California has been dealing with an upsurge in wildfires for the last couple of years. In 2008, massive fires scorched thousand of acres east of San Diego in the late spring. Then a freak fall lightning storm (I was at Natural Bridges that day—it was weird) touched off a blaze in Big Sur that destroyed forest hiking trails and trailed fiery fingers down onto the property of two of my favorite resort/spas—the Ventana and the Esalen Institute. Happily, both remain open to guests and are working on restoring damaged structures.

The upshot of all this: we all need to take care with your campfires and cigarettes when you’re out in the California wilderness. One of the reasons we’re called the Golden State is that most all of our wild grasses turn “golden” by May each spring, and by September they’ll start burning at the merest hint of a spark. So please join me in using in-car ashtrays to butt out your smokes (of all types and colors) and rigorously following all fire regulations when camping or picnicking in the woods and parks.

I’ll post back here with updates on travel to the Santa Barbara region as they come up.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124148217828485383.html

I most especially love #9 and #10. Kindness to others and a positive attitude cost nothing to give out to the people around you. You can gift a harried gate agent or exhausted fellow traveler a smile for free.  It’s honestly not their fault that your plane was delayed 3 hours, you got the middle seat in row 37, or you’re on your way to a crisis business meeting in Pittsburg in February.

It’s cheesy as all get-out, but I find that making the effort to be nice to the people I deal with while traveling actually makes my trip feel less stressful. Whether the facts support that feeling or not.

Our budgets are all tight, but we still need a break from the daily grind. Camping makes for a fun cheap alternative to hotels and inns. At Costanoa, a lodge, tent cabin eco-resort, and tent/RV camping area, a room in the lodge costs $210-365 per night. A cabin or tent cabin costs $115-195, and a tent campsite costs about $55 per night. Which frankly, is an insane price for a campsite and one of the most expensive in the state. At most National and State parks in California, you can expect to pay $0-20 per night for a tent campsite, and a little bit more for an RV space.

Want more info? Listen to me tomorrow!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/29/TRQ016K9M3.DTL&type=travel

I’ve had very good results using TripAdvisor to guide me in the selection of lodgings, and I’ve heard good things about CruiseCritic.

But here’s the deal: as ALWAYS when shopping on the Internet, put your antenna up and use your common sense. Any web site that lets *you* create uncensored reviews is also open to “reviews” by the PR departments of hotels, cruise lines, restaurants, etc. ALWAYS be on alert for fakery. Read critically–if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, even on a usually reliable web site.

So how do you track down the real story?

1. Cross-check. Look at more than one user-review site. Check TripAdvisor, Yelp, and various others of your choice. If the overall reviews don’t match up, get suspicious.

2. Go to the pros. Look for newspaper (on the web) reviews and articles about the restaurant, attraction, cruise, whatever. (Note that newspaper reviews will be more reliable than magazine articles, which tend to be unrelentingly positive and sometimes advertising-driven.) Newspaper reviewers stake their reputations on their impartiality–find one you like and follow her!

3. Find other sources. For hotels, get a AAA Guide to the state you’re looking at if you want an easy-to-use rating system. Or get a Moon Guide. Yes, I’m gratuitously publicizing my series. But I know that in my book, I was *not* unrelentingly positive. The editors at Avalon Travel let us writers be honest when we don’t like something–in fact they encourage us to do so.

Don’t buy lingerie in a foreign country without trying samples on for size. Even if the tag has “American” sizes on it and you’ve been wearing the same sizes for more than a decade.

I bought some (mercifully inexpensive) underpinnings at a Vickie’s Secret knockoff shop in Paris last month. The store was crowded, I was wearing three layers of clothing, and I hate trying on bras even in better situations. So I picked out two bras in my size and bought them. (Approx $6 apiece, which is an unheard-of price for bras in my size in the States.) 

The bras don’t fit at all. It appears that 34 inches isn’t the same length in France as it is in California–it’s about 2 inches shorter in Europe.

A pity. These bras were decently made and almost attractive. But I’ve learned my lesson–next time I’m trying everything on before forking over the Euros!