Taking off Travel blog

What are your favourite travel food memories? You know the ones I mean. Sometimes you have a gastronomic experience that is so great that you can still almost taste it 10 or 20 years later. Sometimes it’s not about the food but about the context while at other times it is very much about the food. Here are some of my best loved food travel experiences.

Iced Tea, Venezuela

It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia. Read more »

Today I wanted to share with you some of the new places where Park Ride Fly USA will be hanging out online from now on. They’re not really that new but we are new to using them, at least in this incarnation. You already know how to find us on Twitter (big shout out to all our followers) which is where we’re most active at the moment.

But if you prefer to spend your online time on other sites there are a few new places where you can also connect with us. (By the way, I’m not using the ‘royal we’ — other people from the company may make an input from time to time.) On most sites you can find us as either Sharon at PRF (that’s me), parkrideflyusa or parkridefly.

One new place where we are happy to be is on Facebook where we have a brand new page. On our Park Ride Fly USA Facebook page we are sharing a few of the articles, posts and resources we find useful. I am happy to say that it’s not just going to be a rehash of our Twitter stream — our Facebook page will include items that we don’t share anywhere else. And once we’ve built up a community we hope to use that page to have more in-depth discussions about travel related issues.

Read more »

Something a bit different this week - some more inspirational travel quotes. Hope you enjoy them, and feel free to share yours in the comments.

1. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. - Maya Angelou
2. We must travel in the direction of our fear. - John Berryman
3. It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end. - Ursula Le Guin
4. The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  – St. Augustine
5. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
6. To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. - Richard Bach
7. The only journey is the one within. - Rainer Maria Rilke
8. You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. - Rabindranath Tagore
9. Shoot for the moon and if you miss you will still be among the stars. - Les Brown
10. Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia. - Peanuts Read more »
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It’s been a busy month for us here on Park Ride Fly USA. We’ve been getting more active on sites like Facebook and Friendfeed and we’ve begun stumbling our favourite sites on StumbleUpon. That means that we for even more great posts for this edition of  our occasional Traveling The Blogosphere blog carnival (last edition here). Read on and enjoy!

Volunteering and Seeing the World on the Sharing Travel Experiences blog. Lillie talks about an extended trip around the world featuring learning, laughter, liberty and love. She says:

Travel is about love of humanity, love of one’s inner self, and (for a solo gal like me) an underlying quest for what future long-term love could and should look like.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading.

It’s OK To Hate Some Places on the Fox Nomad blog explodes the myth that you have to love everywhere you travel to. As Anil points out:

You’ll end up finding that the things you don’t like say more about you than anything else. Whether its the cleanliness, people, or food you can’t stand it’s all about you.

This post really struck a chord with many people as there are around 30 comments. Read more »

I’ve never been mugged on vacation. That doesn’t mean that everywhere I’ve travelled to has been a walk in the park. Caracas is no picnic but I managed to spend a month in the city without getting into serious difficulty (unless you count the scary night I’ve already told you about). Staying out of trouble is often a matter of common sense. Here are some travel safety tips that will make your vacation more enjoyable.

Safety At Home

First of all, give yourself less to think about taking care of safety and security at home. Get someone you trust to look after your house keys and emergency information and to swing by your home every so often to make sure that everything is okay. Put delivery of mail and publications on hold and use timers to program your lights, TV and radio to give the illusion that your home is occupied. Let your neighbors know that you will be gone so that if they see someone in your home who shouldn’t be there they will alert the police. Read more »