For those of you who travel extensively, or who are planning to utilize hotels in the future, I have begun a new blog called "Get A Room!" to offer advice and tips for travelers based on my ten years of experience in the hotel industry. You are welcome to visit, and if you have suggestions on topics you'd like for me to address, please feel free to leave a comment. I also have another personal blog at "Ramblings of a Single Dad," where I document my life as a single dad of an adopted teenager.... read more
On a recent trip to dine with NTA Board members at The Clarion Oceanfront Hotel on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I was surprised to find a lobby FULL of Pirates! Sure, those of us looking on sort of guessed that they were actors portraying pirates, but these guys never broke character. Ever. We hung out with them for much of the evening at the hotel's lobby bar. Turns out it was Pirate Week in the Outer Banks. These guys had come down from Virginia to perform at a couple of events slated that night in Kill Devil Hills, and travel all over the place to share their brand of piracy. While the company is called url=http://www.blackbe... read more
THIS was an awesome trip. The flight from Norfolk was long (I was at the airport at 6am for a 7:45am flight). To be more accurate, it took ALL DAY! Sure, it was 8:30pm by the time I got to my hotel at Whistler Village, but you couldn't fool my body, which was tired and hungry and stiff from the nearly three hour bus ride from Vancouver airport to Whistler Village. Other's at the SYTA Convention compared our arrival at the village to giving birth. Once we saw how beautiful this place was, we forgot all about what an exhausting trip we'd taken just to get there. Expect to hear a lot of Australian accents! I was surprised by how many Aussies there were at Whistler. The young lady at the front desk of my hotel, ... read more
One of the things I've enjoyed the most since moving here was going parasailing. My son treated me to this as an early birthday gift, since the parasailing boats don't go out in the fall (my birthday is late October). I'd been telling myself for years that I would go up, but never did. My son saw to it that I went as high as they go. From 1200 feet in the air with a parachute above your head, you can see the boat that's towing you, but you can no longer hear it! At that height, I could clearly see the dividing line between the red tide that had formed, and the more natural blue-green water further out into the ocean. The city of Norfolk is 15 miles away, but was totally visible from that ... read more