Women on The Move: Safety and the Solo Traveler

by Dia Draper on

I’m all for “Mancations” but as a solo female threading my way through Mexico last year, I enjoyed the freedom of traveling alone. Solo travel is inherently selfish. It is the unadulterated joy of doing what you want to do daily, without concern for a mate’s preferences or schedule.

On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable to want someone to share the joys of a new discovery, the thrill of an adventure gone awry, or simply the comfort of familiar face when you get sick.

One of the main benefits of traveling with friends is that you always have someone to keep an eye on your gear while you make a bathroom/food/ticket run. I follow the common tips for security, but every now and then you have to let your guard down and trust the universe, fellow travelers and kind strangers to keep you and your stuff safe.

There was the night I arrived in Mexico City to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a single, American, female, hailing a cab in one of the most dangerous cities on earth. Though I was nervous, I decided to trust my intuition, and ended up getting a tour of the midnight mariachi bands serenading throughout the city, and treating my cab driver to the best hamburger I had had in months.

And though on occasion bad things happen to good people, and bad people happen to good places, the thrill of solo travel is being free to investigate, participate, navigate and return to tell the tale. We’ve mentioned it before, but its not a bad idea to check out USA Today’s list of best (and worst) destinations for female travelers before you hit the road.

New Backpack?

by Erik Olsen on

This is one of those advances that could have serious repercussions in the outdoor gear industry. A researcher has developed a better backpack, one that promises to make lugging crap into the wilderness a whole lot easier. I mean, how long has it been since you heard of radically new backpacking technology? The whole padded belt thingie, sure. Those elastic pull string locks, yeah, those are cool too.

But this new model, developed by biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, works by shifting the weight of the pack up and down with your body. The backpack is based on a rigid frame pack, like we all know and love/loathe, but rather than being rigidly attached to the frame, the sack carrying the load is suspended from the frame by bungee cords. The pack supposedly remains suspended in place with the bungee cords and stays almost motionless while your body moves around. Of course, it was not devised with you, dear gadling reader, in mind. Not to help pack in more water or your back country skis, but rather for soldiers and emergency workers. You were an afterthought. But, hey, that’s how a lot of our technologies come to be. The Internet?

Anyway, I thought, perhaps it was a bit of a gimmick and did not live up to its promise, but media outlets as prestigious as Science Daily and NPR did pieces on the new pack, so I suppose it’s got some cred. We’ll have to see how long it takes to come up with a viable commercial version you can get at REI.

All-Terrain Segway Hits the Market

by Neil Woodburn on

The much heralded Segway scooter was supposed to turn the travel world on its head.

It didn’t.

This was rather unfortunate for such a cool invention. The “personal transporter” never really caught on with the general public, partly because it just wasn’t very practical. Like nearly everyone who has seen one in operation, I’d love to own the thing myself, but I’m not dropping $5000 for what really amounts to a toy. Other than tooling around for the fun of it, I can’t really see a practical reason for actually owning it.

Segway is hoping to put an end to such line of thinking with their second generation model, the X2 Adventure.

The nerds behind the science have tricked out the old model and converted it into an off-road player with all-terrain wheels.

Wow.

Does this mean we can take it hiking?

According to the Segway website, the X2 “will go practically anywhere in the wild that you want to go, whether it’s along nature trails, over hilly terrain or on the beach.”

Segway also promises that the wide wheel base will ensure “minimal environmental impact” wherever you happen to take it. Hmm… I wonder how park rangers are going to feel about this toy lumbering along their trails and hiking paths? I’m sure they are working on legislation right now to ban it. I can tell you one thing, however, I’m going to be rather pissed if I spend all day backpacking into some back country lake only to be overtaken the last mile by a couple of yahoos tooling by on their Segways.

Fortunately for such circumstances, they can’t go very far or very fast. The X2 can travel only 12.5 mph and has a maximum ranger of 12 miles. And if you run out of juice in the back country, you’re screwed.

Cost: $5,995

Santa Monica Mountains to (Possibly) Allow Camping

by Neil Woodburn on

The closest mountains to my home are great for short hikes, but unfortunately, anyone interested in more than that is not allowed to camp for the night.

The Santa Monica Mountains, which run along Santa Monica, California and up through Malibu, have long banned overnight camping for a variety of reasons. Although the most important is fire danger, the most powerful reason for no camping is due to the celebrities and millionaires who live nearby and don’t want a bunch of commoners increasing traffic and ruining their paradise.

The rich might be losing the battle, however. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has just pushed through a tentative agreement which, if passed, would allow camping in the hills of Corral Canyon and Charmlee Wilderness Park–both of which lay at the far end of Malibu near Ventura County.

If everything goes accordingly, I’ll soon be able to spend the night in Malibu in my own private residence–albeit, a two-person tent.

Potts on America’s Top Ten Travel Spots

by Erik Olsen on

I get very wary of most Top Ten lists of places to travel. It is my unproven suspicion that most of these lists are put together by interns at magazines who browse the web and compile them for their bosses. Most, I would guess, have never actually been to all the places on their Top Ten lists.

But if there’s a writer I do trust out there to come up with a viable to ten list, it would be Rolf Potts. Potts now writes an excellent travel column for Yahoo, which I try to read as often as I can. But usually he writes about more international-based stuff. But today he’s got a piece on, yes, the top ten places to travel in America. And what I like about the list is that it’s eclectic. No Disneyland. No Hollywood and Vine. These are lesser-known, off beat spots where you can savor the flavor of American history and the American outdoors. For example, rather than suggest the old stand-by road trip like Route 66, Rolf suggests driving U.S. Highway 50, Between Maryland and California. And what about Pike National Forest,, Colorado? I’ll bet most folks have never heard of it, but Rolf says it’s where he “learned how to sleep under the stars, build campfires, read topographical maps, and rock climb”. And his favorite is probably my favorite as well. He recommends the epic Olympic National Park, in Washington, which I agree is one of the loveliest places around.

That’s only three of the ten. For the rest, check out the peice.