I may be taking a break but I wouldn’t dream of missing a chance to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. My friend here wants to remind you all to eat fish for Thanksgiving dinner! 🙂
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Short Sabbatical
Editor in Chief
Aroundustyroads.com is going on a short break. Dusty needs some time to develop new material. We don’t want to bore anyone with reruns and repeats. It’s ok to share a popular post over again occasionally but we don’t want to depend on that to meet our posting quota.
Speaking of posting schedules, I think Dusty is re-thinking that and will probably make some changes in 2012. I’m sure she will explain her reasons at that time. At this point I’m not sure how much time she is taking although I know she will have some posts during the holidays. A lot will depend on time, how much time does she have to get to places and how much time does she have to prepare the post.
So we hope you’ll miss us but I promise we’ll be back in a very short time with all new places and experiences to share. 🙂
National Blog Posting Month
Guess What! November is National Blog Posting Month. Imagine that! In honor of the month bloggers are encouraged to make a commitment to post everyday for the whole month. I guess it doesn’t matter if you just post a picture or a link or steal something from one of your fellow bloggers. ( Oh Oh…did I say that!) Nothing original required.
The rules of NaBloPoMo ( that’s the acronym) are simple, although the challenge is set up on an honor system. Participants are required to publish one post on their personal website or blog every day. There is no length requirement, with some posters writing long essays every day and others posting photographs and brief captions. Participants are not permitted to back post or schedule jobs to upload posts in the future, but must actively create a post every day for the month of November.
So those rules eliminate me right off the bat. I write most of my posts Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (my days off) and schedule them to post the rest of the week. I only write posts on Thursday – Saturday when I’ve dropped the ball earlier in the week. Oops! I guess life got in the way.
You see I started this blog to share experiences and thoughts heavily weighted toward travel. Sometimes I don’t have any travel experiences to share. Then I just share what’s happening in my day-to-day life. But sometimes my day-to-day life begins to take up a lot of time and when that happens the blog suffers. (sigh)
What good is sharing experiences if you stop experiencing in order to sit at the computer all day and if you do that, where are you getting your experiences to share? (Did you get all that?)
I set a goal last January to blog daily because that’s what the gurus of blogging said needed to be done to attract readers. Within the first quarter I realized I couldn’t keep up that schedule. So I admitted defeat and revised a posting schedule of 6 days, taking off Sunday.
That worked pretty well for most of the year but as work has been getting busier and other projects are nearing completion and need wrapping up, even a 6 day posting schedule has been a stretch. So for all the bloggers out there that are going to give the challenge a shot, my best wishes to you. Maybe I’ll join you someday but it won’t be this year!
Thanks to Fellow Blogger LadyDiBlog for tipping me off to this special month.
For more information: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-nablopomo.htm
Hefty Fines in the Wind
Mother Nature battered the northeast a week ago and made travel a nightmare.
For passengers on 6 Jet Blue flights and 1 American Airlines plane, the travel nightmare was magnified when the planes they were on were diverted to Hartford, Connecticut.
The planes ran out of snacks and bottled water and the toilets backed up long before they were in a position to deplane the passengers. One the news a tape was played of a Jet Blue Pilot begging for help to get his passengers off the plane and into the terminal. It was approximately 7 hours before the nightmare on the planes came to a close but even then the passengers were still stranded in the terminal.
Under the so-called tarmac delay rules put in place last year, both airlines, could be slapped with a fine of $27,000 per passenger, MarketWatch reported, a whopping $18,900,000 for JetBlue alone.
As I watched the news story I was horrified for the passengers. They mentioned a diabetic passenger in distress and a wheel chair bound passenger along with passengers with babies and small children.
But once the dust settled and I tried to look at the situation objectively I think there are some mitigating factors. First and foremost was the severity of the storm, a record-breaking early season storm. This brutal weather forced the flights to be diverted to Bradley International which was experiencing weather related issues of their own such as intermittent power outages which caused delays in deplaning.
These planes were not the only planes diverted. In a report I saw over 17 planes were diverted to Bradley pushing it over its capacity to handle the additional traffic along with planes that were scheduled to land there anyway.
Although the Passenger Bill of Rights will fine the airlines, it sounds to me as if some of the blame in this case falls on the airport and a large part on Mother Nature. The pilots managed to land their planes safely in adverse conditions but then they were at the mercy of the airport and it sounds like the airport let them down, probably through no fault of their own after… all there was a blizzard going on.
Maybe better plans can be put in place to handle such circumstanes. After all, this is New England and storms do happen. We are not even into “winter’ yet so let’s hope this isn’t a taste of things to come.
http://www.ctnow.com/news/hc-jet-blue-transcripts-1101-20111031,0,7874559.story
Christmas decorations already?
What happened to Thanksgiving? Wasn’t Halloween only last week? The candy is still on sale!
I drove by the Taunton Green and they are stringing the Christmas lights already. Since Taunton is known as The Christmas City the display each year is quite elaborate so I’ll give them a little slack.
However I ran into Walmart to pick up a few things and there by the door was a fully decorated Christmas Tree! Inside the store you could shop to the tune of Jingle Bell Rock.
Maybe it was the early snow storm that swept through New England but I still think the Christmas trees and decorations should go up the day after Thanksgiving….one holiday at a time!
Of course if retailers must get ready for the season before Thanksgiving, could’t we have a week or two after Halloween to finish eating our candy before we start to think of cookies and milk for the Jolly Old Elf?
Merry Thanksmas everyone. Have a Bootiful day 🙂