Toyota’s Farm to Table Tour takes sustainable eating on the road

by Laurel Miller on

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Yeah, right. Toyota just needs damage control. As if feel-good, treehugging road trips make up for all those recalls.” But before you judge, let us separate the issue from the mission.

This is Toyota’s second annual Farm to Table Tour, in which 11 farmers markets nationwide participate with the automotive giant to visit “farmers markets across the country to showcase the connection between farmers, chefs, farmers markets, and the communities they serve, and to give market shoppers the opportunity to experience Toyota’s hybrid vehicles.” On each stop, up to 12 local chefs and farmers pair up to highlight seasonal ingredients through free tastings. Talks on eating locally and sustainably, culinary vacation giveaways, gardening information, and test rides in a 2010 Prius, Highlander Hybrid, or Camry Hybrid are also part of each market collaboration.

Toyota is also making financial donations to the participating markets, as well as to the Farmers Market Coalition. In addition, the company is using eco-friendly materials and purchasing carbon credits through TerraPass to offset the educational tour’s carbon footprint.

Tour stops include Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City. The Washington DC FARMFRESH Market by the White House stop on July 29th features influential chef Nora Pouillon, of Restaurant Nora, the nation’s first certified organic restaurant, which opened in 1999. Regardless of how you may feel about Toyota, the company deserves props for its ongoing commitment to sustainability, and supporting family farms. And that ain’t a bad thing.

Best travel tips from real travelers

by Willy Volk on

Have you checked out Gadling’s 100% reader-generated feature, “100 words or less.” In “100 words or less,” YOU — the expert traveler — get to share your expert travel tips with Gadling and all our readers. Know a sure-fire way to score a cheap hotel room? Confident you know a trick to get an airline upgrade? Share it with us!

We’ve rounded up some of our favorite tips below. Enjoy.

Hotel tips
If you often leave personal items in hotel rooms, remind yourself by writing it down — but write it on a mirror with a dry erase marker instead of on a piece of paper you could easily overlook.

Today’s tech-savvy world requires a lot of equipment to stay “plugged-in.” Cell phones, laptops, and MP3 players all require power cords to recharge. Since these items don’t need to be plugged in all the time, it’s easy to forget your power cords when checking out of a hotel. Increase your chances of recovery by writing your name and contact information on a piece of masking tape and securing the tape to your power cord.

If you’re concerned about the cleanliness of your pillow, the inside of your shirt is probably cleaner (or at least more acceptable) to lie on than a suspect pillowcase. Simply turn the shirt inside-out, slide it over your pillow, and you’re good to go… to sleep.

Sleep better with these other hotel tips.


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Cruise trip tips

Packing a dry erase board and markers and attaching to your cabin door accomplishes several things, including helping you to identify your room and providing an easy way for your family to communicate their whereabouts.
Take an insulated travel mug on your next cruise and it may become your favorite accessory.

If you’re cruising as part of a big group of family and friends, it’s a lot of fun to divide into teams for a scavenger hunt. Items for the hunt can be dares, found objects, and fact-finding missions.

Get a key chain necklace and put your room key on it. Wear this around your neck at all times to avoid losing it or having it stolen.

Whenever we go on a cruise, my husband and I always plan to snorkel on at least one island. On our first cruise, we went on a shore excursion that provided the snorkel, but then we got smart.

Most cruise ships today are multi-deck mini-cities carrying as many as 5,000 passengers. And, unless you’re traveling alone, you may find yourself separated from your traveling party at some point during your cruise. How to stay connected? Give each member of your group a two-way radio, all programmed to the same frequency to help keep you organized and in touch.

Visit our other cruise trip tips.


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Road trip tips

To keep maps and directions safe during a trip, laminate them. For around $30, a home laminating machine will seal standard letter size pages. (Copy and print stores have the capability to laminate larger maps for a minimal fee.) Alternatively, you can use contact paper to cover paper maps. In addition to being more durable, laminated maps offer the advantage of allowing you to draw your route on the map and easily wipe it off later, if you change your mind.

To avoid hours of boredom, plan a “scenic scavenger hunt.” It’s easy. Just write down a list of 100 things you might see along the way, like landmarks, buses or bridges. The first person to complete the list wins.

Before embarking on a road trip, map out two different routes — a slower, scenic route and a shorter, faster (less scenic) route.

Motor through more road trip tips.

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Dining out on vacation tips
When traveling to a foreign city, you can usually find the cheapest and best-tasting food by looking for menus that are written entirely in that city’s native language.

You’ve spent so much money on just getting to Hawaii or Florida, why pay more to sit inside a restaurant? Weather permitting, you should be outside on the grass! Or on the sand. Or at a picnic table.

Before you go out of the country, make a few wallet-sized cards that list what you can and can’t eat in the native language(s) of the country you’re visiting.

Devour more dining out on vacation tips.


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Souvenir tips
T-shirts have always been my favorite travel souvenir. Many of them were sized for an eight year old and most were dreadfully stained, but I could hardly get rid of them. They were my mementos! Instead of tossing them, I cut out all the images and logos and made a travel quilt.

A great take-home and space-saving souvenir for wine lovers are corks from bottles you’ve enjoyed while traveling.

When you find yourself not knowing exactly where you’re going, ask a local to draw directions for you. Keep a store of interesting napkins or papers and a pen on hand to take advantage of the opportunity of being lost. Asking for directions might also lead you to start some great conversations and to gain a deeper insight into the locale you’re visiting.

Save some of these souvenir tips for later.

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Airplane tips
During your next flight, be considerate of the passenger in front of you. When settling down into — or, getting out of — your seat, don’t grab the seat in front of you for leverage.

Sick of hearing about a stranger’s dysfunctional family or odd medical conditions? Avoid conversations all-together by doing a simple thing: wear headphones. They don’t even need to be plugged in.

Your seats are reserved. There’s no circulating air until the plane takes off, and even if you’re the first person on the plane, you’re going to be hot, you’re going to have to move, and you’re going to get elbowed — and maybe get luggage dropped on you. Also, if you’re not the first person to board, you’re going to spend 20 minutes slowly creeping down the crowded walkway. So… stay out in the relative open space of the terminal waiting area until the gate agents make the final boarding call.

Take off with these other airplane tips.

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Traveling with kids tips
Buy at least one disposable camera for each child on the trip. These are inexpensive and will keep your child entertained for a long time. Tell each child that they should take pictures of things on the trip that they find interesting.

The front passenger is always the navigator when I’m traveling with my family or a group. However, I discovered that you can turn your children into junior navigators while helping them learn geography at the same time. It helps eliminate them from asking, “Are we there yet?”

Rather than lug boxes of baby necessities around, consider ordering supplies online — diapers, food, etc. — and shipping them to your destination. You’ll have more room in your car; there’ll be less to pack and unpack; and your neck won’t be so sore from hauling boxes in and out of the house.

Grow up with these other traveling with kids tips.

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Packing for travel tips
Contact lens cases with screw-on lids make great travel accessories. When you want to take small quantities of hair gel, sculpting wax, eye make-up remover, an essential oil, Aloe Vera, or under-eye cream, you can’t beat contact lens cases. They’re small. They don’t leak. They can hold one week’s worth of lotion or gel in each little section.

When traveling over the holidays with gifts, never pre-wrap! Wrapped items may need to be inspected by the TSA, and that could mean they’ll be unwrapped by security before you even get to your destination.

Here’s a way to pack your smallest, but most expensive, items without losing them or space in your suitcase: find a typical pill box and place your precious metals in there. Anything from rings to necklaces will fit.

Store these additional packing tips.

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International travel tips
Guidebooks are all well and good, but they rarely take you off the beaten path. Before arriving in an unfamiliar place, pick an unusual food to track down in your destination; it’s even better if you can find the same food in multiple countries.

Always carry a small calculator when you travel internationally. It will save the day when you are trying to figure out how much things cost in “real” money.

When traveling abroad, get at least a small amount of foreign currency for tips and other unexpected cash expenses before leaving the airport or crossing the border.

Explore the unknown with these other international travel tips.

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To submit your own tips, sign up for a free account at Seed, filter the assignment list by the category “travel” and look for assignment requests with the words “100 words or less.” (And yes: if your tip is published, you will be paid!)

[Photos: Flickr | Fly for Fun; StrudelMonkey; StrudelMonkey]

Pico Iyer: The trip that changed my life

by Pico Iyer on

Bangkok these days seems about as alien and exotic as its sister City of Angels across the ocean. Hollywood cop films are shot there, New York bars open their second branches on its back-streets and for many a kid just out of college in Seattle, the Khao San Road is as natural a first stop as once the Left Bank was, or North Beach. But in 1983, Thailand still seemed the far side of the universe. And to a boy of 26 who was spending his life in a little room in Rockefeller Center in New York, writing about places he’d never seen, it was an instant initiation into mystery and night-time and the limits of all the things he was so sure he knew.

Men came up to me outside the airport — and it was a dumpy airport then, worthy of an almost forgotten country — brandishing pictures of women in bikinis and rooms whose beds seemed to move like the heavens (now those pictures would be much more graphic — and available to a certain kind of visitor before he’d left home, on the Net). There was a smell of jasmine — of spices and gasoline and all of them mixed together — as I headed off in the dusk and clambered into a minivan for the long, long ride into the city. I’d never really set foot in a five-star hotel before when I deposited my luggage with a towering Sikh doorman at the Oriental Hotel and set off into the dark.

The neon was flashing evilly, and irresistibly then. A young woman was stringing her thin arms around me and cooing things in the universal language of desire (for what I represented, if not for me). A Filipino man in the basement of a four-star hotel was singing Grateful Dead ditties on request. No one had heard of Patpong then, or told me that the most alluring women in the street were men.The sound all night — I couldn’t sleep — of slamming doors and soft feet pattering down the (no-star) corridors. Calls at 1 a.m. from strangers with their coos again, sure that I was the only man for them. The tang of mint in every dish, and tall, cool glasses of watermelon juice that I couldn’t have described the day (the life) before in midtown Manhattan.

A Canadian took me under his wing, a wise old hand at 23, and already well on his way to becoming a part of the nether world that was the real world in the Bangkok night, ready to claim every unmoored newcomer. A train was about to set off for the cool spaces of the north. At night, when the tuk-tuk drivers revved up along the jampacked lanes, the smell of diesel and perfume intermingled, I found myself in alleyways where old-style neon blinked and relayed the promises of Suzy Wong.

It wasn’t Thailand, of course, that was beckoning me, but all the force of the things I couldn’t make out. Night was day and late September was summer and men were women who became men again at dawn. The characters around me on the signs (the streets) were strange, and the language so tonal I couldn’t tell a player from a prayer. There were mirrors everywhere, in bars, hotels and what they gave me back to me was a figure I couldn’t recognize. I hadn’t realized ’til that day that you travel to stumble into the unvisited corners of yourself.

I hadn’t realized ’til that day that you travel to stumble into the unvisited corners of yourself.

In Chiang Mai, two days later, I was walking — puffing, really — up a hill, through a landscape from the Vietnam I’d seen only on telecasts, and sitting in a circle in a village, opium in the air. The villagers were dancing, by the light of a candle, and I couldn’t tell if it was the dog they had just eaten or the drugs. Displacement in time had become displacement in space: nights in a hut, a German’s pupils all red, and then dawn with the sound of a rooster, and the preparations of a village anywhere nearby.

The next thing I knew I was in Burma — the rickety grandfather of the England I’d grown up in (a colonial son, of course, becomes master of the house as soon as his father moves on), sailing on Inle Lake, among opium warlords and guerrillas, wandering, dazed, among the 3000 temples of Pagan. A few days later I was in Hong Kong, on expenses (I hadn’t known the meaning of the word in grad school the year before), being entertained at a banquet by the Chinese billionaire who’d built Macao. The next day I was in Narita Airport near Tokyo, waiting for a plane back, and, stumbling into a temple in the little town near the terminal, coming upon an October scene — bright blue skies and a chill of autumn in the air — that told me that I should return to Japan, as I did, for life, it seems.

I’d traveled around India as a teenager, witnessing with a foreigner’s bewilderment a country that was meant to be, and clearly was not, my own. I’d spent two summers traipsing around Europe writing Let’s Go guidebooks, convinced that I was a doctoral student in foreignness and movement. I liked to think myself a man of the world in those days, the prerogative of innocence being that it cannot see to the limits of its knowledge. When young, we know we know it all, and never imagine that the stock of knowledge will only diminish, trickle out, as the years go on.

But Thailand, and all that followed, silenced me. I sat in a colleague’s house in an October downpour, the torrential rains turning the little soi into a running river (people rolling their trousers up to their knees to get across), and tapped out an article on, of all things, Vita Sackville-West, the sometime lover of Virginia Woolf. I’d taken the artifacts of Bloomsbury into the hills with me, and read them among the animists and the opium. Perhaps I was trying to hang onto the life I knew, measuring out the fluent cadences of Sissinghurst here in the wilderness off Sukhumvit.

A bowing secretary came into the room with a pot of tea (my colleague was in Vietnam). The garden in front of me was turning into a misty, tumultuous scene worthy of Maugham. The house my colleague lived in, the life he’d made for himself (a veteran of the war) was more spacious and extravagant than anything his or my bosses could contemplate in Westchester.

What you don’t know, will never know, will always be more involving than what you can explain: it is the fundamental principle of love and of religion.

I came back, after a fashion, from that trip, but it derailed me for good, and showed me the lure of the dark that lay outside the boxed room in which I wrote. What you don’t know, will never know, will always be more involving than what you can explain: it is the fundamental principle of love and of religion. And love and religion were some of what I thought about as I sat in the Time-Life library, paging through any report I could find of Burma, of Thailand, of Laos even, and Cambodia, where I’d never been. In the midst of the traffic outside my eleventh-floor apartment came the sound of something else, more haunting and fragile: a pipe across the fields, a new day in a very ancient place.

Romantic it sounds now, in the recollection. But it wasn’t a romance, because I went back to check on it six months later, and then returned again five months after that, and then took a six-month leave of absence to get thoroughly lost in Asia. I should have known, as I disappeared into Eighth Street, in search of Thai food, the pictures of the pagodas and jungles I’d seen enlarged and set on my office wall, that this was not mere flirtation. I hadn’t come back at all, and never would. The trips that change our lives are the ones where nothing specific happens, and one can remember, 27 years later, every day from September 23rd to October 23rd, 1983.

Pico Iyer has visited Thailand more than 40 times since his initial trip, but something of the mystery is still there for him. His most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

[Photos: Flickr | Elisa*; Travlinman43; Irene2005]

World’s most eco-friendly beaches to visit now

by Laurel Miller on

If your idea of heaven isn’t a beach packed with crisping bodies, balls of crude, or the lingering whiff of raw sewage, don’t worry. CNN has provided a list sandy idylls that retain their purity, even though a few, like Oahu’s Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, are major tourist attractions, or located in tourism hotspots. Not surprisingly, most of these places are located on preserves or otherwise protected land, or are so isolated, they’re spared the excesses of humanity.

Other top picks include Whitehaven Beach in Australia’s Whitsunday Islands, Koh Libong in Trang Province, Thailand, and Oregon’s Oswald West State Park, as well as locations in South and Central America, and Europe. Best of all, there’s something for almost everyone on this list, as accomodations range from off-site luxury, to nearby camping and mid-range beach bungalows and guest houses (due to remote location, prices are somewhat jacked up). Small price to pay for a slice of paradise.

[Via Mother Nature Network]

New travel guide spoofs, “Where not to go before you die.”

by Laurel Miller on

Prolific travel writer Catherine Price is over the whole “bucket list” trend. Annoyed that a crappy movie spawned an obnoxious national book craze of all the things one must see, do, and visit before they kick it, Price decided to strike back. Her new release, 101 Things Not to See Before You Die is a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek compendium based on Price’s own travel experiences.

Some of Price’s picks include The Beijing Tap Water Museum, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, rush hour on a Samoan bus, and Nevada. But the 31-year-old New Yorker is far from being a jaded crank. In a recent CNN interview, she explained, “People shouldn’t take it too seriously– it wasn’t my intention to say all of these places are actually horrible. Some of them are pretty interesting. (The motivation…) was just to liberate people from the feeling there are all these things they have to do. I’m guilty of this myself, but if you’re just going through things checking off lists then you’re not really experiencing them. You’re just doing it like an assignment.”