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All worries are less with wine.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Hunger gives flavour to the food.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry.
So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity.
Blog post: Love Team Freezer
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Foz Meadows
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Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.
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Andy Behrman (Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania)
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Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and the
gorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling
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Shannon MacLeod (Rogue on the Rollaway)
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Have intention, sacred will travel.
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S. Kelley Harrell (Life Betwixt: Essays on Allies in the Everyday and Shamanism Among (Intentional Insights Blog-to-Book Series 1))
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From my travel blog @http://www.lwmcferrin.com/travel
When faced with disaster, the best medicine is laughter.
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Linda Watanabe McFerrin
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Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.
We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.
And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
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Catherynne M. Valente
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Avid readers are the most authentic creatures on the face of the earth, and their hearts and minds are not for sale at any price. "Mysteries for the Inspired Traveler" Goodreads blog
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Kopman-Owens
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Anywhere you wanted to travel to?”
‘I’m suffocated by the darkness and this question.
I wish I was brave enough to have travelled. Now that I don’t have time to go anywhere, I want to go everywhere: I want to get lost in the deserts of Saudi Arabia; find myself running from the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas; stay overnight on Hashima Island, this abandoned coal-mining facility in Japan sometimes known as Ghost Island; travel the Death Railway in Thailand, because even with a name like that, there’s a chance I can survive the sheer cliffs and rickety wooden bridges; an everywhere else. I want to climb every last mountain, row down every last river, explore every last cave, cross every last bridge, run across last beach, visit every last town, city, country. Everywhere. I should’ve done more than watch documentaries and video blogs about these places.
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Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
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Things like quitting my job with no real plan eons before I was ready, blogging to the world the most private parts of my existence, starting a company with zero clue, having opinions that are decidedly in the margins of popular opinion, traveling with no itinerary, hopping on motorcycles with strange men in foreign countries, asking for things I’m afraid to ask for, dancing terribly in front of people. I live from a place of “Why not?” and this newfound sense of right-minded risk-taking—as in risk-taking I am fully in control and aware of—has led to some of the more fantastic moments of my life and given me major courage and freedom.
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Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
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Bucket had started his criminal career in Braas, not far from when Allan and his new friends now found themselves. There he had gotten together with some like-minded peers and started the motorcycle club called The Violence. Bucket was the leader; he decided which newsstand was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who has chosen the name- The Violence, in English, not swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English.
The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead. As the rest of the club members had had similar academic success, nobody in the group noticed the mistake.
So everyone was very surprised when one day a letter arrived for The Violins in Braas from the people in charge of the concert hall in Vaxjo. The letter suggested that, since the club obviously concerned itself with classical music, they might like to put in am appearance at a concert with the city’s prestigious chamber orchestra, Musica Viate.
Bucket felt provoked; somebody was clearly making fun of him. One night he skipped the newsstand, and instead went into Vaxjo to throw a brick through the glass door of the concert hall. This was intended to teach the people responsible lesson in respect. It all went well, except that Bucket’s leather glove happened to follow the stone into the lobby. Since the alarm went off immediately, Bucket felt it would be unwise to try to retrieve the personal item in question.
Losing the glove was not good. Bucket had traveled to Vaxjo by motorbike and one hand was extremely cold all the way home to Braas that night. Even worse was the fact that Bucket’s luckless girlfriend had written Bucket’s name and adress inside the glove, in case he lost it."
For more quotes from the novel visit my blog: frommybooks.wordpress.com
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Jonas Jonasson (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1))
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and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
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Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea
Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications?
No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country.
The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there.
Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you?
Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank.
But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.
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Paul Theroux
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social media is not new. It has been around for centuries. Today, blogs are the new pamphlets. Microblogs and online social networks are the new coffee houses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast media. The rebirth of social media in the Internet age represents a profound shift—and a return, in many respects, to the way things used to be.
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Tom Standage (Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years)
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It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult. So try for yourself to write a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining relationships with sources, researching in written records, verifying everything, writing and revising drafts, all on a tight and unforgiving schedule. If you find you like doing this, keep a blog. In the meantime, give credit to those who do all of that for a living. Journalists are not perfect, any more than people in other vocations are perfect. But the work of people who adhere to journalistic ethics is of a different quality than the work of those who do not.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
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For some people, the lure of travelling and exploration is just too strong to resist. I have jokingly called this the ‘Itchy Feet Syndrome’. Years ago, you would have been able to spot this person easily, as their passport would have been filled with exotic stamps and visas. Today, they are likely to have a mass of photos and travel stories uploaded onto their Facebook page or blog.
So what makes some people reach for their passport at every opportunity? What inspires them to leave home and travel the world on a sailboat or in a converted van? Is it simply a need to explore and see what is around the next corner? Or is it a deeper desire to be free, to live a simpler life?
On talking to many of the authors who have contributed their travel story to this anthology, it became clear that having ‘Itchy Feet’ is a real thing. Many have described how they felt this way from a young age, or even inherited this from their parents or grandparents. What is clear is that their desire to travel is so strong they cannot resist the attraction of the next new place or experience.
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Alyson Sheldrake (Itchy Feet - Tales of travel and adventure: An anthology of travel stories (The Travel Stories Series))
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Tell them about your blog. What is your blog about? Try to narrow it down to a theme. For example, my theme is intentional leadership. Next explain what kinds of things you write about. I think it is best to limit yourself to a handful of categories. The more focused your content, the more readers you will attract. Kate McCulley’s About page on Adventurous Kate’s Solo Female 104 Travel Blog gives a few fun facts about Kate (she has been shipwrecked and once made a pass at Jon Stewart; she quit her job to travel the world), and then dives right into her theme: I am a solo traveler at heart, and one of my goals is to show women that solo travel can be safe, easy, cheap and a lot of fun. Meanwhile, I’m committed to showing you what the lifestyle of a long-term traveler and online entrepreneur is like. Like anyone else in the world, I have good times and bad times, but I promise to show you reality—with honesty and humor.3
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Michael Hyatt (Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World)
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ropeandboard.com is a travel blog giving you great ideas on how to travel with kids. The blog is ideal for families who are just starting to travel with kids or families that have been travelling and need some better ways to pack, play and travel. The site covers age ranges from infant to toddler to teens. Make your next trip more enjoyable with fabulous tips from ropeandboard.com
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Rope and Board
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A bit playful and a little ironic – as if to emphasise how small yet prominent the Swedish scene was – they had started calling their trio Swedish House Mafia. In the summer they travelled to Ibiza, the party island in the Mediterranean that Filip already knew was the kingdom of heaven and played the clubs there. The pictures on the blog showed Sebastian Ingrosso with a sizeable drink in his hand at the legendary spot Pacha, where they performed with the star David Guetta. Steve Angello sat with a sunhat on the beach and read about himself in the music magazine Mixmag. The dream life.
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Måns Mosesson (Tim – The Official Biography of Avicii: The intimate biography of the iconic European house DJ)
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I was shackled by my own bias, perhaps we all are.
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Khaqan Sikander (That Which Flows)
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The Passion of Adventure share their travel and adventure experience at different places that can be the travel guide for your next trip.
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The passionofadventure
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It's through traveling you make the great journey into yourself, and it's the clarity of extremes in traveling that forces you to meet yourself like you've never met yourself before.
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Carew Papritz (The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift)
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In a different era, Ignatius would have been terrific at the Internet. You can picture him tucked into his Constantinople Street bedroom with an empty case of root beer at his feet, crouched over a grungy, glowing laptop, posting screeds to his blog, adding pointed and overwrought comments below news articles.
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Margaret Eby (South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature)
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Viator Travel Blog $45 per post (looking for regular contributors) GoNomad $25 per post World Hum Payment negotiated after pitching Gadling (Email editor@gadling.com) $25 per post The Expeditioner, $30 per article BoostnAll $30 – $50 New York Times ‘In Transit’ Blog (Email Monica Drake at modrak@nytimes.com) $50 per 300 word article Transitions Abroad $50 to $150 per piece Matador Network $40 depending on the article
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Kirsty Stuart (How to Start a Travel Blog and Make Money)
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The world’s greatest thinkers have an insatiable curiosity and actively seek new experiences that can increase the amount of their creative constructor pieces. They travel, make new acquaintances, try various hobbies, attend conferences and seminars, and read books, magazines and blogs.
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Andrii Sedniev (The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas)
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With ecstasy, what we do Here, directly impacts what we can achieve There.
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S. Kelley Harrell (Life Betwixt - Essays on Allies in the Everyday and Shamanism Among (Intentional Insights Blog-to-Book Series 2))
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Consider, for instance, Jill Hubbard Bowman, an intellectual property (IP) attorney in Austin, Texas, who publishes a legal blog, IP Law for Startups, iplawforstartups.com, and an inspiring career website for young women, lookilulu.com. Jill Hubbard Bowman: Unexpected Twists and Turns I had a dream to be a trial attorney who would fight big legal battles and win. And then my dream was derailed by a twin pregnancy that almost killed me. Literally. It was a shock and awe pregnancy. It caused the death, destruction, and rebirth of my identity and legal career. I was working as an intellectual property litigation attorney for a large law firm in Chicago when a pregnancy with twins caused my heart to fail. After fifteen years of infertility, the twin pregnancy was an unexpected surprise. Heart failure because of the pregnancy was an even bigger shock. The toll on my legal career was even more unexpected. Although I was fortunate to survive without a heart transplant, I eventually realized that I needed a career transplant. As my heart function recovered, I valiantly tried to cling to my career dream and do the hard work I loved. But the long hours and travel necessary for trial work were too much for my physical self. I was exhausted with chronic chest pain, two clinging toddlers, and a disgruntled husband. I was tired of being tired. My law firm was exceptionally supportive but I didn’t have the stamina to keep all of the pieces of my life together. Overwhelmed, I let go of my original dream. I backed down, retrenched, and regrouped. I took a year off from legal work to rest, recover, spend time with my toddlers, and open myself to new possibilities.
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Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
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Alejandro de Humboldt National Park
Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people.
One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct.
The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles.
“The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.
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Hank Bracker
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In 2011, two years into Bartz’s tenure, a company called Hunch did a study comparing Gmail and Yahoo Mail users. It found that Yahoo Mail users were overweight women aged eighteen to forty-nine who lived in the Midwest and had never traveled outside their own country. They owned CDs. They had high school degrees. Gmail users were typically thin men aged eighteen to thirty-four with college degrees. They lived in cities and had traveled to five or more countries. They had MP3s. Yahoo users liked magazines; Gmail users liked blogs.
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Nicholas Carlson (Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!)
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Travel to Cuba
Generally Tourist travel to Cuba is prohibited under U.S. law for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and others subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The hard and fast rules have been relaxed some and exceptions are now made for certain travelers who can show an acceptable reason, to visit the Island Nation in which case a “Tourist Visa" is required and available. US Citizens must have a valid passport with two blank pages available, for entry and exit stamps, at the time of entry into Cuba.
United States issued credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba so travelers should plan to bring enough cash with them to cover all the expenses they might incur during their trip. Authorized travelers to Cuba are subject to daily spending limits. See the Office of Foreign Assets Control page of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.The export of Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) is strictly prohibited, regardless of the amount. Travelers may only export the equivalent of $5000 in any currency other than the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). Anyone wishing to export more than this amount must demonstrate evidence that the currency was acquired legitimately from a Cuban bank.
Cuba has many Hotels and Resort Areas, most of which are foreign owned; I counted 313 of them. Many are Canadian or European owned with Meliá Hotels International in the lead with twenty-eight hotels in Cuba alone. Being a Spanish hotel chain, it was founded in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The photo show the internationally known “Nacional Hotel.” Some Cruise Lines including Carnival now offer cruises to Cuba and advise guests as to the entry requirements.
Follow Captain Hank Bracker, author of “The Exciting Story of Cuba” on Facebook, Goodreads and his Web Page as well as Twitter. His daily blogs and weekend commentaries are now being read by hundreds and frequrntly thousands of readers. Send suggestions and comments to PO Box 607 Elfers, FL 34680-0607.
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Hank Bracker
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If the United States is to avoid the same situation, the blogging doctor claimed, then the country should quarantine whole regions, especially during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays that usually prompt mass travel.
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Ling Ma (Severance)
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Uncle Fixer is a reliable source to provide you with the latest blogs, updates and news about handyman services, technology, travel, and tourism. Whether it’s top trending news, the latest fashion updates, or finding tips related to health and beauty. We provide valid and diverse consumer center information on every topic instantly.
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Uncle Fixer
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Spirit Airlines Reservations Phone Number +1-855-653-5007
Now and then when we plan an outing we are truly not mindful it could get dropped. We book tickets for our future travel however a few unavoidable circumstances lead to wiping out of plans. We really want to drop our appointments and for that, we should know about the undoing strategy of that aircraft. Despite the fact that there is some time-restricted period where you have the money in question returned of your ticket yet other than that you might have to pay some scratch-off charge.
Now and then accidentally unavoidable circumstances emerge where we really want to drop our arrangement and for this, it is vital to have a thought on the wiping out strategy on the trip on which we made our appointments. In this blog we will examine upon 'Would you be able to drop Spirit flights', Spirit scratch-off approach and the techniques to drop.
Soul Airlines crossing out states that on the off chance that you drop your ticket inside 24 hours of unique booking, you are qualified for return the money in question.
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Pigewano
“
Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She
made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then
looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio:
Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I
design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m
trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I
don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t
make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog
someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m.
I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you!
What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan?
The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made
it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was
flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy
shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s
clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something
only children did.
The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing
different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama
with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy.
And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little
captions about how the products inspired her.
Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at
an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d
been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out,
but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for
yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated,
hated most of all.
I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this
blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator?
This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your
formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have
lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies!
“Everything okay?” asked Jillian.
“Yeah, what?”
“Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and
everything.”
“Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan.
“It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?”
“What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan.
How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy?
What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more
acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now
there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that
they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even
bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?
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Halle Butler (Jillian)
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It was disheartening to read this sentence in a travel blog. Just including it here makes me cringe: "Sneakers and even sweatpants are acceptable attire everywhere, even in upscale or fancy restaurants." What has become of us? When did travellers transform into the people always in workout gear? What happened to the days when embarking on a journey was an occasion that warranted dressing with pride?
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Anastasia Pash (Travel With Style: Master the Art of Stylish and Functional Travel Capsules)
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Sell your art, crafts, or any handcrafted item on etsy.com Develop a travel concierge service to help people when they miss their flights Offer online tutoring services in your field of expertise Host a networking event (charge a low ticket price and get sponsors to provide food) Create and sell a visitors’ guide to your town or city, or build a web resource for tourists, supported by advertisers Create an online (or offline) course in some quirky subject you happen to know a lot about Publish a blog with a new lesson on a specific topic every day Start a podcast and sell sponsorship Visit yard sales or thrift shops and buy items to resell Offer a simple freelance service—anything from fact-checking to tech support or something else entirely Become a home, office, or life organizer Manage P.R. or social media accounts for small businesses Buy and sell used textbooks to college students Sell your musings on business, art, or culture as a freelance writer Start a membership website, where people pay a monthly or annual fee to access useful information about a specific topic Write and publish a book (if I can do it, you can too!)
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Chris Guillebeau (Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days)
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Suami istri yang suka traveling bareng lebih bahagia dalam rumah tangga.
(Hasil penelitian Edge Research dari Amerika - mengutip dari blog-nya Traveloka)
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Riki Ahmadi (The Couple Trip - Menikah Tamasya)
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Are you offering a niche service for a very specific audience subset who has unmet needs? Maybe you’re a designer for only travel blogs? Perhaps you’re a copywriter specifically for relationship coaches.
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Meera Kothand (The Blog Startup: Proven Strategies to Launch Smart and Exponentially Grow Your Audience, Brand, and Income without Losing Your Sanity or Crying Bucketloads of Tears)
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Personal development • Fitness • Food • Budgeting or personal finance • Fashion/Beauty • Lifestyle – Home decor – Organization – Travel – Outdoor/Survival
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Meera Kothand (The Blog Startup: Proven Strategies to Launch Smart and Exponentially Grow Your Audience, Brand, and Income without Losing Your Sanity or Crying Bucketloads of Tears)
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To create a worthwhile project, you have to be willing to work harder than the other guy. You work while he or she sleeps or travels.
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Bryan Cohen (How to Work for Yourself: 100 Ways to Make the Time, Energy and Priorities to Start a Business, Book or Blog)
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Point them to your top posts. This is an opportunity to invite them to “sample the brew.” Draw them further into your content. Give them a taste of your best writing. Google Analytics or even your blog’s stats package can provide you with a list of your most popular posts of all time. You should also point them to your blog’s archive for more content. Adventurous Kate’s featured posts include: • 11 Best Photos of 2011 • My Adventurous Travels—From A to Z
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Michael Hyatt (Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World)
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Similarly, it is this exertion of power over our bodies that motivates TSA patdowns of headscarf wearers at airport security checkpoints. Think about it: We already have to walk through what is pretty much an X-Ray machine that allows you to see straight through our clothes. It is a monstrosity so invasive that, in 2011, there was a public outcry over a TSA whistle-blower’s blog post in which he detailed how agents would ridicule the rolls of fat on passengers’ bodies as the agents watched from their screening rooms.3 Surely the headscarf is not made of some fabric that can defy such a machine, but nonetheless we are always, always, always stopped for an extra patdown, with TSA hands invariably laying claim to our bodies. The search isn’t about security, but rather about hitting us where it hurts. As one TSA agent let slip to me during one of these encounters, “We have to check you if you’re wearing that,” and as another said on a separate occasion, “You’ve traveled with headgear before, right? So you know how this goes.
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Amani Al-Khatahtbeh (Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age)
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Such were the things I discovered in the weeks before leaving for the city. In advance of all of my trips I would dip into the culture by reading novels and poetry, watching films and television programs, and browsing fashion, travel, and design blogs. Doing this, relishing how enjoyable an upcoming experience might be, isn’t just edifying—it can boost our spirits long before we even leave for the airport. “Anticipation is a free form of happiness,” Elizabeth Dunn found in her research on well-being, “the one that’s least vulnerable to things going wrong.
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Stephanie Rosenbloom (Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude)
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Iran is a country that needs to be discovered. At the age of large international travel corporations losing their attractiveness, you can go to the local tour operators and get in touch with them.
They also provide you with insiders' information about the country and its attractions - tangible and intangible. Read more at "Destination Iran Blog".
DestinationIran.com is one such company with more than 20 years of experience.
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Rahman Mehraby
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Personal development • Fitness • Food • Budgeting or Personal finance • Fashion/Beauty • Lifestyle o Home decor o Organization o Travel o Outdoor/Survival Why do you blog or do business in any one of these niches?
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Meera Kothand (The One Hour Content Plan: The Solopreneur’s Guide to a Year’s Worth of Blog Post Ideas in 60 Minutes and Creating Content That Hooks and Sells)
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Why I hate ________ E.g. Why I hate designing blog images / Why I hate email marketing / Why I hate traveling with the kids. List your reasons and then talk about how your product has helped you. This will work great for email and a blog post.
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Meera Kothand (The One Hour Content Plan: The Solopreneur’s Guide to a Year’s Worth of Blog Post Ideas in 60 Minutes and Creating Content That Hooks and Sells)
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I’m and aspiring author who writes in Fantasy and YA Genre. Although this year has been filled with many hardships, regrets it’s also taught me a lot. In 2018 I got a great opportunity to travel, met new people, set goals. Unfortunately due to stress, anxiety, lack of communication and fear of losing a great opportunity I lost it all. More importantly I lost a kind person, writer, and friend. I learned that I wasn’t as great of a person I had hoped to be.
When I’m upset I say things I don’t mean. There’s no excuse. I learnt that the hard way. I let my anxiety build up and I don’t make any progress. I wanted nothing more than to join the navy but I was so scared I’d lose my last chance from hurting my back. I was terrified but my anxiety was keeping me from progressing. So when I lost it and a friend I realized that was it. I hade several anxiety attacks for the first time. It was terrifying, I was shaken. But I learned we all have to hit rock bottom and I found mine.
I am determined to change, be a better person, overcome my anxiety and let go of the past. In the last 6 months I’ve started working, made huge progress in my book,won a writing contest and even published a few chapters/drafts of my first book. In 3 days it made it to #1 in Sorcery & Alchemy, # 14 in magic, #23 in fantasy, #26 in dark fantasy and many more categories. I started a writing blog about tips, writers block, overthinking, fear of rejection from publishers, and much more!
So fellow writers, out stories aren’t perfect and neither are the worlds we create. Let’s leaen from our mistakes and discover a world within together.
Cheers to a new year, 2019
Sincerely, gabby
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Note to Self