Protect yourself from frostbite

by Erik McLaughlin on

On your trip to the slopes for some much needed excitement and adventure, you awake to find fresh powder. Lots of it, too. You begin to head for the runs and realize that in your excitement, you’ve forgotten your gloves. No matter, you think, I have to get out there! A few hours later, your hands begin to blister and get numb. What do you do?

This is a common situation and one that I have seen happen all too much. The condition is frostbite and it can not only slow down your trip, but can cost you your extremities!

This is a condition where the tissues of the body, generally the fingers and toes, begin to actually freeze. This can cause massive damage to the tissue and sever cases, beside being very painful, can require amputation of necrotic (dead) tissue.

There are two conditions to know, frost nip and frostbite. Frostbite is the worst and most severe form, characterized by destroyed tissue and numbness. Blister formation and muscles damage are also common. Frost nip is less severe and does not destroy the tissues.

Treatment for all forms, both frostbite and nip, center around re-warming the effected areas. Remember to treat the person for hypothermia, as well as frost bite. Protect them from the cold environment, remove wet or constricting clothing and keep them warm. Try not to re-warm the extremity with a campfire or tailpipe exhaust, as this may cause burns to the already damaged area. Warm water, 40 C/104 F is the ticket. Immerse the area into the water and have the person try to gently move their fingers or toes. Keep them well hydrated and avoid tobacco and alcohol, which inhibits good circulation. Resist the temptation to break the blisters and do not massage the area, both can damage the already injured skin. Ibuprofen may work well, initially, for pain control, but stronger stuff may be needed. Padding the areas between fingers and toes, with cotton, also helps.

Nobody sets out with a goal to get frostbite. To prevent this, keep your body core and your extremities warm. Stay well hydrated and avoid tight or constricting clothing. Mittens work better than gloves, for cold weather hand protection. Also, on longer trips, avoid over-washing the hands and feet, as this removes the skin’ naturally protective oils.

Keeping your body warm and healthy is the secret to having a good cold weather trip. Remember, bring spares of gloves and warm socks, and try not to get so excited about your trip that your forget them in the hotel.

Amazing Race winners: what to do with the money?

by Jamie Rhein on

This article contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen the finale, please do not read this.

The answer to “Now what?” of TK Eriwn and Rachel Rosale’s Amazing Race million dollar win is travel first. Rachel is taking some time off and they are hitting the road with a hefty sum even though savings is part of their idea as well. I’ve done some imagining to see how the dollar amounts might work out. Each won $500,000. Let’s say taxes take $200,000–maybe less, but for these purposes, let’s work with $300,000 remaining. With $300,000 for each person what would you do? Both Rachel & TK did say they are going to travel. Since they are getting along so famously, they’re going to travel together. Rachel also said she is going to do some work on her house, buy a few new outfits and save the rest for later. TK already got a haircut.

Let’s say Rachel decided to save $100,000 in some sort of aggressive funds. She’s young so she can do that. Risk taking is on her side. In 8 years or so, she’ll have $200,000. In 16 years, $300,000. In 24 years, at age 46, she’ll have $600,000, and by the time she’s 52, if all goes well, she’ll have over $1,200.00. By 60, over two million. That’s if she doesn’t touch that $100,000. That strategy could give her a very sweet deal for later travel. But, that’s later; this is now.

Let’s talk about the remaining $200,000. Even if they each spent $50,000 on travel over the course of a few years, providing she rents out her house so someone else is paying the mortgage, what a great time they could have.

As a budget traveler, I’ve tended to stay in two-star hotels unless at a conference where the conference hotel has a terrific deal and my employer has helped pay. We did spring for the Westin in Taipei once. This is a honey of a hotel and well worth the money for a treat, but in general, we don’t stay in our rooms much when we’re traveling, so paying for elegance is wasted on us, but in some places elegance does come cheap. In India, even if one stays in a former Raj palace, such as a Grand Heritage Hotel, something I highly recommend, the chances of spending over $100 for a wonderful room is not going to happen. I should amend that this is funky, historical, artsy wonderful–not plush linen, a bed fit for a king, and fine china wonderful. I went to Neemrana twice.

Besides staying in a Raj style hotel, here are three other suggestions for Rachel and TK based on my most deluxe trips.

Pack mule trip to Ladakh: The most expensive trip I ever took was a pack mule trip to Ladakh where each grouping of people had their private guide who made sure stragglers didn’t wander off into the hills, or if blisters were too unbearable, he had the means for doing some doctoring. The mules carried our stuff and there were cooks along to prepare wonderful vegetarian meals three times a day. They also made tea and gave us snacks. I’d suggest a trip like this one to TK & Rachel. They could do a private trip with two mules and one guide and a cook. Don’t give up the cook and don’t give up the guide. What’s the point of all that money if you’re on a mountain in Ladakh trying to breath and cook dinner? Better let someone else whip up a delicious dahl and rice dish. The guide is a necessity because this is a place of trails that head off in every direction without destination makers pointing the way. (Here’s a detailed account of someone else’s trip published in The Seattle Times three years ago. I bet the prices are not that much more.)

Cycling in Western Australia: Another wonderful trip I took was an everything included cycling trip in Western Australia. That lasted for 9 days, but didn’t cost me a cent. I went along as a chaperone for high schoolers–mostly 9th grade boys. Let’s just say, I more than paid my way fair and square. If anything, I wouldn’t have minded if someone had slipped me a $20 for my efforts of staying cheerful and upbeat. For Rachel and TK, they’ll have the added bonus of being able to buy beer in one of the many pubs in Freemantle. Chaperones weren’t allowed to drink, so I only gazed into the pubs with small whimpers of I can’t believe I’m in Freemantle with all these great pubs and a slew of adolescent males. (Here’s a previous post. There are links to companies that do such trips.)

Antique Rice Barge Cruise in Thailand: If TK and Rachel have a feel for romance, they should take a rice barge cruise in Thailand. The one I took with my husband, dad and daughter (our theme was not romance) was one night complete with gourmet meals, tropical drinks and a full moon. The trip went from outside of Bangkok, including Ayuthaya and traveled along the river back into the city. Watching life awaken along the river as the sun came up was quite special. A warning though. The trip included a visit to a temple where we gave gifts to a monk who sprinkled water on us. It was part of a holy day. I got very unexpectedly pregnant right after. Perhaps there’s no correlation, I’m just saying. Okay, maybe there was some romance.

What advice do you have for TK and Rachel for how to use their travel money wisely, but with style?

Ode to Neil: What is 1% of 2,000 posts?

by Jamie Rhein on

I’ve been blogging with Neil for about a year now wondering how the heck is he managing to crank out such bounty with his sly wit and traveler’s know-how. Since the number of posts Gading manages to put out in a day are sometimes hard to keep up with, I thought I’d give you a sampling of my favorites of Neil’s.

Of course, like he wrote when he signed off today from Gadling on his last post–his 2,000th, I’m sure we haven’t read the last of Neil. However, I thought that someone who has 2,000 posts in two years certainly could have a post dedicated to him. It’s not exactly the same as the trophy-like statue of the Greek god Hermes pictured here, but hopefully it will suffice. Hermes is linked to travel among other things.

(Neil, to turn this into a real statue, you can print out a copy of the picture, carefully cut around the outline of the statue like a paper doll, glue it onto a piece of tag board, cut around that, affix it to a toothpick with tape, stick one end of the toothpick in a bit of playdough or something and perhaps you can get it to stand up.)

Statues aside, this is what 1% of 2,000 looks like–20 posts. But, first, here’s my all time favorite written for our April Fool’s Day bonanza in 2007. Bush Lifts Mark Cuban Travel Ban

These are culled since April of 2007. I picked these because they either made me laugh, inspired me to write my own post, I learned something I didn’t know, brought back some of my own travel memories or gave me useful information that I used. You can decide which is which.

1. Iceland’s putrid fish delicacy.

2. Infiltrating North Korea Part 15: More song and dance, and a conundrum about chocolate

3. Help Gadling buy this woman a cow

4. How to buy goods confiscated by TSA

5. The museum of broken relationships

6. Dumpster diving: The cheapest way to eat when traveling.

7. Hollywood’s Craziest Foriegn Country Stereotypes

8. Turd Coffee: An Indonesian Specialty

9. Affordable Float Plane Fishing in Alaska Part 1: A How to Guide

10. 9,000 Naked Men in Search of Wood

11. The Thankless Life of a Sherpa

12. Removing Leeches

13. The Philippine Penal System Vacation: Free Song, Dance and Meals!

14. Best (Authentic) Mexican Restaurants in Los Angeles

15. Disneyland’s Secret Restaurant

16. Griffith Park: A return from the ashes

17. Are Cookies on your Computer Increasing the Cost of Your Vaction?

18. Go Now before They’re Gone: Conde Nast Traveler’s 20 Most Threatened Places

19. The Strange, Uncomfortable Silence of Naked Germans

20. Cow Tourism

Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Neil Woodburn on

Yes, you read the headline correctly.

And yes, it means exactly what it looks like it means.

Nature-Deficit Disorder is not a clinically diagnosed disease. It is, however, a rather clever name for a disturbing trend towards “denatured childhood” and the alarming affects that can result from such a condition.

The phrase was coined by Richard Louv in his fascinating book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.

Louv points out that today’s children no longer spend long summer afternoons running through the woods, playing in fields, or camping under the stars. Instead, they are at home playing video games, watching movies, surfing the web, or engaging in other indoor activities.

I’ve witnessed this myself when I go home to my parent’s house for Christmas and am surprised every year by the absolute dearth of kids playing in the street with their new toys. Christmas morning is a ghost town–outdoors, at least. If I peer through the neighbor’s windows, however, I can see all the kids huddled around TVs or computer screens, bug-eyed and brain dead. Frankly, I find it very depressing.

So what’s the harm in spending less and less time outdoors in nature?

Louv argues that the exposure to nature is necessary for cognitive development and without a heavy dosage of it, children are more prone to suffer from depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, stress, and, of course, obesity.Part of this theory is based upon the concept of biophilia–a belief that we are all still hunters and gathers at heart and are therefore still very strongly connected to nature. As a result, “there is something in us that needs natural forms, that needs association with nature in ways that we don’t fully understand.”

Although Louv is not a doctor, he sites a substantial body of research supporting links between positive immersion in nature and a child’s increased cognitive development.

He takes the argument a step further by blaming decreased nature exposure on worried parents who no longer allow their kids to run loose. Playtime is not only structured and supervised these days, but playgrounds and parks have been completely bled of any natural elements for fear of lawsuits, thus creating an artificial environment that might be outdoors, but it sure isn’t natural.

It will be a long time, if ever, we see Nature-Deficit Disorder appear in the pages of the DSM, psychology’s A-Z of psychiatric diagnoses. I doubt that such a condition will ever be proven conclusively, and yet exposing children to the great outdoors just feels right to me, like it’s the natural thing to do.

Walking the length of the Alps with the Via Alpina Trail

by Neil Woodburn on

One of the world’s greatest hiking trails has finally opened. And if you’re a backpacking glutton, you can take it all the way across the European Alps.

And how far is that you ask?

Well, if you start in Monaco, work your way up to Chaminox, and then cross over into Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and then finally, down to Slovenia, you would have covered 3,100 miles.

Via Alpina officially opened in 2005 after many years of effort to link together the numerous trails crisscrossing Europe’s most fantastic mountain range. This would never have been possible prior to the formation of the EU since the trans-Alp trail crosses borders so often. The section known as the Red Trail, for example, crosses back and forth 44 times–backpackers would have filled up an entire passport with stamps just hiking the trail 20 years ago.

But now, all one needs is a warm sleeping bag, some gorp and donkey-like endurance to travel the same distance. The best thing about stitching all these trails together, however, is that the Alps are extraordinarily user-friendly thanks to a series of huts where backpackers can spend the night during their journey. In addition, large swaths of trail pass through villages and resort areas where trail blazers can stop for a beer and schnitzel instead of eating dehydrated food for 44 days straight.

If you’re considering such an adventure yourself, check out the trail’s official site, Via-Alpina.org, where you can download maps, read trail descriptions, and even hook up with hiking partners.