrain, including a couple of short switchbacks that could stop you in your tracks if you don’t gear down fast enough. The trails were in great shape, save for one section of the trail that was taped off, the rains a week before making it a muddy mess.
Over all, Lock 4’s rooty singletrack was super fast, with well-marked bailouts before the most difficult technical sections. Being that rock gardens are my kryptonite as a rider, the only section that gave me any real difficulty was a narrow, stone-strewn climb that tested my nerve as much as my technical skills.
We did just a few laps at Lock 4, pausing near the top of one of the climbs to admire Old Hickory Lake, which surrounds the park on three sides. It was a beautiful day, and more than a few riders were on the trail on that Wednesday afternoon, playing hooky from work, just like us.
We were rained out the next day, and afterward it was time to break out the road bikes. But I’d gotten the dirt I needed, and that was enough.
So you want to ride the singletrack near Nashville? Find out trail conditions, get directions and trail maps at tennesseemountainbike.com.