Taking off Travel blog

Happy Thanksgiving from all at Park Ride Fly USA. Here are some great images of this holiday season.

Turkey (image: moonjazz)

Read more »

Could the roads look like this on Thanksgiving Day?

Happy Thanksgiving Week! Have you already started your Thanksgiving holiday? It’s the busiest time of the year for travel, with many people taking vacation well before the day itself and making a full week of it, traveling to visit family and friends. If you’re one of the early birds, perhaps you traveled this past weekend (a report in the Chicago Tribune lists last Friday as the busiest flying day this season) and already relaxing somewhere while you read this.

Others, if the Baltimore Sun report is anything to go by, will be starting their Thanksgiving vacation tomorrow in what the paper’s Michael Dresser calls the holiday’s ‘inexorable transition from a holiday to a holi-week.’ (Sounds good to me! )

Some, though, prefer to wait till the last minute, and travel on the day itself. As we’ve pointed out before, traveling on the holiday date can be a great way to save money on your trip, though I wouldn’t take that for granted this year.

The AAA says Thanksgiving Day will be the day that most people take to the road. The organization is predicting a 4% rise in traveler numbers for the season, with 38.2 million people driving, 3.4 million flying and just under a million traveling by buses and trains. Return travel this coming weekend is also expected to be congested (though you always have the option of flying and booking off airport parking).

It seems that rising travel costs aren’t stopping people from traveling for one of our most cherished national holidays, but the advice from TripAdvisor’s Jamie Counter is that if you’re also thinking of making a Christmas trip then the best deals are probably already gone.  Flying off-peak and from smaller airports might provide some hope. (Image: Osvaldo Gago)

Soultravelers3′s response to my recent post on Memorial Day got me to thinking about something that travelers often experience – celebrating holidays that are important to them while in a country where people don’t even know they exist. Or, even if it’s a common holiday, creating that sense of home that makes the holiday special for you.

Christmas Abroad

Many moons ago, I was spending Christmas in Barcelona, far removed from my usual haunts, with a bunch of people who weren’t going home for the holidays – a couple of Australians, a Canadian girl and me. Rather than stay in France and mope, we’d decided to do something different and head to Spain to experience the holiday there. We bought some small gifts (we were poor students), a couple bottles of wine, some chocolates, a mini Christmas tree and some tinsel to decorate our room.  Before we settled in for the holiday, we walked around the city, which was blanketed in white (my first white Christmas) and absorbed the beauty and the atmosphere. Then we went back and talked about how we celebrated the holiday in our own homes. It didn’t make us less homesick, but it felt good to share. Read more »