Monthly Archives: November 2012

Where o’where shall we lay our heads down?

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We love to travel and deciding where we stay depends on how long we have and how we are traveling. If we are going on a road trip, we tend to fly by the seat of our pants and find a place as we get close to stopping for the day. When we have a limited time for our holiday and are staying more than one day at a destination, I put a lot more time into finding a comfortable and affordable place to rest our heads.

When choosing lodgings we have a couple of items that we need:                               1. Clean and comfortable beds. Since we are traveling with two adults and one child, at a minimum we need either two full/queen beds or a full/queen and sleeper couch.

  1. Access to a refrigerator, at the very least, if not a kitchenette. No matter where we travel, we always like to have a refrigerator available for our snacks and drinks. Sometimes, we like to make some of our meals as well.

  2. Good location to where we are visiting, access to transportation, and free parking.

  3. Affordable

As, I have mentioned we love to travel and in order to continue traveling we must continue to live within our means. Not a very easy task nowadays; however, because of access to the internet, budget travel continues to be possible.

My first line of attack is the local chamber of commerce; some towns have a very comprehensive site, so there is no need to go further, for example, the one for Sanibel Island. However, for some towns, you must look deeper. Since we tend to explore new areas, we depend on reviews from fellow travelers to help us make up our mind.  There are several websites that I cross-reference: Tripadvisor, Hotel.com, bedandbreakfast.com, and, an old favorite, Travelocity. Recently I heard that some reviews on Tripadvisor were planted by the establishment’s owners/employees; I have found that they generally validate other reviews but it is good to keep that in mind. In the same commentary, they mentioned that reviews on Expedia could only be done by people that have purchased the lodgings through Expedia – good to know.

Recently, I have learned about Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list their accommodations around the world. They list rooms, apartments, homes, villas, and castles that are available for a night, a week, or for a month. They list lodgings at any price point (I saw a room for $25 a night and villa for $1300 a night), in more than 26,000 cities and 192 countries. I learned about Airbnb from a friend who was listing her apartment and loved how easy it was to get booked. Another friend loves it too and wrote me:

“We used Airbnb on our Pacific Northwest trip to stay in Vancouver and San Francisco and loved both places we stayed at. One advantage is that you can select the exact neighborhood you want to stay in. In San Francisco, I like to stay around Buena Vista Park since that’s where we used to stay when my brother in law lived there. There was a choice of several and we got a place with killer views, near the Haight and Castro. Both parties are screened pretty thoroughly and the pictures are quite representative. I would definitely use them again and would have no hesitation recommending them.”

Airbnb sounds absolutely wonderful. The search engine appears to be very user friendly and accommodations are reviewed. I can’t wait to start using them.

How do you select your lodgings when you travel? Please share and I continue to share.

Witnessing a sacred event

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Last week, I was blessed and honored to witness the monks from the Drepung Loseling Phukhang Khamtsen Monastery, a Tibetan Colony in Southern India create and destroy a Sand Mandala at Cornell University. Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning “cosmogram (flat geometric figure depicting a cosmology)” or “world harmony.”  In Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism, it is said that wherever a Sand Mandala is created, all sentient beings and the surrounding environments are blessed. Whoever views the Mandala experiences profound peace and great joy. The colorfulness and harmony of the millions of sand particles in the Mandala give a powerful message that we can all live in peace if each of us works to create a little more space for others in our hearts. Children in particular, upon seeing the Sand Mandala, are left with a very positive imprint, which will germinate as sprouts of peace as they grow older

Throughout the creation of the Mandala, the monks pour millions of grains of sand from a funnel-shaped metal tool called the Chakpur. The funnel is filled with colored sand and is then scraped back and forth in order to release a fine stream of sand, creating a beautiful symbolic picture. The Mandala we witnessed symbolized compassion. In ancient times, powdered precious and semi-precious stones were used instead of sand. For example, lapis lazuli was used for the blue color, rubies for the red color and so on. The artists began at the center of the Mandala and worked outward.

I have always dreamed of experiencing the Sand Mandala but I have to say that I was not prepared for how deeply it would affect me. As I observed the creation of the Mandala and moved around the room so many emotions welled up inside me, when I stood in front of a picture of the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, his expression of pure calmness and serenity moved me to tears. Mathew and was quite taken with the experience too and wanted to return the next day for the destruction of the Mandala.

I keep referring to the creation and destruction of the Sand Mandala, and you may be asking yourself, “Why destroy such a beautiful thing?” It is to remind us of the impermanence of life. All things have a beginning, middle, and an end. The closing ceremony was as beautiful as the creation of the Mandala. The monks chanted and then swept the colored sand together using circular brush stokes into the middle. We were blessed to take some sand home with us.

It is said, that the whole region, in fact the whole earth, is blessed by the creation and destruction of the Sand Mandala. I truly am blessed, having witnessed the sacred event. May peace prevail on earth.