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MotorCycles
Are you an adventurer? Do you have the spirit of a wanderer? If so, then the hottest new trend in vacation travel, a motorcycle vacation, may be just the ticket for you. Whatever countryside you enjoy, and whatever bike you ride, a motorcycle vacation promises great fun and entertainment.
Imagine a history buff that uses a motorcycle to explore old Civil War battlefields. Wilson’s Creek in southwest Missouri, Pea Ridge in Northwest Arkansas, and the site of the battle of West Port near the Plaza in modern day Kansas City are all easily accessible by bike. Or, if exploring the west is more your thing, take a trek out west, starting in Sedalia, the scene of the first recorded cattle drive in history. Then on your bike trace the other cattle towns of the old west like Wichita, Parsons and Dodge City in Kansas. Then keep heading west to Colorado the mile high state and visit Estes Park. Go a little south and visit Colorado Springs, park your bike for a day and take a tour of the Air Force Academy and look at the grounds of Cheyenne Mountain, home of Norad.
Still yearning for more western adventure, then you can ride your motorcycle to New Mexico and visit Lincoln County where Billy the Kid and his Regulators raised a ruckus in the 1880’s. New Mexico has great camping in the mountains near Cloudcroft, so be sure to take the opportunity to visit and if you feel up to it, sleep under the stars, with your trusty motorcycle near you, like a cowboy’s horse.
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As the baby boomers retire, the recreational vehicle industry has seen an upsurge in sales. For many people, nothing measures up to the independence and flexibility of enjoying the open road in a recreational vehicle (RV). There is certainly much to be said for taking your hotel with you wherever you go, and the savings on hotel costs can more than pay for the initial cost of an RV.
RV travelers realize the cost savings of this type of travel. There are no hotel rooms to book and dining in your RV can save an enormous amount of money compared to eating in restaurants every day. Owning a fifth wheel or travel trailer, whereas you can unhook your RV from your truck, saves you from having to book a rental car. For those in motor homes, many travelers will tow a vehicle behind them.
When considering the purchase of an recreational vehicle, you will be faced with three choices; a fifth wheel which is pulled by a pick up truck and attaches to a wheel inside the truck box (hence its name fifth wheel), a travel trailer which is usually pulled by a truck with a rear hitch, or a motor home. All three types of RV’s have their pros and cons and each point will need to be considered based upon your needs and your budget. Other consideration for the RV lifestyle is the price of gas. However, it is still more economical than staying in hotels and eating at restaurants every night.
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Boating holidays are a wonderful way to spend the summer! Just pack your bags and float around on a houseboat or a yacht for a few weeks, enjoying the sunshine, fishing and swimming and visiting towns along the shoreline. It’s comparable in cost to staying in a hotel, with so much less hassle. And it’s great for the whole family, especially the kids. Children always find entertainment on and around water. They swim and snorkle, while adults relax in a fold-up chair with a cool drink and a book.
Boating holidays, as opposed to travel on large cruise ships, offer a more intimate and relaxed voyage without the bustle of thousands of mega-ship passengers all around you. And the venues are more intriguing than the tourist traps visited by the big cruise ships. The smaller boats are surprisingly well-serviced, with features such as showers and sometimes bicycles for tours around the countryside during stops.
Many online services throughout the world offer trips on local canals and lakes surrounded by historic locations. What about a canal trip throughout Holland? This seafaring nation was built on marshland, and vestiges of the marsh still remain in the form of canals criss-crossing the whole country connecting quaint towns (with architecture carefully preserved, thanks to Dutch laws against the remodeling of historic buildings) to cosmopolitan cities such as Amsterdam.
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I fancy buying an RV darling. Ok Honey, go out and get one and we can spend all our vacation time in it and have great fun. Wrong, very wrong. Do not buy an RV if this is how you are thinking. Your RV will just be a waste of money.
Buying an RV is an important decision and something the whole family needs to be involved in. An RV is also an investment, an investment in time and cost but you will not see a profit on an RV, well not in financial terms but it can have a huge payback in terms of satisfaction and enjoyment but if you just rush out and buy an RV without giving it a lot of thought then it could be, at best, an expensive waste of money, and an RV can be, at worst, a marriage breaker. I know as I have seen it happen.
When we were trading up to a larger and newer RV, my sister in law from Atlanta decided she was going to buy our old RV. The trouble was it was her idea and not a joint family decision. She had been on vacation with us a few times and liked the lifestyle, thought it would be great for her daughter to spend more time in the countryside but she never really considered if her husband wanted an RV. He was the type who would choose a sports car to drive without thinking of where his daughter was going to sit. He liked speed, acceleration and easy maneuvering, not something you tend to find with an RV. It lasted a few years with him being unhappy with all his vacations in the RV, he bumped into a few trucks and did some damage to the RV, (which I had to repair), and was just generally unhappy with the whole idea of having a vacation in an RV. It got to the stage of seriously damaging their marriage. What went wrong? Well my sister-in-law did not sit down and really think about an RVer’s lifestyle.
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