Travel

I have spent quite a bit of time on Hilton Head Island over the last eight years or so, ever since our friend moved there with her kids and opened a business back in ’99 or 2000. It’s a pretty beautiful place but one thing I have noticed over the last few years is the amount of growth the area has had. The traffic is horrendous during the summer months. While she lives in Bluffton, only a few miles from the island, it can take more than an hour to get from her house to her work or anywhere else interesting on the island. That whole area north of Savannah has been experiencing tremendous growth over the last few years I guess, which is good for the local economy but it is starting to make vacations seem as crowded as going to Disney World.

Since I enjoy going to coastal areas so much it is a wonder I had forgotten about Amelia Island, in the northeast corner of Florida. It’s only about fifty miles farther for me to drive from west of Atlanta than Hilton Head and it’s also a really nice area. I wasn’t aware until recently that they welcomed tourists as much as they do. Back in the seventies and eighties my mother was responsible for setting up company retreats for her boss and quite often they used Amelia Island. At the time they would fly down to Folkston (where my grandfather’s family is from) in a little plane and then drive the rest of the way to the Island, which is just northeast of Jacksonville. Now you can fly into Jacksonville International Airport and rent a car, or just drive to the island. It’s probably about five and a half hours for me, which isn’t bad at all.

While I will be at work on New Years Eve, there are several things going on down there and it would certainly be a blast to open the new year on Amelia Island. One cool thing that’s going on right now is that several different hotels as well as bed and breakfasts are participating in a lodging special which gives a third night free if you book two nights. Condé Nast readers voted Amelia Island one of the ten best islands in America and they are right. Plenty of restaurants and cool things to do, as well as some really nice golf courses.

Golf really isn’t my thing but checking out old places and taking pictures is. Sometimes I drive the girls (and the wife) crazy with just wanting to tour neighborhoods and walk around. One of the really sad things about historic places like Amelia Island is that over the last 120 years so many areas have lost their charm with the commercialization but Amelia Island escaped that. The Fernandina Beach area has a 50 block historic district with many of the structures dating back to the 19th century, including many old mansions and cottages in the Victorian style.

One thing that lends to it’s charm is the fact that since 1562 Amelia Island has flown under eight different flags, which may be the reason it’s sometimes known as the Isle of Eight Flags

France, Spain, Great Britain, Spain again, the Patriots of Amelia Island, the Green Cross of Florida, Mexico, the Confederate States of America and the United States have all claimed Amelia Island at one time or another.  Wiki has some pretty cool stuff about what is known as the Amelia Island affair,

I would love to go check out Fort Glinch. The fort itself was built prior to the Civil War and the area is now a state park comprising just under 1100 acres. The fishing pier at Fort Glinch goes out 1500 feet into Cumberland Sound. There are a couple of campgrounds and there are also day use areas as well.

With all of the posting I have done recently on Joran van der Sloot I have done a bit of reading and visiting of sites related to the Netherlands as well as Aruba. This sort of combines my love for different places with blogging. I haven’t written about any kind of vacation spots lately so it was about time anyway.

Although they have a pretty decent Europe Hotel Guide I like visiting HotelsByCity.net for the pictures and links to other local sites in addition to blog posts and hotels.

The guide for Amsterdam has some pretty useful information about the city itself, links to cheap Amsterdam hotels as well as links to the cities home page and blog posts. While not on the top of my list of places to visit I wouldn’t mind spending some time in Amsterdam just to check out the canals and architecture.

You can also find information about the weather in Amsterdam as well as other cities and local attractions in the city. Amsterdam is full of Museums and art houses and the night life in the city is one of the bright spots in Europe. In addition to art work there is also the museum of the resistance which I would like to visit one day. It provides information about the holocaust and World War II.

* Sponsored by Mexican Vacation Villas.

A few years back the wife and a friend of her’s took their mothers to Mexico on vacation. They spent about a week in Cancun. I guess it was a bit more than a few years ago since she was a couple of months pregnant with our son. That would have been in 1988 I think. Had to be since he was born in ’89. Anyway, Cancun is located on the ‘Mexican Riviera’, right on the eastern portion of the country on the Caribbean. It’s a pretty beautiful area even if I have only seen it in photographs. The area stretches down the Yucatan peninsula for about 60 miles or so. It’s definitely not Cancun though. Cancun is full of high-rises and with it comes a ‘party attitude’.

The Mayan Riviera as it is known is more serene, with smaller restaurants, shops, and less of an American influence. It’s also much more laid back than Cancun is. When the wife and her mom and friend went I do know they went to Tulum, which is a really nice area, almost hidden away from the hustle and bustle of everything else.

Mexico Vacation Villas has luxury vacation villas about 15 minutes from the Cancun Airport, pretty centrally located right between Cancun and Playa del Carmen and within a short driving distance of just about anything you might want to do, that is if you want to do anything at all aside from hanging out at the beach with a drink, relaxing.

Go check out Mexican Vacation Villas where you can get a list of all the direct flights into the Cancun airport along with information on all of the activities in the area, maps of the golf courses, directions to Wal-Mart of course, recipes and useful phrases (downloadable) for things you might be looking for such as food, bathroom, etc. You will also find contact information from folks that have stayed in the Villas in the past so that you can really get a good idea of what they are like.

I have to sit down this evening an write out a vacation plan for 2008. I have the requests from two of my managers and that should be fun to deal with. Two of their vacation requests overlap each other. I asked one of them yesterday which none was more important to her since they are both going to have to adjust the dates on one each. She has reservations for Disney for the first one so the second one will have to be moved and the other lady is going to have to adjust hers.

Still don’t know when I am going to be taking mine. All six of their vacation dates are right smack in the middle of when I normally take mine, so I am going to have to take mine at some other time. I thought about taking the first one in February. If the wife’s friend in Hilton Head still has not moved by then we may go visit her. That would be pretty cool. She lives in a really nice area of Bluffton, SC. The neighborhood she lives in is huge. There is a pool, and horse stables and some really beautiful luxury homes right around there I enjoy driving around just to look at.

I am still considering taking my ten day vacation at the beginning of June. That would work out very well and if we can ditch the girls for a few days, maybe go down to the keys. It will be the off season and a bit cheaper at that time. I can deal with a bit of heat in order to save some money..

* Sponsored by On The Beach

One of the places I haven’t written about yet is Turkey. I love to take virtual vacations (since I work so darn much that long vacations are out of the picture) and I also love history, which makes countries like Turkey with it’s varied history and vibrant culture so cool to learn about.

Turkey is situated right between the Middle East/Asia and Europe, surrounded on three sides by ocean with 5,000 miles of coastline. It borders eight different countries, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria. That’s a lot of countries considering the massive coastline it has. With so many different cultural influences and the fact that it borders two different continents it’s a pretty unique mixture of traditions.

Although when you read history and think about Troy (some of the walls of Troy are pictured to the left) and the Trojan War you think about Greece and their culture, the Trojan War took place on the Anatolian Peninsula which is also referred to as Asia Minor. The Trojan War is an extremely important event in the history of ancient Greece. If you aren’t familiar with it, according to Greek mythology, the was was waged after Paris of Troy stole Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The Iliad and Odyssey along with a couple of cycles of epic poems describe the latter part of the war as well as Odysseus’ (one of the Achaeans) journey home after the war.

With the huge population (over 70 million) and culture, not to mention the great summertime weather, Turkey holidays have become very popular tourist destinations, particularly for the British. Resorts in places such as Kusadasi are very nice and steeped in the history of the ages. Placed right next to a wonderfully preserved ancient town where the ruins are abundant, it’s a great place to sightsee and when you are done there is always to beach to hang out at.

Another really nice resort location is Bodrum. Bodrum is located in South Western Turkey, right on the coast and is a perfect summer destination. With a pretty thriving nightlife and plenty of daytime activities to keep busy with, it is a vacation destination not to be missed.

I am still busting a gut to go to Hawaii with the wife at some point in the next couple of years. We’ve been all over the southeast and I have seen several other areas of the country but I would love to get some Hawaiian vacation information and start saving for the trip. Up until 2005 we had never been anywhere without the kids. Even during our honeymoon the wife was pregnant with out first child so when we took a weekend and flew down to New Orleans it was great. I would love to be able to go to Kauai and spend at least a week just relaxing and taking in the scenery.

The Federal Government along with the State of Hawaii has been making a huge effort over the last few years to clean up the state after millions of tourists and now it’s even more beautiful than ever. Hawaiian Beach Rentals has some really good prices on Kauai vacation rentals that are almost a steal.

My only issues with going to Hawaii are the fact that I am not very good at flying and I would probably need a sedative before we left just so that I could fly comfortably. As I get older the fear gets worse, so I can either suck it up and deal with flying or spend a couple of extra weeks driving out west and then taking a cruise to the islands, which is not necessarily a bad thing I suppose. The main thing about that is actually getting the time off of work to spend doing something like that. I would most likely have to take an entire year’s worth of vacations all at once in order to do something like that.

The wife made a comment a few days ago about how she would like to go back to Disney World again at some point in the next couple of years. I’m all for that but I think maybe we will do things differently next time. We did have a blast though…

We took this one right outside of the hotel we stayed at in the park.

It was fairly expensive. I think that all in all we dropped around $5k while we were there and could have spent more. A bit more than my budget could afford but it was certainly worth it.

The next time we go I would like to stay longer but in order to do so we either need to rent a motor home or maybe an Orlando rental home for a couple of weeks. It certainly was nice being able to stay right in the park but the savings we would have by doing something else would make it more likely that we could stay longer.

All in all I felt like crap on Sunday morning. Nay..I felt like hammered dogshit as Rob would say. I was really looking forward to getting up, packing up, checking out and going to breakfast with the rest of the bloggers prior to heading back to Atlanta.

What I actually did was lie in a coma as the wife and Michelle packed up the cabin and stayed there until it was time to go. I belted myself into the truck while they checked out and said goodbye to everyone. A few brave souls came over to say goodbye, at east until I decided it was time to exit the truck and go blow chunks by the Chattahoochee. That must have been an interesting site for the mid-morning old people taking their morning constitutional walks. At least the monkey hat was off my head.

Luckily that was the end of the nausea but I did spend the entire day sleeping and whining about how awful I felt. Hell, I am still dehydrated 🙂

No phone calls, no dealing with work. Thank goodness there wasn’t any major emergency at work that required my attention.

I am still pissed off that I felt so crappy on Sunday morning. What a freaking lightweight I have become in my old age…