You need to travel for business. Should you take your spouse with you? There are pros and cons to doing this.

The pros of taking your spouse with you on business vacations:

• You get to spend time together in a new place. This is great if you have some downtime to enjoy the destination that you are visiting.
• You can take some of the cost of a pleasurable trip off of your taxes. You might enjoy a great time with your spouse but if you went on vacation to attend a Cisco certification training seminar then it still counts as work.
• It makes work more fun!

The drawbacks of taking a spouse with you on business travel are:

• The trip will cost more. Your employer won’t pay for your spouse and you won’t be able to count that part on taxes.
• You won’t get time apart from each other. Sometimes it’s nice to take a break and then come home to your spouse instead of being together all of the time.
• Both work and play will get neglected. You might intend to spend equal time doing both your Cisco certification and spending time with your spouse but it never really works out that way.

So what should you do? It depends on your relationship, your job and your destination. Think it through before making a decision.

Technorati Tags: Cisco certification, Cisco certification training

Before I start writing this, let me just say that I love my wife.  She is one of the most amazing people that I have met and I love her to pieces.  We have been married for nearly ten years now, and they have been some of the best days of my life.

But there have also been a number of times where we have butted heads.  I guess you would have to say that we are both stubborn, and sometimes we struggle to come up with solutions for our disagreements.  Perhaps the worst arguments that we have ever had were with respect to what we were going to do for vacations.

You see, my wife is a big fan of visiting as many tourist attractions she can.  She loves to spend hours at museums or walking through ruins, and spends a lot of time researching the places that she can visit.  So, when it comes to vacation spots, she wants to visit places where there are places to go, and she likes to plan things out accordingly.

On the other hand, I am more of a beach bum.  I choose destinations based on the fact that they are coastal regions and have a beach where I can sit all day.  I guess I like to relax, and a beach provides a perfect opportunity to do so.

Needless to say, somehow we seem to find places where we can both get what we want out of our vacations, but there is a lot of fighting.  At least we have fun when we get there, right?

Technorati Tags: coastal, tourist attractions

My friend Kelly just informed me that she and her husband are going to Japan for Christmas this year. They’ve booked a stay at a hotel that has a private hot springs off of their room. From this hotel they are going to be able to hike to see snow monkeys.

My friend Rafael has taken three trips this year so far - to Arizona, Nevada and Washington. I was supposed to go on one of those trips with him but then I ended up having to have surgery and couldn’t go after all. He described it to me after the fact and I definitely feel like I missed out.

I guess I’m feeling jealous about all of the traveling that my friends are doing right now. It seems like everyone else gets to go on trips except for me. My boyfriend and I have been kicking around some Canada vacation ideas. We’d both like to ski Canadian Rockies. But the reality is that he’s living on a student’s income and I’m trying to catch up with these medical bills so neither of us can afford to take that trip right now.

I know that my time will come. I’ve traveled in the past and I’ll get to travel again sometime in the future. I’m just feeling a little envious of everyone I know who is getting the chance to travel right now.

Technorati Tags: canada vacation ideas, ski canadian rockies

There is a trend in travel that appeals to only a certain group of people. It’s the trend called culinary tourism. This refers to people who make it a point to travel to places where they can enjoy certain food or restaurants. The restaurants that benefit from this trend don’t have to be located in specific places. They don’t have to be certain types of restaurants. They don’t have to be staffed with the top graduates from the most elite cooking schools. They simply have to be willing to market themselves towards the group of people who are making this trend so popular.

Doing this requires finding a way to make your restaurant stand out from the other restaurants in your area. You also want to stand out from similar restaurants in other areas. If you have a unique culinary education then make sure that your customers know that. If you offer a rare regional dish then promote it in all of your marketing. And then seal the deal by making sure that the customers who come to enjoy your food are treated to a better-than-average dining experience. That’s really all it takes to benefit from the culinary tourism trend.

Technorati Tags: cooking schools, culinary education

My dad is currently in Germany on a trip.  He has been there more than a dozen times, and now that he is retired he goes every couple of years.

German travel is a huge interest of his, so naturally he has a website on the subject.  He was originally using free hosting for it, but I bought him a FTP hosting plan for his birthday last year.  (I’ll renew it as an early Christmas present this year.)

Anyway, for the last two trips he has taken, he has been posting updates to his website about what he is doing.  I tried to get him to set up a blog to make it easier to update, but he wouldn’t do it — I think he actually likes doing everything the old school way in HTML.

Basically, what he does is to get onto his server and open up the page file in notepad, add to it, and then save it back to the server.  So in a way, he’s using his server to do a free file transfer – I don’t think he actually takes the original files with him at all, just downloads them from the server every time he wants to update.

It’s kind of neat to be able to follow my dad’s trip via his travel website, but I wish he would send emails too.  Since he’s not doing a blog, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to, and it would be nice to know when there are updates there to view!

Technorati Tags: blog, free file transfer, FTP hosting