Smart Traveller

The Blue Ridge Parkway is one of the most beautiful scenic driving routes in America and stretches from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. It took more than 50 years to construct the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is 469 miles long.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is about 1 hour and 45 minutes’ drive from Richmond Airport, and you can hire a car at the airport for your trip. If you want to explore the route thoroughly and without rushing your car hire holiday, it can take up to ten days.

You’ll be able to see stunning scenery as you drive along the route, as it winds through some of the most beautiful parts of the USA at an average altitude of 3,000 - 4,000 feet.

There are also plenty of attractions that you can visit nearby, such as Stonewall Jackson House, The Natural Bridge, Virginia Safari Park, the VA Museum of Transportation and Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. You’ll find plenty of places to stay in the area and a range of places where you can stop for something to eat.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is open throughout the year, although some sections may be closed during bad weather or for repair during the winter. However, the best times of year to take a car hire holiday in this part of the USA are in Spring and early Summer or in Autumn.

Image by: Brian Stansberry

Borders UK is marking the release of the new romantic comedy, Marley and Me, which stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, with a competition in which you could win a trip for two to Miami.

The prize consists of two return flights from London to Miami, five nights’ bed and breakfast accommodation in a 3-star hotel in Miami, return transfers from the airport to your hotel, travel insurance and spending money.

You can enter the competition via the Borders UK website. Simply complete your details and answer a simple question about the film. Entries must be received by the 3rd of April, 2009.

Image by: Ixitixel

Ecotourism can be a great way of seeing the world whilst either minimising the effects of your travel on the environment or even actively helping the environment through volunteer work. However, many of the green holiday options available still involve air travel which, as discussed previously, contributes to carbon emissions and, as a result, to climate change.

Sometimes flying is the only viable way to get to a destination and, as mentioned in the earlier post, simply avoiding such places could be counter-productive, as some poorer communities rely on money from tourism. So, when we need to travel by air, is carbon offsetting a good solution?

There are a number of websites that you can use in order to offset carbon emissions.  You can use these sites to calculate the carbon emissions that you will be responsible for as a result of a flight (or in respect of driving your car or the electricity that you use in your home each year), and then pay to offset these emissions. The money that you pay is then used to fund projects such as producing renewable energy, or providing people in Asia or Africa with energy-efficient cooking appliances.

The Government accepts that carbon offsetting can be valuable but the Directgov website states that “offsetting should be a final choice if air travel is unavoidable. It can help reduce the impact of your activities in the short term, but it’s not a substitute for producing less emissions in the first place”.

However, some people believe that carbon offsetting is nothing more than a way for people to assuage their guilt and provides us with a “feel-good” factor without us actually having to change our behaviour in any way. In an article published on the BBC’s website last week, Martin Livermore goes even further, describing carbon offsetting as “transferring money to developing countries to fund projects that probably would have been implemented anyway, and with little real impact on emissions”.

For Livermore, the only way to slow down the effects of climate change is to entirely rethink the way in which we use energy: “The answer is to use the best available and most cost effective low carbon technology for base load generation (nuclear power), increase the focus on energy efficiency in all sectors of the economy, and encourage R&D on new transport and power generation technologies”.

So where does this leave the traveller? If we need to fly occasionally, it’s surely better to do something in order to counteract the effects of our travel than to do nothing and wait for the world’s governments to take action. After all, changing the way in which we use fossil fuels is unlikely to be a soution that can be implemented quickly.

Another solution, however, could be to channel the money that we would have donated to a carbon offsetting programme to somewhere where it could have an even greater effect.

Oxfam, one of the world’s best known charities, for example, is running a climate change campaign. Not only does the charity provide aid, particularly in the form of disaster relief, to the people directly affected by the consequences of climate change, it is also campaigning for direct action from governments to support these people and to cut emissions.

You can make donations to Oxfam in order to help the charity to fund its work, but you can also get involved by sending emails to decision-makers and signing online petitions. Taking such a proactive approach to the issue of climate change, as well as working to reduce the emissions for which our individual lifestyles are responsible, could result in major long-term changes in the world.