What Your Luggage Tells Others About YouWritten by Flor Bonifacio
Airports are fascinating places. In midst of all rush is enforced waiting. Waiting that people make use of in all sorts of ways. One of things that I enjoy most doing is looking at people’s luggage and imagining what they do for a living, where they’ve been, where they’re going to and what they might be like if I knew them.There are two fertile points where I do my luggage musings. The first one is on departure as I queue up to check in my luggage with rest of throng. The other is upon arrival as I wait for my belongings in luggage carousel. There are easy to decipher luggages. One of them is standard airline sized black luggage with wheels and retractable handles that most corporate executives –ever efficient time managers - carry. Most of these time saver luggages do not end up in carousels nor are they checked in, as they now fall into hand-carry luggage that can be wheeled (just) along jumbo jet’s tiny middle aisle, stored in overhead lockers (again just), and whisked out of plane and airport for next boardroom meeting halfway around globe, Another easy to figure out luggage is humongous backpack carried by globe-trotting young person out to experience world on a tight budget. Their backpacks are normally double their size and weight and in them I would imagine would be blankets not usually provided in cheap backpacker hostels and pots and pans that might come in handy when they run out of money and need to camp out for night. A hard one for me is hard case Samsonite luggage and person that comes with it. They seem to fall into all sorts of categories. They could be rich widows who are going to Europe to while away their time and need a few Samsonite hard case luggages with combination locks to secure their diamonds and pearls.
| | Last Minute National Park VacationsWritten by Gregg Strand
Vacationing at national parks is probably most exciting and adventurous travel any family will enjoy in their lifetimes. There's just so much to see and do. However, planning a national park visit also requires more planning than a "normal" vacation. Why?As you can imagine, our national parks, and those of Canada and most nations, are treasured and protected wilderness. The pristine vistas and natural wonders are part of any country's national heritage and should be preserved in their natural state as much as possible. We can all appreciate this but it makes visiting parks a little more challenging. Some hotels and lodging are available inside most parks but number of in-park accomodations is limited, as they should be. Can you imagine result of building more and more lodging facilities to accomodate literally millions of visitors that travel to most popular parks? Soon wilderness would be lost in a sea of various types of dwellings. So, new lodging facilities are being built near park property, not within it. But there is still a problem if you want to visit a park at last minute. Unfortunately, even with expansion of nearby lodging, demand is so great that it can be very difficult to find last minute lodging for national parks. There are usually available rooms but problem is finding them. If you go to a general search engine and enter a search for lodging options at any popular national park, problem is not that you won't find any sites, but just opposite.
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