Go Green Travel Green

You are browsing the archives of 2008 August.

What I Learned at the Most Eco-Friendly Wedding Ever The food was grown by the bride and groom, the toilets were composting, and the tableware was borrowed from friends…. Registry: At a Local Shop or Donation to Non-Profit We learned the hard way that if you register at a national store (like Crate & Barrel), you’ll receive an obscene amount of packaging with your gifts.

So, how exactly do you get there without drowning in debt — or in glacier melt-offs?… Transportation: Getting There and Away Bus instead of flying Train instead of flying Take a ferry or ship Use Search Green Travel to save money on flights while saving the environment Buy your tickets online (since over-the-phone charges fees)

Then my environmentalist side kicked in. Considering the sheer amount of plastic that comes with a single airline meal — from the Saran wrapped plastic containers and water bottles to the disposable plastic silverware and individual-size butters — maybe this isn’t such a bad thing, environmentally speaking…. Then reality set in. Are travelers more likely to pack a homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich and bottle of water, or grab a burger, fries, and soda on their way to the gate?

“I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this — we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
- Hilaire Belloc

photo: Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Canada

After exploring the extensive beer section at the local grocery store in search a local bottle of wine and turning up only an aqua blue bottle of Boone’s Farm, we gave up and decided to seek assistance…. She was slightly less puzzled by our request for wine than Bud had been, and pointed out a huge bottle of $9.99 Sweedish Hill “Doobie Blues” and another of “Jack Ass Red, local wines named after the vineyard’s pet donkey.

Partly because my last book review post Eat, Pray, Love Quotes was well received and partly because selfishly I want to have my notes from this book in one place for a reference I pulled together my favorite quotes from In Defense of Food…. But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strickly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in frongt of the TV, and increasingly, alone– is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.” “But who knos what else is going on deep in the soul of the carrot.

In our rush to get Search Green Travel launch-ready, we’ve fallen behind on getting weekly links up. So, without further ado, here’s what the green travel blogosphere has been talking about in the past few weeks.
Fake Plastic Fish has a look at plastic in Barcelona.
No Impact Man sheds light on countries that may drown if [...]

Amazon launched Amazon Green this week, which displays products users tag as eco-friendly.  But is it a good way to find green travel gear?
Not yet.
Right now, Amazon Green is a little hard to navigate. And because the system is based on tags, if you search for green travel products you come up with items like:

Zojirushi [...]

We have a guest post up at Kayak.com about 5 (+1) Ways to Travel Green with Kayak.
If you haven’t checked out Kayak lately you’ll see that they have recently added features like sorting rental cars by miles per gallon. Remember whenever you use Kayak to give back to the environment by searching with Search Green [...]

Then walk down Robson Street and find a spot where you can observe consumerism at its best as passersby shop at stores like Armani Exchange and Tommy Hilfiger If you have a sweet tooth, get in touch with the terroir side of your traveling locavore diet , and pick up some mint truffles or maple chocolates from Daniel Le Chocolat Belge …. Day 2: Yaletown, Chinatown, Gastown, and Granville Island Munch on a vegetarian breakfast tortilla wrap while you sip artistically-designed organic espresso at Caffe Artigiano on Hornby St., then cross the street to Vancouver Art Gallery , and browse the collection of nearly 10,000 artworks by Canadian and international artists.

Search for Plane Tickets, Hotels, Rental Cars using Search Green Travel. Search Green Travel is a brand new travel tool, created by Go Green Travel Green, to assist you in your travel planning…. You Don’t Have to Buy, Only Search Using Search Green Travel is an incredibly easy way to give back to the environment– all you have to do is search for cheap travel.

Last week we hosted a Traveler’s Social Media Love-In to encourage travelers to meet each other on various social networking sites. We’ve compiled all the users who submitted their StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Digg profiles and posted them below. We had a great turn out so be sure to check out these fellow travelers’ profiles and [...]

Why, exactly, are nonstop flights so much better for the environment than flights with a stopover? Here are some calculations: During a 143 mile direct flight (roughly Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia, PA), 51% of fuel burned is from the taxi, takeoff, climb, and landing…. During a 1,151 mile nonstop flight (roughly Washington, D.C. to Minneapolis, MN), a plane burns about 13,896 lbs of fuel (1,819 of which come from take-off and landing).

Elizabeth and I had arrived in Hurghada, Egypt after a nightmarish plane ride from Moscow on which 1) I got sick from the fumes, and 2) a drunk Russian man in the seat next to mine repeatedly passed out, resting his head on my shoulder, while his friends across the aisle looked on a laughed…. Our “three star” hotel — where the shower, on full force, dribbled water like a leaky pipe — was staffed by young Egyptian men who were practically fluent in Russian, though they’d never formally studied it, and their English was good.

Welcome to this edition of the Green Travel Carnival! If you haven’t visited Go Green Travel Green before we invite you to look around. You can check out some of our popular posts via the tab on the right column or if you’re looking to start with the basics check out Green Travel 101. [...]

I couldn’t help but notice a display for Coca-Cola’s new Drink 2 Wear “sustainable” apparel Stuart Kronauge, vice president of marketing at Coca-Cola North America said , “If the 200 million Wal-Mart shoppers in the U.S. purchase these shirts, they will help us reuse and divert more than 700 million bottles from the waste stream.”… And maybe I’m wrong here, but my best guess is that it takes a lot more resources to produce these plastic shirts than it does regular cotton shirts.

You should be fairly active in these social media sites (the idea is that you will find others to friend/follow; so it’s pointless if you don’t actually use these sites) In the comments below please post the html to your profile on StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter (starting with these three, if it makes sense to add other networks we will do this again another time) I will then create pages that compile all these links together. My plan right now is to leave this open until Wednesday night at 9pm (U.S. EST ), but if it gets out of control or I start getting a lot of spammy comments I reserve the right to shut it down earlier.

I struggle to be a vegetarian (and often fail) when I travel because I believe that to fully experience a culture or destination, you should try local foods — even foods you might not ever eat at home…. Plus, you can interact with the people — farmers and craftsmen alike — whose goods you’re buying, which is an interaction that can be harder to come by in the U.S. People.

Here were some of the comments: Christine: What I would like to see specifically is Travel Blogging… promoting a travel blog, social networking for travel, what works, what doesn’t etc. All that technical and marketing stuff that isn’t covered anywhere, unless you look at Problogger.net, but then it’s so general it doesn’t apply…. That’s probably why there isn’t a place for it, and most of us just end up talking about this stuff via email with other bloggers.

There are lots of diagonal streets in DC, and when you combine those with the one-way streets, driving from point A to point B can be a time-consuming challenge…. I tried directions in a few different parts of DC and was unimpressed when I was told just about every time to go up a diagonal street that angled away from my final destination — even when there was another street that went straight there.