Budget Travel Zen: 10 Free/Donation-Based Yoga Studios In The US

by Jessica Marati on

Knotted shoulders… stiff necks… flight delay anxiety… pent-up aggression toward the armrest-hogger seated next to you on the plane. Travel certainly has its ways of winding you up, and there’s nothing like a great yoga class to wind back down. But with trendy studios charging upwards of $25 per class, it can be difficult to find a practice that doesn’t exceed your daily travel budget. These ten free or donation-based yoga studios allow you to pay what you can, and many of them come with a welcoming community that can help you stay grounded throughout your trip.

Asheville Community Yoga, Asheville, North Carolina
Based on the concept of Karma Yoga, Asheville Community Yoga is a non-profit organization offering a wide variety of free classes, including vinyasa, ashtanga, hatha, yin, restorative, core and various kinds of flow. The center also offers special workshops like “Spring Detox Hot Flow” and “Yoga for Healthy Knees.” Though classes are free for those who truly can’t afford to pay, a “Love Offering” of $5-15 per class is requested. 8 Brookdale Rd. Ste. A, Asheville.

Yoga to the People, New York, New York; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco and Berkeley, California
With nine studios in four cities, Yoga to the People believes that the transformative power of yoga should be available to everyone. Studios offer a mix of power vinyasa flow, traditional hot yoga and hot vinyasa classes. Suggested donation is $10 for vinyasa classes, while hot yoga is available for a flat fee of $8. Click here for locations.Moonlit Yoga, Portland, Oregon
There’s no better way to spend a Saturday evening than with yoga, tea and candlelight. The weekly Moonlit Yoga series, hosted at various studios throughout Portland, is open to yogis of all levels, with a sliding scale donation suggestion of $6-10. Check Facebook for each week’s location.

Black Swan Yoga, Austin, Texas
Black Swan offers a smorgasbord of hatha, vinyasa, power, sweaty and intriguing “candle sweaty” classes at their two studios in Downtown and South Side. Suggested donation is $10-15. 1114 West 5th St. and 4534 Westgate Blvd., Austin.

One Yoga Foundation, Miami, Florida
Enjoy your practice in a park under the sun through the One Yoga Foundation, which offers free outdoor classes in green spaces around Miami and its surroundings. Donations support the organization’s efforts to bring yoga to special needs communities. Click here for locations.

Circle Yoga, Washington, DC
The Circle Yoga Cooperative offers a range of free community classes, meditation sessions and workshops with donations benefiting the teacher’s charity of choice. Their sister studio, Budding Yogis, also offers classes for children and families. 3838 Northampton St. NW, Washington, DC.

Urban Flow Yoga, San Francisco, California
Urban Flow Yoga in the Mission District provides donation-based yoga classes by Bhakti Flow certified instructors as well as community outreach programs. Recommended donation is $10-20. 1543 Mission Street, San Francisco.

Studio 34, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
In addition to its regular and reduced rate community classes, Studio 34 offers a handful of “Pay What You Can” yoga classes incorporating the Forrest method, which emphasizes breath, active sequences and longer holding of poses. 4522 Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia.

Health Yoga Life, Boston, Massachusetts
The yogis at Health Yoga Life encourage participants to “Occupy Yourself” with their accessible, open-level, donation-based vinyasa flow community classes. Drop-ins welcome. 12 Temple St., Boston.

Lululemon Athletica In-Store Classes, Nationwide
If you can deal with being surrounded by pricy merchandise during your practice, you can take advantage of yoga superstore Lululemon’s rotating schedule of free yoga classes from local instructors. Select locations also offer programs like run clubs and motivation seminars. Click here to find your nearest location.

[Flickr image via lululemon athletica]

National Portrait Gallery Opens Two Civil War Exhibits

by Sean McLachlan on


The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is commemorating the Civil War with two new exhibits.

“The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck” looks at the work of a rebel dentist who became one of the Confederacy’s leading political cartoonists. Unlike most German immigrants, who sided with the Union, Volck was an active rebel who not only fought the Union with his pen, but also smuggled much-needed medical supplies to the South. The exhibit runs until January 21, 2013.

More famous is photographer Mathew Brady, whose portable photographic studio is shown above. “Mathew Brady’s Photographs of Union Generals” make up the second exhibition. Numerous high-quality images of the Union’s leading and lesser-known generals will be on display. The exhibit runs until May 31, 2015.

The exhibitions are part of a continuing series at the National Portrait Gallery marking the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

D.C.’s Cherry Blossoms turn 100

by Dave Seminara on

Washington, D.C. is a city of posers. Especially during the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival when camera-toting tourists and locals descend like locusts to D.C.’s Tidal Basin to bask in the ethereal beauty of these Japanese trees in bloom. 100 years ago Monday, 3,020 cherry blossom trees arrived in Washington as a gift from Japan, largely thanks to the efforts of a journalist and traveler named Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, who was also the first female member of the National Geographic Society.

Aside from an incident in 1941 when four of the trees were chopped down in retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it’s been a century-long love affair ever since. If you visit the Tidal Basin on a warm sunny day, as I did on Thursday, good luck trying to find a place to stand, let alone somewhere to park. Everywhere you walk, you’re intruding on someone’s photo opportunity.

According to the April 2012 issue of National Geographic, Americans took 80 billion digital photos in 2011. By my own calculation, approximately 43 billion of those were taken at the Cherry Blossom Festival. If you think the commuter trains in Mumbai are snug at rush hour, you haven’t tried to see the cherry blossoms in bloom on a sunny day.

Every year, I vow that next year I’ll go see the cherry blossoms on a rainy day, in the middle of the night or, even better, during a lightning storm to avoid the crowds, but somehow that never happens. Still, there’s a magnetic pull that keeps me coming back. When the trees are in bloom, you’ve got to go take a look. It’s kind of like a nude beach — you know it’s just going to be fat guys from Dusseldorf, but you need to see it for yourself.

The Japanese have a special bond to the trees, which they call sakura. The Canadian writer Will Ferguson once hitchhiked through the length of the country, south to north, following the trail of the sakuras blooming and his book, “Hokkaido Highway Blues,” is a hilarious account of his attempt to penetrate the soul of the country.

%Gallery-151319%For me, the best part of the festival is watching people pose for their cherry blossom glamour shots. You see women trying to look seductive, stoic Asian men who pose solemnly, as though they were being booked into a state penitentiary, guys in suits holding their tablets awkwardly to frame photos, and me, taking about 300 photos of my sons for no good reason. Imagine how much that would’ve cost in 1912.

Photos by Dave Seminara

Find hotel deals with new booking site Guestmob

by Meg Nesterov on

The Internet has brought us many ways to research and book hotels at prices much lower than the hotels’ published rate. Aggregate sites like Kayak and Orbitz give you the best available rate (BAR) without pre-payment on a specific hotel, while “opaque” sites like Priceline and Hotwire allow you to bid for a room below BAR but the actual property remains hidden until after you book and the purchase is non-refundable. Now a new booking site offers you hotel deals well below BAR while ensuring consumers flexibility and a standard of quality.

Guestmob differs from other hotel booking sites by combining high-tech algorithmic pricing and expertly curated properties hand-picked for their high user ratings. The site works by grouping hotels into collections of four to eight properties in a given category and neighborhood. You enter your travel dates and can immediately see a room rate of up to 50% below BAR for each hotel collection. The Thursday before you check in, the exact hotel is revealed but you are guaranteed one of the specific hotels in the collection. Best of all, unlike other opaque booking sites, you can cancel your reservation up to three days before check-in.Previously, some savvy travelers have tried to “game the system” with sites like Bidding for Travel, a forum that tries to guess winning bids and participating hotels on opaque sites by sharing successful bookings. Guestmob removes the need for this research by specifying hotels in each collection and immediately offering a deeply discounted price. While room upgrades, frequent guest points and other requests are still at the discretion of the hotel upon check-in, it’s still a great option for travelers with flexibility.

A Guestmob search for a hotel in Chicago on a weekend in mid-May yielded a price of $164 for a 3.5 star hotel on Magnificent Mile (such as a Courtyard or Embassy Suites), or $203 to bump up to a 4 star in the same area such as a W or Westin Hotel. The same properties ranged from $221 to $279 on other sites. Most Guestmob hotels are part of well-known chains such as Marriott or Starwood, or smaller chains like Kimpton and JDV.

Guestmob soft-launched last year in San Francisco and has now expanded to include New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Portland and Phoenix. The site is well connected to social media so you can get help, learn news or give feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can also chat with them right on the site if you have questions.

Photo of the Day: Moody Dupont Circle

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Dupont Circle has never looked quite so moody as it does here, in Flickr user Guillermo Esteves‘ beautiful interpretation of the DC social hub. The black and white starkness of the image contributes to this impression, though it’s really the clouds and the bare trees that nail the late winter atmospherics of this corner of DC.

Upload your best photos to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We choose our favorite images from the pool to be Photos of the Day.