Trevor's Travels

If you’re ready to finally take your dream vacation, or if you’re just travelling for work, there are a number of things you can reasonably expect from any reputable online travel agency. Obviously, you don’t just want bare bones service. If at all possible, it’d be nice to have someone you can talk to, a wide range of options, and so on. A quick checklist might read something like this…

Good Customer Service

If you have any questions, you’re going to want them answered, right? An online travel agency should provide some degree of direct, one on one customer service, via email or telephone. Even if you’re just going through a simple, bargain-ticket site, you really should look for a site with a live helpline.

A Wide Range of Options on Flights

A low price is great, but you should also be looking for options. You might not want to fly economy class every time. If you’re planning a dream vacation (or if it’s business travel and you can talk your employer into footing the bill…), you might want to give business or even first class a try. Ideally, an online travel agency should be providing you with a seat on any section of the plane.

Great Deals

This one is kind of obvious. A travel agent’s job, after all, is to find you a great deal. If you want to find the best online travel agency around, you might want to shop around for quotes or customer reviews. ). Some sites let you set up and compare foreign currency calculators for multiple destinations of your choice so you can get a better picture of the total costs of your travel beyond the base package price.

Plenty of Hotels to Choose From

If you’re not going to be spending a lot of time in your hotel room, you don’t really need much but a bed and a television set. On the other hand, if you’re going to be stuck in your room for hours on end, you might want something a little classier. Basically, you want to work with a travel agency who gets you great deals without sacrificing a wide variety of choices. Another benefit to shopping for a hotel online: virtual tours.

Impartiality

A real travel agent is just going to try to find you the very best deals available. They’re not going to try to lean all of their customers towards one airline or another. There are a few so-called “travel agents” out there who are secretly receiving bonuses from certain airlines, but this isn’t a common practice, nor is it encouraged within the travel agency industry. These people represent the exact opposite of what travel agents stand for and should not be associated with the countless honest travel agencies out there.

Quick Flights

Anyone can find you a great deal if they’re willing to book you on a flight with a half a dozen twelve-hour layovers. If you like hanging out in airports, this might not actually bother you, but let’s be honest, most people hate hanging out in airports for hours on end. Ideally, you should be able to get a good price on a flight without a lot of layovers.

Convenient Online Profile

Most online travel agents will maintain a customer profile that allow you to customize your options, track expenses and save preferences in order to streamline future trip planning (for example, you prefer the aisle seat). You can benefit by storing any corporate or membership discount numbers, frequent flyer numbers and other pertinent information to assist with faster and cheaper reservations.

User Generated Experience

An extension of just saving your past purchase data and current itineraries is forward-looking user generated content. There are two types of user generated content: reviews and information posted by other registered travelers, which can be a lot more helpful than the standard marketing-speak; and real-time content requested by the subscriber such as weather forecasts, customized news feeds based on interest keywords, and fare alert services based on the user’s parameters, including a general timeframe (so you can see which travel days cost more or less) and region (e.g., Baltimore to Europe or Denver to the South Pacific).

So Basically…

What you want, really, is a wide variety of options at a good price. It’s not always easy to get the perfect balance. You might have to pay a little extra if you want to avoid a lot of layovers, and you might have to sacrifice business class flying if you want a low, low price. A travel agent’s job is to find a nice compromise between these two goals.

Again, you’re not always going to find the perfect balance. Luxury doesn’t come for free, and a lower price usually comes at the cost of some minor sacrifice. But, if you find a great online travel agent, you might get a better deal than you would expect.

Cave exploring has become a favorite adventure activity for many Americans. Whether you’re taking a short, self-guided or guided tour of a commercial cave, or engaging in advanced spelunking of non-commercial caves, there’s just something magical about entering a cave. The feel of the cave air, the smells, the quite, the utter darkness when the lamps are turned off.

In caving you will discover the beauty of nature and marvel at rock formations and crystals that took thousands, and even millions, of years to shape and develop. Caves come in different shapes and sizes. There are caves that are horizontal, dry, hot, humid and sandy, while others are vertical, cold, flooded and muddy. There are even caves that are located under rivers and seas.

Another great thing about visiting a cave is that you are able to step back in time a bit, as many caves have served as dwellings for early humans, offering shelter from the outside elements. Another interesting thing about caves – when you’ve toured one, you’re going to want to tour another. Luckily there are numerous caves to explore in America that can keep you busy year after year. Let’s take a look at several which offer guided and self-guided tours perfect for the whole family:

Mammoth Cave National Park – Kentucky

Since 1816, visitors have toured Mammoth Cave, one of the world’s longest and most famous cave systems. The name Mammoth was coined not from the prehistoric wooly mammoth, but because the cave system is so huge – more than 365 miles of it has been explored so far.

Cave tour prices range from $4 to $45 and include tours for all levels of experience, from a 30-minute, self-guided discovery tour to a 6-1/2 hour “Wild Cave Tour” for more advanced cavers which involves free-climbing cave walls and crawling through areas as low as 9 inches high. Temperature inside the cave usually stays around 54° Fahrenheit year-round.

Jewel Cave National Monument – South Dakota

Located just east of the Wyoming border, Jewel Cave is considered one of the best caves in the National Park system, and number three on the list of longest caves in the world! Much of the cave remains unexplored today. But tours inside the cave offer breathtaking walks and intense caving adventure. Aside from stalactites and stalagmites, several varieties of bats reside inside the cave especially during winter.

Jewel Cave offers three different tour packages, each requiring a different level of experience. The easiest tour is the Basic Tour, which most people should be able to manage. Of course, you have to remember this is a cave, so there will be some steps to climb. On the Basic Tour there are 723 steps to manage, but you don’t have to climb them all at once, they are interspersed throughout the 1/2 mile tour. The next tour in difficulty is the Historic Tour which enters and leaves the cave through an historic entrance and views the cave from an unpaved trail. You will carry lanterns on this tour, which is considered strenuous. Children under 6 are not allowed on the Historic Tour. For the experienced cavers, Jewel Caves offers a Spelunking Tour, a 4 to 5-hour tour which snakes through 2/3 of a mile of the Cave. You are provided a headlamp by the park service, but you must provide all your other equipment. In addition, you must be over 16 and pass a number of tests before being allowed on the Spelunking Tour, including proving the ability to wriggle through an 18″ X 24″ passageway. Needless to say, people with a fear of heights or claustrophobia definitely won’t be comfortable on this tour. Reservations are required for the Spelunking tour.

Kartchner Caverns State Park – Benson, Arizona

Located in the southern part of Arizona, Kartchner Caverns was discovered in 1974 by cavers and purchased as an Arizona State Park in 1988. What’s cool about Kartchner is that it’s a “living cave,” in that the formations inside are still growing. It also contains 13,000 feet of passages, boasts one of the world’s longest soda straw stalactites – 21 feet 2 inches, and is in near-pristine condition. Typical of most caves, Kartchner Caverns has its share of bats. In fact, during the summer the Cave’s Big Room becomes a nursery roost with over 1,000 female bats.

Meramec Caverns – Stanton, Missouri

Like your caves on the commercial side? Then you’ll love Meramec Caverns, which has a gift shop inside the entrance of the cave. In fact, Meramec Caverns is the largest commercial cave in Missouri, which is known as the “Cave State” due to it containing over 6,000 surveyed caves. In addition to its natural history, Meramec Caverns has some interesting recent history, as legend has it that the cave was used as a part of the “Underground Railroad” to aid escaping slaves. Legend also has it that Jesse James and his gang hid out in the caves after committing train and bank robberies.

Meramec Caverns also has the distinction of having a ballroom inside the caves which hosts many private and public events, such as an Easter Sunrise Service. The ballroom is an interesting combination of chairs, sound system, lighting and, yes, limestone and stalagmites.

Other Missouri Caves and Caverns

As long as you’re visiting Meramec Caverns, why not check out some of the other caves in Missouri? Some notable ones include:

Fantastic Caverns – Springfield, Missouri

Fantastic Caverns is considered “America’s Ride-Through Cave” and is great for seniors, physically-challenged individuals and people with small children because you don’t walk though the cave, but, rather you take a jeep-drawn tram through the cave.

Marvel Cave – Branson, Missouri

Again, if you like your caves on the commercial side, then Marvel Cave is for you. Marvel Cave is another “living cave” with formations that are still growing, and is now part of Silver Dollar City, an amusement park with over 30 rides and attractions, the cave being one of them.

Mark Twain Cave – Hannibal, Missouri

The Mark Twain Cave was discovered in 1819 and is Missouri’s oldest show cave, providing tours to the public for over 114 years. The cave is named after “Mark Twain,” the pen name of Samuel Clemens, who explored the cave quite frequently and wrote about its wonders. Again, legend has it that Jesse James and his gang hid out in the caves.

If you’re looking for something interesting and unusual to do with your family on your next vacation, do consider visiting one of the many fascinating caves that America has to offer. You may discover a passion you never knew existed.

Have you ever wanted to travel the world and make money for writing about what you see? It’s not as hard as you may imagine. Using a few underground techniques, you can be making a healthy income in no-time flat for writing about traveling the world!

Here are the ways you can make money as a travel writer:

1) Traditional Method: Selling Your Stories To Travel Magazines and Newspapers.

This is the most common and most well-known method. Ironically, it also pays the least of all the methods.

You can take two paths when selling your article to a magazine. First you can query a magazine on their interest about a particular subject. If interested, they will agree to buy your article if it meets their standards. The second method is to write the article, then try and sell it.

To find magazines and periodicals that purchase travel stories, go to the library and check out the most recent Writers Market and you’ll have over a dozen periodicals that pay anywhere from a few hundred bucks to a few thousand dollars for an article.

The risky side to this is that there are no guarantees of payment, and you must either have a great story or be a great writer to make this work. Not impossible, just tough.

2) Writing For Other People’s Blogs.

If you can write a 400-1500 word post on any given subject, you can sell the post to a blog at a set price. Heres why: Blogs constantly need new content. It’s how they stay fresh with their readers and how they stay well-ranked in the search engines.

However, writing a new post every few days is a difficult task! If you take over that task for a blog owner, you’re going to be saving them a TON of time and effort, providing their readers with great value, and making an income for a project that is relatively easy for you to complete.

You can get paid anywhere from 20 bucks to a few hundred dollars for this kind of writing… and it’s a LOT easier to do that writing for a magazine.

Think of it: You spend a day writing 5 articles and sell the articles for $30 dollars each. Now you’ve made $150 dollars for a couple of hours of work and everyone is happy.

3) Writing for Your Own Blog.

Another option is to write your own blog and use your travel stories to drive traffic to it. You’d be surprised at the number of bored, lifeless people who want to live vicariously through someone traveling the world. You can then monetize your blog by selling adspace or selling products related to your blog. This sounds basic, but it has made many-a-traveler tens and even 100’s of thousands of dollars per year.

4) Completing Writing Projects on ‘Project’ Sites.

There are literally hundreds of writing projects posted every single day on Elance, Guru, DoMyStuff, and other ‘project’ posting websites.

All you have to do is set up a free account as a content provider, then answer people’s requests for writing projects. Once you’re done, the funds will be electronically deposited into your bank account, and you can withdraw the money from any ATM in the world. You can then pick up another project… or complete several projects all at once!

Many projects go for $1000+ dollars, so it doesn’t take a lot of these to be able to travel well and travel often. You can even do the work on the airplane ride to your next destination!

If you have any writing skill at all, you will be able to pick one of these methods and become a well-paid traveler.

**Attention Readers**

To get your copy of our free step-by-step guide showing you how to make money as you travel without ever holding a ‘job,’ visit http://www.moneyfortraveling.com. The expert authors at www.MoneyForTraveling.com

have all made a substantial internet income while traveling or they have been hired and paid well to travel the world and will show you how to do the same.



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