There's No Place Like Home: Weekend in Hawaii

So roughly two weeks ago, American Airlines put it's Salt Lake City to Honolulu route on sale for $277 total roundtrip. I have never seen it that cheap to fly between Hawaii and Utah before, so I had to find a time to use that deal to go home and visit my family. It was great timing because my mom's birthday was this past Sunday and I was able to book one of the cheap tickets for that weekend. The best part is that she didn't know I was coming.

I had my older sister pick me up for the airport and stop by Foodland on the way home for some of the best poke (a delicious sort of sushi bowl dish) on the island. We got home and completely surprised my parents! It was the best thing ever! I haven't seen them since last May when I went home for my little sister's high school graduation ceremony. It was nice to just be home and hang out with my family. And since I was home, it was a trip where I didn't have to feel rushed or obligated to do any particular activity or visit with any particular friends.

My little brother, mom, and I

Because I am from Hawaii, a lot of times my friends will ask if they can come home with me. It's sometimes nice to have an excuse to visit some of the more touristy places on Oahu like Pearl Harbor and I'olani Palace, and to hike some of the coolest trails on the island, but sometimes I just want to go home and enjoy just being home. I still stand by the idea that everyone should take advantage of a spare bed or couch a friend may have to offer you in a place you want to visit. Staying with locals is the absolute best way to travel, especially if they are already your friends.

Chilling at the beach near Ko Olina

I was home for just over 48 hours (due to my lack of vacation time), and it turned out to be a really nice family weekend. We went to Ala Moana, sat at the beach near Ko Olina for a while, swam with some turtles, went to church, and ate lots of good food together. I could not have asked for a better weekend!

It was a great trip, and I think a common pattern of my favorite travel memories is that they happen when I have a lot of unstructured time for doing whatever the heck I (or my friends/family) feel like doing. While there is nothing wrong with planning to do specific activities on a trip, especially if there is a particular activity or event you really want to attend, unstructured time allows for more spontaneous adventures to happen. And those often end up as some of the most memorable experiences anyone could ask for. Like how I got to see turtles at the beach near my parents' house for the very first time! :D As much as I travel, it was really good to be home for a couple of days.
#lucklyilivehawaii


Another post on what to do when airlines screw you over (based on this trip) will be coming shortly :)

Adventures at Home: MLK Day at Arches National Park

Since I had Monday off of work and I ended up not going on a big trip this week, I decided that I wanted to do something fun and adventurous for the holiday. While I do like to travel far and wide, I find it just as exciting to explore the neat little treasures closer to home. Plus, winter is a great time to visit a lot of the outdoor sights in Utah if the weather is good, and luckily for us the weather was in the 40s all day on Monday.

Driving to Arches National Park with my little sister and a good friend from grade school was the best way to spend the extra day I had off. Usually most of the famous attractions in Utah are packed with people making parking, hiking, and dealing with tourists difficult at times. Arches can get especially crowded since so many people want to see the iconic Delicate Arch. I mean, it's even on our license plates! It is quite a sight, and I absolutely loved the little mile-long hike to get to it. 

I was surprised at how easy it was to get to the Delicate Arch trailhead. The drive from the entrance to the end of the park was not more than 15 miles making all the trails and viewpoints surprisingly easy to get to. I can't imagine how packed it gets in the summer, even with the scorching desert weather! I am grateful that we did the hike when we did because the weather was not too hot nor was it freezing cold. It was perfect!



Giovanna goofing off on the trail to Delicate Arch

Since winter in Utah comes with highly variable weather, and since it usually snows in January, it was a blessing that there was no ice or snow anywhere along the three hour drive from Provo to Moab. That also meant there were no more than a handful of other people in the park with us. It was really awesome that one of those other people in the park that day also happened to be an old friend from when I was at grad school at BYU! And with gas prices as they are, it took only one tank of gas for my car to make it there and back. 

As if that wasn't enough of an incentive to make the cheap, fun day trip to Arches on Monday, when we got up to the entrance booth, the park ranger informed us that it was one of the annual Free Entrance Days for the National Park Service! We didn't have to pay a dime to enjoy this amazing national treasure! And anyone who knows me knows how much I love FREE things :)

After a leisurely and very affordable day of exploring the park, we went to downtown Moab a few miles from the park entrance and had a nice all-you-can-eat pizza, soup and salad dinner at Zax's restaurant on Main Street, the Monday night special which was perfect after a day of hiking and being outdoors. There was even a smashed penny machine next to the restaurant, making this the most perfect day! (For those of you who don't know, I collect smashed coins when I travel - I will do a post on this later since it has been a great way to find fun places to visit).

All in all, we left Provo around 9am and were home by 10pm. It still amazes me that this was only a few hours from home. I will definitely have to come back and visit Canyonlands National Park next, perhaps on another free entrance day. There are so many amazing places to visit everywhere you go! You should never underestimate the power of a local destination. Travel doesn't have to involve a plane or a train or a long distance to be an adventure! A trip is a trip is a trip, no matter how big or small :) 

 

(Travel) Knowledge is Power

I am not rich. A lot of people assume that I must have a lot of money because I travel so much. In all honesty, the biggest reason that I am able to travel as much as I do is not because I have a large amount of financial resources but because I have a large amount of information resources.

Knowing where to look is essential to finding deals. Understanding what you find in addition to good timing is essential to making those deals work for you.

Travel is one thing that appeals to everyone. It transcends the boundaries of space and time, of culture and class. While travel often seems out of reach to even those with the most amount of resources to help them achieve it, all it takes is a little desire and a little effort to figure out ways to make travel work for your schedule and budget. Knowing how to fit travel into your life is something that everybody wants, but not many people figure it out. It all hinges on the balance of time and money available to you. If you don't get a lot of vacation time, then the best thing may just be to accept that you have to take a shorter trip. But isn't a short trip better than not going at all? That has been my travel philosophy for the last several years, and it has taken me far across the world. Knowing how to fit trips into my schedule has blessed me with a robust travel resume, even if I have mostly spent weekends rather than weeks or months abroad. Travel is a choice. As long as anyone is willing to put in a little time and effort into finding the travel resources that work for them, travel can become easy and affordable.

Hiking to Devil's Bay at the Baths on Virgin Gorda, BVI

There really is an art to being able to consistently stay on top of the good deals and find deals that are actually useful to you. For instance, one day in early 2013, I woke up before 7am and decided to check The Flight Deal before going back to sleep. I found an AMAZING deal on American Airlines from Salt Lake City to St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands for $140 roundtrip, including all taxes and fees. But I never would have purchased that ticket if my friend, Alicia, wasn't already in St. Thomas for an internship and was asking me to come visit her. I jumped on that deal and told all our mutual friends, and an hour later all the tickets went back to $600. We had a tiny window to capitalize on that deal, and so we did. Travel knowledge is nothing without the drive to take action. It helps if you have a short travel wish list written up with specific reasons why you want to go to those places. This helps a lot in deciding whether or not to take advantage of a deal when it comes your way.

It takes a certain amount of diligence and patience when it comes to figuring out what the best websites are and how to understand the information. You really have to take some time to understand how airlines work. A lot of deals come from fare wars where airlines attack certain flight routes at their competitor's hubs and other times deals just arise as a simple promotion. There is no "best" time to buy a plane ticket or find a deal because the factors that affect airline prices fluctuate so much and so often. The only way to find the absolute best deals is to check your travel resources daily, or even multiple times a day, and even then there is no guarantee that those prices will be the best.

Hanging out in the Virgin Islands

When I was in graduate school, I began looking up ways to find cheap travel, and I got into the habit of checking a handful of what I consider to be the most useful travel blogs for general information (like Million Mile Secrets and Mile Value) weekly. Eventually, as I learned more and more from reading, I discovered other resources that provide more detailed information and are tailored specifically to cheap flights rather than cheap travel (like the FlyerTalk Mileage Run Forum and The Flight Deal) daily, which can sometimes take knowing a little travel jargon to figure out. No matter how much I share my travel know-how with my friends, most of them are not on top of checking these sites as diligently as I am, which is why I am more than happy to post any amazing deals I find on Facebook. But without a friend to help nudge you in the direction of a good (and useful) sale, the travel information network can be quite overwhelming. I hope to make a little sense of it here for all of you.

It's Not a Vacation! Reasons to Travel

There are a million reasons to travel! To travel is not always to take a vacation; I rarely view the trips I take as vacations, because generally the underlying purpose of my trips are to visit specific friends or family members or accomplish specific goals, and the adventuring comes along the way.

I've found that the biggest barrier to traveling is only yourself. When confronted with a great deal on a ticket to a place a person has been yearning to visit, they generally still hesitate. With airfare deals, no one ever knows how long they will last, so hesitation often means missing out on the fare. If you know where you want to go, and especially if you know why, my best advice is to be prepared to purchase a ticket financially, mentally, and physically in case a great deal comes up.

When I travel, I always try to find more than one reason to justify visiting a place. It always makes it more worthwhile. Here are a handful of reasons to travel, besides simply to take a break from the real world:

• Visit Friends and Family
• See Historic Sites
• Experience Various Forms of Architecture and Art
• Food! (Need I say more?)
• Attend Concerts
• Attend Sporting Events
• Attend Other Various Events
• Work
• Service/Volunteerism
• Adventure and Outdoor Experiences
• Photography Opportunities
• And Many More!!!

I'll give a brief example of a time I have taken a trip for each of the reasons listed above.

Visit Friends and Family. I started out traveling as a toddler in order to visit my relatives on my mom's side in Thailand and on my dad's side in Ohio. For most of my life, this was the only reason to travel. I have also started visiting my relatives and friends as they have spread out across the world after college. For instance, I visited one of my cousins living in England during the 2012 Olympics and made a huge Europe trip out of it. I have many friends living in various global cities, and as I travel, I only make more friends to come back and visit next time!

Native American Memorial at the Little
Bighorn Battlefield

See Historic Sites. I am a history nerd! I absolutely love being in the same place as some historic person or event. Part of the Power of Place is that it connects you to the past. Whether you travel to view sites, buildings, and monuments dedicated to great military battles (like the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument), meaningful religious sites (like Nauvoo, IL if you're Mormon, or even the Garden of Gethsemane), or remnants of an ancient empire (like in Rome and even Istanbul), history has an undeniable power over our hearts and draws us to special and sacred places.

Visiting the Blue Mosque
in Istanbul

Experience Various Forms of Architecture and Art. As an urban planner, architecture is near and dear to my heart. Experiencing a physical place that represents something significant, like walking through the Sistine Chapel or the Aya Sofia, stirs visceral feelings inside me that looking at a painting usually does not. But people travel all over the world to see magnificent works of art in all forms. Art in all its forms has played such a large role in the evolution and progression of cultures throughout the world, and there is nothing that can replicate the experience of viewing a great work of art in person.

Food! While it may be a little crazy to travel the world just to eat a specific dish or at a specific restaurant, no travel experience is complete without trying the local food! The way food is prepared, cooked, and infused with flavor tells a lot about the history and culture of a people. While I have not decided to visit a place solely for the local cuisine, I have to admit that it is a large deciding factor when I'm trying to pick a place to visit. Food options definitely determine how I plan my days when I travel both at home and abroad. For example, I chose to have a layover in Istanbul last January, and the AMAZING meats and breads that I had there did not disappoint! 

Attend Concerts. Music makes the world go round! When you don't live in a major city where your favorite bands and/or musicians like to perform, you can go to them. In this day and age, there are a plethora of music festivals and concerts to choose from. I have personally made a trip to visit my relatives in Ohio driven by the fact that Muse was having a concert in Cleveland at the same time (before they added Salt Lake City onto the schedule). And I am forever grateful for that opportunity to spend a lot of time with my family.

Running in the Ragnar Wasatch Back

Attend Sporting Events. I have traveled both to watch sports and to participate in them. I have run several half marathons, a Ragnar Relay, and the Disneyworld Marathon across the country, and I have traveled to watch USC play in various football games since I graduated nearly 5 years ago. Attending sporting events brings people together like nothing else can. The atmosphere and spirit of the people at a game of anything is really amazing, although it's not for everyone. But there's something to be said about how patronizing sports has been a part of human culture for thousands of years.

And Other Various Events. Along with the Olympics, there are many other events that draw people from all corners of the globe. People travel far and wide to see Megaevents like the World's Fair and the Olympics, and they also travel to see and participate in local festivals like the Holi Festival of Colors in India (or even in Spanish Fork, UT), La Tomatina in Spain, Songkran in Thailand, or event Oktoberfest in Germany.

Work. When you must travel for work, it's easy to use whatever spare time you have to have a little adventure and explore a little if you choose to do so. Academic and professional conferences have sent me all over the United States, most recently to Savannah, GA to learn about historic preservation. I flew out a few days early and took that time to explore Savannah and Charleston a little bit more. There's nothing like a little traveling to make work fun.

Some of the kids I worked with
on Isla Mujeres

Service/Volunteerism. There are many ways that anyone can travel in order to provide service to others, both domestically and abroad. Personally, I had the chance to visit and do service projects on Isla Mujeres and Isla Contoy in 2009 on an Alternative Spring Break to Mexico through the USC Volunteer Center. It's always a win-win situation because while you are helping others, you also get unique experiences that no ordinary tourist gets to have. Tourists are not allowed to spend the night on Isla Contoy, a National Park and bird sanctuary, so I had the chance to kayak out there with the park rangers and to watch the sun rise and set on that island in the middle of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

In the newspaper for our service projects on Isla Mujeres

Kayaking in Patagonia

Adventure and Outdoor Experiences. Having adventures in the great outdoors is always a great reason to travel! There are so many places to experience the wilderness at varying degrees. Some National Parks offer paved walkways and easy trails to see some of the most awe-inspiring natural features, and sometimes the wilderness is so vast that you need a lot of know-how (or at least a guide) to help you on your way. Both provoke legitimate outdoor adventures. One of the first solo trips I have taken was to visit Torres Del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia last March. I did get a guide for that trip, and it was one of the most amazing travel experiences I have ever had.

Photography Opportunities. While I am not a great photographer, I love to take pictures to document my trips. As I have traveled a lot on my own lately, I have become a master of taking a travel selfie while no one is around to help. A picture says a thousand words and helps you to relive your travel experiences as well. I do have friends who travel a lot to capture amazing photographs (check out @rockinrakozy on Instagram for one of the best examples), and I wish I could do what they do! Photographs not only represent your travels, but they also inspire others to take action in their own lives as well.

My attempt at photography
on the streets of Brussels

And Many More!!! With the intense globalization of society and advances in transportation technology, people are traveling more and more for every possible reason. There are people who travel for medical tourism, cultural and heritage tourism, religious tourism, and many more categories of tourism. There is basically a form of tourism for every niche out there. Tourism and travel is so diverse, and that is one of the reasons that I believe it is such a beautiful thing! It has the power to change people like nothing else in this world.

As I continue with this blog, I will give many more examples of travel and tourism experiences I have had for many different reasons. I also hope to develop my ideas on the Power of Travel in a way that can inspire and resonate with all of you. So for now, just remember that if you really want to travel, be prepared! Having a place in mind and a definitive reason to go will only help you get there.

2015 Travel Goals

It is finally here! My travel blog is at last a reality. This is where I hope to keep you up to date on all my travel experiences, trip planning, and tips in addition to any deals I find and all my thoughts on travel policy issues. To start things off, here are ten travel goals I have for the new year:

1. Visit Dubai. Because I am a city planner, I have studied Dubai throughout my entire planning education. It's history and the progression of its urban development fascinates me, and it has been at the top of my places to see list for a while now. Thanks to the Etihad Airways Mistake Fare on Christmas morning, this dream will become a reality at the end of April.
2. Swim in Jellyfish Lake. Ever since I saw an IMAX movie on Jellyfish Lake at the Polynesian Cultural Center on a field trip when I was 8 or 9 years old, I have longed to swim in the fabled lake for myself. Because of a dear college friend living in Saipan, I will get the chance to finally make the journey to Palau for this once-in-a-lifetime experience this March.
3. Go to the Taj Mahal. While I have never had a strong interest in visiting India, I have wanted to see the Taj Mahal for myself ever since reading about the Mughal Empire in the Royal Diaries book series in grade school. Because of the Etihad mistake fare, I will have my chance to visit in September.
4. See the Northern Lights. I have not been fortunate enough to see the Aurora Borealis in person yet, even though I did visit Iceland last spring. I am hoping to find a way to see them some time this year.
5. Backpack through Europe. While I don't get enough vacation time to truly do a proper backpacking trip, I would like to take a week or so this year to backpack through Croatia (Plitvice Lakes, Dubrovnik, and Zagreb at the very least), Hungary (mostly Budapest), and the Czech Republic (Prague, Cesky Krumlov, and anywhere else I have time to see). This trip will depend on how much vacation time I can save up by early fall.
6. Go on a safari. I have to mention the fact that I got a great deal on tickets from Salt Lake City to Johannesburg, and I am trying to work out a cheap safari in Kruger National Park. It's really difficult to book an experience like this on a budget, so we will see what I end up getting. This trip is coming up in February, and I'll also stop in Cape Town with a possible side trip to Victoria Falls. I'm crossing my fingers that this one works out!
7. Eat a deep dish pizza in Chicago. Chicago is one of the only major U.S. cities that I have not had the pleasure of exploring yet. This city is dear to me because of the Columbian Exposition, the 1893 World's Fair, which is one of the single most important events that has defined our nation's architecture. Chicago brought us the first skyscraper along with the advent of the Ferris Wheel as America's response to the Eiffel Tower. In addition to all this history, Chicago has some wonderful food that I am dying to try. I must find a way to visit!
8. Jump off a cliff in Havasupai. Havasupai is another domestic destination that I am determined to visit this year. Havasu Falls and Mooney Falls look like heaven on earth, and this will definitely be my big outdoorsy trip of the year. Now I just need to convince some friends to drive down with me.
9. Hike to The Wave. I will definitely attempt to hike to The Wave at the Utah-Colorado border this year. As time passes by, this destination is only growing in popularity. With only 20 permits given for this hike per day, I can only hope that I will get one when I drive down to enter the lottery some time in the next several months.
10. Go home to Hawaii. I am originally from Hawaii, and I have never been to Kauai. I try to go home at least once a year, so I'd love the chance to visit Kauai and possibly hike the Kalalau Trail before the end of the year. I also hope to run the Honolulu Marathon in December, but we will see if I can train enough for that.

If anyone has any suggestions on places I should add to this list or things I should do in my travels this year, feel free to add them to the comments! I am so excited for all the adventures 2015 has in store. Happy New Year everyone!