Walking briskly against the wind blown New Orleans Riverfront, my new friend, Shannon, began to peel away toward her parked car. I continued straight, heading for the Aquarium. We had met for the first time, in person, earlier that morning. After lunch at Brennan’s and a tour of the French Quarter she had to get back to her Baton Rouge home. As she veered away I leaned into the wind, putting the back of my hand to my mouth I called out,

“Hey, did you know it was me right away this morning?”

Nodding her head, she laughed back “Yes! It was the hair!”

Each of our Twitter pages has our profile pictures, but they are small, and, well, you know how peoples photos represent sometimes. Shannon, @Cajun_Mama, one of four travel writers for the popular Traveling Mamas website, was already waving at me by the time I spotted her walking along Decatur to where I stood outside the Cafe Du Monde. We were having a tweet-up, she recognized me instantly.

I know for a fact there are some of you reading this wondering “what the hell is she talking about?” Meaning, not only do you not have a Twitter account, but have maybe never even heard of it. Or, maybe you’ve heard the word on t.v. but just didn’t know what it meant. Certainly newscasters toss the phrase out with some regularity lately. In fact, Twitter has brought news well ahead of any network broadcast. The Airbus A320 landing in the Hudson is a prime example. I saw a tweet about a plane “crashing” into the Hudson, then we turned the news on just as coverage broke. US Airways began tweeting that day, but has not kept it up. Tracking the news of the bushfires my husband, @heligypsy was busy fighting in Australia, my best resource was using twitter.search.com using a hashtag #bushfire. Every 15 seconds there were hundreds of new tweets, with first hand information coming in.

Here is Jon Stewarts take on the Twitter Frenzy. He is not wrong, but that doesn’t make me wrong for being a twitterer.

I started using my twitter account a year ago to network with other travelers, RV’ers and writers. Right away the service proved to be significantly helpful. Using my 140 character allotment answering the question “What are you doing?” I typed out that I was researching riding the train from Alassio, Italy to Nice, France the following day. Quite unexpectedly, I received a response from Kelby, @Typeamom, the Go France writer for about.com. She replied with suggestions and helpful website links on what to see and do. With one positive experience under my belt, I decided to try it again, this time specifically asking for help on my upcoming three day trip to Milan. Whammo! Jessica, @italylogue, a Milan loving Portland Oregon resident and travel writer for the Bootsnall Travel Network was almost instantly at my service. Without her help I would have not seen the great and beautiful city of Milan from the top of the Duomo, nor would I have gotten on the tour that dropped me front and center at Leonardo Da’Vinci’s astounding painting, The Last Supper.

Google Twitter and not only will you get the direct link to the application itself, but the second result is a link to our President, Barack Obama’s Twitter account. The last update on the Presidents page is from Jan 19th, 2009, we all agree he’s been pretty busy, yes? There are also links to other applications that interface with Twitter in the hopes of helping to make it an easy and useful tool to stay connected and informed. You can find thousands of articles with tips for Twitter, top ten lists of how to make it work, rules of the “follow” (this is extremely individual), top lists of people to follow based on niche and on and on and on.

So, if you didn’t know before, you now may have a better idea of what twitter is, and why people use it. I’m @vagablonde on the site, no surprises there. If you jump in, look me up. Do you think you will engage in this new Social Media trend, or are you going to sit this one out?

The sun sets on another perfect day in the Greek Isles. My friend, Lyndsey, hydrating after a day hiking around. The glass Ioli bottle was refilled several times during our travels. Sometimes the water just came from the kitchen sink, but other times we made very specific pilgrimages to fountains along ancient paths in the hills. More often than not, there were locals at these spots also filling their water containers (usually in the one, five or ten gallon variety) Outside the charming town of Nafplio, we drank fountain water that, loosely translated and interpreted, would make us virgins.

Belize is one country that really made me work to discover its bounty of pleasures. The adrenaline had long worn off after getting through the border protocol, and I was ready to stop moving – anytime. We found ourselves fighting the same road conditions, potholes and unmarked speed bumps that we’d endured for the last 1500 miles. The improvement on the road was that, where the asphalt crumbled to nothing, there is actually a shoulder rather than a sheer drop like in Mexico. This only meant we had a lot more pedestrian and bicycle traffic to maneuver around. And, we were catching up to what looked to be a significant rain storm ahead.

Keith remarked on the obvious British influence of the colonial homes, but I was a little too focused on the trash, junk and dilapidated hovels. Reaching Belize City, my energy levels spiked with excitement.

“We’re Here!”

We miraculously navigated ourselves through crowded round-abouts and narrow congested bridges onto the Western Highway where both Astrum Helicopters and Old Belize Marina are located. The highway begins at a cemetery. Graves on the left and on the right, and with an island of plots in the middle. That’s right, a drive through cemetery.

The road widens, and the area becomes slightly industrial, and immediately turns into a garbage dump. This place is supposed to be paradise, is it not? Uuugh, I am so sick of all the garbage.

After finding and touring the Astrum facilities, we backtracked into town for supplies, and returned along the highway to set ourselves up at our temporary base of Old Belize marina. Temporary until we found a house with a fenced yard to rent. We never planned to live in our 19 ft motor home for the winter.

The rain storm we’d been following earlier had come through, leaving us little choice but to park in the mud. Keith and I take our shoes off, its no problem, but Zoe doesn’t really understand the “wipe your paws” direction. While hooking up the power, Keith learned that beside being a big mud puddle, the area was home to biting fire ants – now mad biting fire ants. We were stuck with them for the night.

Unsure of the draw of our a/c unit on this shared power supply we’d hooked into, it was decided that we’d not test it on our first night here – enough breeze was blowing that if we opened all the windows, we’d keep cool enough. Sometime after midnight, both of us were being “zapped”, felt like little jolts of electricity for split-seconds. Our first encounter with the dreaded sand fly, they came right through our screens and ate us as a midnight snack.

The following day, Keith went to the office to settle up on our camping arrangements before heading to Astrum for his check ride and other employment obligations. He returned to the motor home, put the thing in gear and said “I paid up for four days.” I am positive my eyeballs almost came out of their sockets and I repeated, but in a much higher, much louder voice,

“You paid for FOUR days!!!”

And 16 weeks later, we pulled the chocks from beneath the wheels of the motor home, and began our journey back to the United States via the west coast of Mexico. We never found a living scenario any more appropriate than staying at the marina, in our little camper. Eager to explore the glorious beaches of Mexico, my heart tugged to leave the Cucumber Beach Marina. Good friends had been made, and beauty discovered. This had become our home, much to my surprise.

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” Paul Theroux.

Spring wildflower blooms in Death Valley can be hit and miss from year to year, depending on the winters rainfall. The delicate displays of color, bursting yellows, cool blue, magnificent reds are such contrast to the harsh rocky soil they struggle to emerge from. This year’s prediction is for a later March, early April display.

He Said – Now I have two women telling me where to go

I have been using G.P.S. navigation tools in helicopters since the technology was first introduced. The G.P.S. I use in my helicopter is simple, and has an update- able database. The downside to using a G.P.S. while flying, is that pilots become dependent, fixated and distracted by the information the G.P.S. provides.

When I started using G.P.S. for hiking and later, in car navigation, I was concerned about the distraction factor. Being the consummate professional that I am, and having years of prior experience navigating with G.P.S., I felt certain I would utilize the G.P.S. properly. The car G.P.S. would be a mere back up while driving the streets and highways. I would never let it be a distraction to my driving. It was nice idea.

Driving east of Ellensburg, Washington in our brand new Ford pickup I checked the mirror to confirm Paula was behind me in the rental car we would be dropping off at Moses Lake Airport. A few years ago Paula and I had flown a helicopter into this same airport for fuel and I knew where the airport was; well sort of.

“Hey! I have G.P.S. in this truck,” I thought.

After popping in the software DVD in the G.P.S., I attempted to initialize and input the rental car drop off location. Nothing was working and Paula pulled up along side and gave me the “whats up?” sign. I had been drifting a little towards the road edge and Paula could tell from my animated pointing and steamed up side window that she was lucky not be listening to my tirade.

After dropping the rental car Paula had the G.P.S. in the truck working perfectly. You can not input new info while driving it seems. Good idea! Too bad I had not realized or thought of that obvious safety feature. Within a 100 miles I am fully enamored with the new G.P.S. and its many features. I suggest we come up with a name for our talking G.P.S. A name that reflects her calming voice and skillful assistance to navigation. All my name suggestions fall flat and a few has Paula doing the finger down the throat motion.

“OK,OK, I’ll think of something we both like.” I tell Paula.

A day or two later and the G.P.S. honeymoon is over, finito!  A G.P.S. is only as good as its database and ours has some newer roads and highways missing. Being told every 20 seconds to make “a legal U-Turn” on a perfectly correct route earns our G.P.S. her name finally, but its not one that I will ever write in a blog.

Another problem surfaces. Many auto G.P.S. allow you to input the vehicle length.  Our G.P.S. does not have this feature. The “Shortest Route” sounds good until you realize too late, that it was the same route used by Hannibal to cross the Alps.

We are back to using the G.P.S. as originally planned. Paula has the Rand McNally up front, the Gazateer for the smaller roads, the amazing I-phone with its Google Earth and map applications and the almost always reliable inverter powered laptop with its EVDO  internet receiver that hits most every cell system en-route.

The only thing lost these days is Paula. Buried under the maps and techno gear we pass through entire towns where Paula is busy Googling the things I saw by just looking out the window. What a novel idea!

She Said – How (not) to navigate a road trip

White knuckled doesn’t begin to describe the angst I suffered on our drive over 12 0′clock knob outside Roanoke, VA. I practically had to remind myself to breath, and try to remain cool as our 54′ truck/RV combination slowly wound up the steep single lane mountain pass. Maple, Poplar, Dogwood, Birch, Oak and hundreds other trees were peaking with fall colors. It would have been an extraordinarily scenic drive, except I have blocked most of it out. I was worried. Worried we’d encounter an oncoming vehicle, there was no room for two on this pass. Worried we’d come to a tree too low for our 12ft. clearance and have to back all the way we’d just climbed.  My big problem was, Keith had concerns about us driving this route too.

How did we get here? On a road we had no business being on, a road a local friend told me later,

“I don’t even like driving my car on 12 o’clock knob!”

Simple. I’d plugged an address into the onboard navigation system in our truck for our destination, the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The first left we were advised to make seemed odd, it was too residential. But, rather than consult the Rand McNally, I sat back and trusted the direction. A mistake I will not have to repeat to learn.

GPS is fairly new to me. My first experience was so positive, a Hertz rental car in Portland Oregon with a Magellan system at no extra charge. Finding the REI in downtown was effortless. Turn R here, in .2 mile turn R here, etc., Fantastic! I was sold. And for good reason, the benefits are helpul on so many levels. I am now using the maps app on my iPhone, in conjunction with the onboard system, sometimes with a mapquest print out backup, and always with my atlas at my side. My only last problem is having my nose stuck in all these systems to make sure we get where we are going, on the best and right path, but what am I missing while getting there? I’m learning to sort it all out.

Every morning hotel staff raked the beach sand and straightened chaise lounge chairs for miles along this stretch of the Mediterranean.  Each hotel has their own brightly colored beach umbrella’s and matching chairs. The morning scene is serene, almost deserted, until about 10 am. As the crowds arrive, umbrella’s burst open and the beach becomes an entirely different place to be.