Can you see the real me on Loyalty Traveler?

Over the past few years a common occurrence happens when points and miles bloggers meet me. People generally tell me that I am nothing like they expected from reading my blog.

There were about 45 bloggers at the Boarding Area conference in Colorado Springs last weekend. I spent time talking with about 15 of the bloggers.

I am horrible at small talk, mingling and working a room.

Tell stories and I’ll be hanging with you for hours. Hang with me and I’ll tell you stories for hours.

Rude Awakening

I had met only a few of the BoardingArea bloggers at two events in the past. I was a presenter at FrugalTravelGuy’s 2010 conference in Chicago. I cancelled out on the October 2011 conference in February 2011 while suffering a fever in Washington, D.C. and I have never been asked to speak at any other Points & Miles events.

I do not go to MegaDo, FTU, the Freddies and all the conference gatherings. My experience with these conferences has been most of the conversation is about someone’s latest credit card acquisition and shopping miles score rather than stories of the personal travel adventures coming out of those deals. People tend to talk about places they have been without telling much about the places and the people they meet there.

My blog is where most people meet me and apparently that is not a sufficiently revealing source of information to provide a picture of who I am and where I came from.

These comments or something very similar were said to me over the three BAcon days:

• You know how you imagine someone will be and when you meet them you realize they are completely different. (I’m not sure if that was a positive or negative reaction. I think it was positive at BAcon, although at other conferences I think it was meant negatively.)
• From your blog I thought you were much older; like 75 or something. (I am 53).
• You have a much more interesting personality than comes through on your blog. You should share more of your stories.
• You  should share more of your personal stories on your blog. (I know I just said this in the previous bullet, however, this was told to me by several people.)
• You are an odd duck among the BoardingArea bloggers.
• You really are a hippie. (Not really. I tried to be, and I lived around many hippies, but I have always been more of a solitary soul than a communal participant. That is why I am so happy living life as Loyalty Traveler blogger these days.)
• What’s up with that creepy hot tub photo on your blog?  (This sentiment was expressed by several bloggers.  That is why I addressed the hot tub photo issue in its own post this week.)

Oral Fixations

I like to hear travel stories. I like to tell travel stories.

The question I ask myself frequently as I write Loyalty Traveler blog posts is “How much of my personal history should I share in my posts?”

It is hard to know when a story from my past 53 years is relevant and interesting to readers or if it comes off as a narcissistic distraction.

So I am thinking of trying something like “Story Friday” on Loyalty Traveler where I share a travel story from my past. Since I am not good at following routines, the story will likely appear any day of the week.

To start I think I should give readers three broad spectrum posts to share my parent-guided travel years (1-15), my self-guided travel years (16-34) and my domestic and international travel years (34-48) up to the time I started writing Loyalty Traveler.

The Story Inside

My family are storytellers. We grew up in an oral tradition and much of that was due to frequent moving during the years when my father was in the army.

Can you see the real me?

I have lived in Monterey for the past ten years and I was born about seven miles from where I currently live. I met my wife Kelley at the Monterey Peninsula Junior College in a room about ten minutes walk from where we live. Until 2001, I never lived in the same place for more than four years.

Growing up I changed schools 12 times in 11 years from kindergarten to my last year of high school. I stayed at Seaside High for less than one year before leaving home during my junior year on a cross-country Greyhound bus to see the U.S. My parents were not the problem I was fleeing. I had wanderlust and school was too depressing a place to be hanging out for another year.

For the next few years I blew like a tumbleweed or dandelion from place to place living on the beaches of Oahu and Kauai, deserts of Nevada and the woods of Vermont. Some days I ‘d simply walk out to the road and put my thumb out to see where I would end up at the end of the day. I love the outdoors and I quickly tire of cities and crowds of people.

Rock and roll music gave me life. I am not a musician, just a listener. Before starting Loyalty Traveler my favorite job was nine months I worked in a record store when I was 19. I am a bit of a musicologist and most of the live concerts I have seen in my life were the result of winning rock trivia contests. If you want to talk Classic Rock, I am a good resource. Readers might notice I often use rock lyrics in my blog posts.

This post is not a travel story. This is just an opener.

Until another Story Friday.

Update May 18, 2013: Yesterday was a day spent in Yosemite where I had to tell myself for 90 minutes to put the camera down and get laser focused on driving home before dark. While making the 4-hour drive from Yosemite Valley to Monterey, I realized I forgot to add that the BAcon conference was the best travel-blogging-as-a-business conference I have attended yet. This post made that major omission and likely left some readers with the wrong impression of BAcon.

There were 45 bloggers at BAcon and many memorable travel stories to hear from bloggers who travel for business and leisure. I know I’ll be reading more travel bloggers regularly after last weekend.

Randy Petersen and the team excelled at the conference organization.

I gave a teacher a hug today as I kissed my wife and she left for work this morning to teach a public school classroom of five- and six-year-old children.

The news coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre these past 72 hours broke our hearts with the tragic details of death in a public school. Schools are typically a sanctuary of safety in every community, regardless of the community’s issues outside the school grounds.

My wife Kelley and I have been credentialed public elementary school teachers since the early 1990s. She still works on the front lines of society in the trenches of a community public school. A teacher is an educator and a social worker, a child advocate and ‘in loco parentis’ guardian of numerous children during the school day.

Schools are one of the few places where nearly all children of a community come together without the barriers of socioeconomic class, religion, and ethnicity that otherwise tend to segregate our communities.

Many of us are deeply touched by and mourning the massacre of first grade school children and teaching staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Kelley and I spent the weekend listening to media coverage and talking about what this school week will be like; not in Newtown Connecticut, but here in California.

School site trauma is rare. Friday afternoon’s media coverage revealed many journalists were even ignorant of the fact that schools practice lockdown drills in addition to fire drills. School staff are trained with school lockdown drills to handle threatening situations. We pray that training never needs to be implemented.

Kelley and I have experienced several real lockdowns at public schools. These generally occur as a precaution when police are trying to apprehend an armed suspect in the community. Fortunately we have never been involved in a school related shooting.

Thinking back over our time in schools revealed times were not necessarily better in the past. Kelley’s past includes being a 6th grade student in Monterey County at a public school classroom with her teacher mother on a weekend when a teacher working in another classroom was violently assaulted and murdered.  The past couple of weeks I pieced together how I came to be in Hawaii in fall 1977 at the age of 17, rather than in high school for my senior year. I left high school during 11th grade. Gangs, guns and too much violence drove me out of high school in my pursuit of a better and safer environment. I live about five miles from my old high school and I think our community is a far safer place now than it was 35 years ago.

The media debate this past weekend has revolved around gun control, more school security and mental health services.

Placing more guns in school in the form of security guards or arming staff is a really bad idea in my opinion.

Child safety will be better served by having more school personnel to cover recesses and lunch and assist teachers in the classroom. More adults working with children rather than guarding children is the real essential need at most school sites to provide a better and safer learning environment for children.

I heard journalists suggest metal detectors at schools. Seriously?

My wife’s class could use more pencils, paper, textbooks, and disinfectant wipes to immediately improve school conditions for children.

Access to mental health services is one of the keys to dealing with troubled children before they become troubled adults. Typically a school and children at that school are faced with months coping with the situation of a disturbed and violent child, before the child is removed from a classroom or school to a more restrictive educational setting. School districts pay a large proportion of the expense to relocate a mentally disturbed child who walks into the public school system. My wife and I have both had students who were removed from traditional classroom settings due to violent behavior and it is usually a long-term battle with the school administration and/or parents to secure social services and a more appropriate placement for a child afflicted with mental health issues.

I recommend reading a piece published by Liza Long, ‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America http://huff.to/U4LqWk via HuffPostParents.

How does Kelley as a kindergarten teacher comfort five and six year old children and assure parents and their kids that the children at her school are in a safe place?

Teachers carry on with the lessons of the day. Children learn their ABCs and math, and just as importantly as academics, children in school learn the daily social lessons of kindness, treat others nicely and fairly, share and help someone who needs assistance.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Source: “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN” by Robert Fulghum. See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/

I stopped by my wife’s classroom last Thursday on my way to San Francisco to do a quick photography project.

One of her kindergarten students asked me a question.

“Where have you been? On vacation?”

I replied, “That’s what your teacher says.”

Elementary school teacher is a tough job. Most people who try to teach as a career give up and move on after a few years. I moved on after ten years working as a public school teacher. Now I just try to help school children when and where I can as a volunteer.

Days in San Diego, Hawaii, San Francisco and Big Sur have kept me away from my wife’s classroom much of the past month. I’ll be pitching in this week at school to help wrap up the school week before the holiday break.

Teachers and children deserve the opportunity to have a safe and fulfilling learning environment in the community. We can all help meet that goal.

And tonight when Kelley returns home from her day in the classroom, I will give her another hug.

“Yesterday’s Dream – Tomorrow’s Memory” – Lover’s Point, Pacific Grove, California

November 6, 2012. This is election day.  Monterey is burning up with election fever this sunny 80 degrees Presidential Election Day 2012 on the central coast of California. Yesterday even set an all-time high temperature record for the date at 87 degrees and the third hottest day of 2012.

Cannery Row, Monterey, California

This post is not about hotels. It is about voting in California.

Most of my readers are Americans. Most of you are not from California.

This is not a partisan piece. I want to defeat both parties at the ballot box. Read More…

My morning routine on schooldays – my wife is a first grade public school teacher – is to scan the morning papers for any story of interest to stir my wife’s curiosity and wake her from morning sleep. Huffington Post is my usual stomping ground since a Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart video generally grabs her attention. No new videos today. So I went looking for details to see if the National Parks Service has issued the permit for the Saturday, October 30 rally on the Washington Mall. The permit was reportedly amended yesterday to up the attendance from 25,000 to 60,000 people.

Stephen Colbert – March to Keep Fear Alive

Jon Stewart – Rally to Restore Sanity

This morning I quickly browsed through the LA Times, San Jose Mercury, New York Times, CNN, and landed back on Huffington Post. Eventually I made my way to the Huffington Post Travel section.

Mall of America is getting the second Radisson Blu hotel in the U.S. But, I already knew that story.

Italy bans the plastic water bottle along heritage coastline. This one caught my interest due to a story I read yesterday about the first water fountain opening in Paris to dispense carbonated water. That article mentioned the fountains were common in Italy. My wife and I acquired a taste for carbonated water after a year’s worth of vacations in Europe this past decade. We have been weaning ourselves of the habit specifically due to the plastic bottle waste. But at least we drink our San Francisco produced Crystal Geyser and not some bottled sparkling water shipped from Europe. And I always recycle which is quite an ordeal in California with our antiquated redemption bottle recycling program.

Virgin Hotels is being launched by Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines fame. How often does Branson hit one out of the park? At 14 I liked to view my Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells LP record label. At 50 I like the mood lighting and white plastic interior of the Virgin America airplane. Can’t wait to see the Virgin hotel. But, I already knew that story too.

Hotel Kicks Out Cancer Patient After Bad TripAdvisor Review is a story I have seen around for days. This story even made its way to Lucky’s One Mile at a Time blog yesterday. But the Huffington Post story title was the first time I actually saw the word “cancer” in connection with the story. Kelley woke from her sleep and asked me to read the “Bad TripAdvisor” piece.

Adrian Healy and Sherrie Andrews were on a three day hotel stay at the Golden Beach Hotel in Blackpool, England. They were vacationing as a respite after his first round of chemotherapy treatment. The second night of their stay the hotel manager called Blackpool Police to evict the couple after he accused them of posting a bad TripAdvisor review.

My survey of the TripAdvisor reviews for the Golden Beach Hotel in Blackpool, England does not match up with the Sep 4 stay dates reported by the Blackpool Gazette. There is a September 8 TripAdvisor.com review which appears to most closely relate to this story, however, the date is September 8, 2010 and the poster is listed as a 65+ year old man.

And here is the manager’s response to this review:

How would the Golden Beach hotel manager even know about the TripAdvisor review during the couple’s stay if this incident happened on September 3, 2010? Are hotels notified of TripAdvisor reviews before they are actually published?

There was a family with children negative review on September 4 and the next earlier date is August 27, 2010.

Things do not quite add up with this story.

Now I have written my fair share of negative hotel reviews. First word of advice is go to the hotel manager on duty during your hotel stay to remedy a bad situation. Then, write the hotel review after you have left the property.

So you say it’s your birthday, well it’s my birthday too

Today, September 23, is my wife’s birthday – Happy Birthday Kelley and Bruce Springsteen.

Readers new to Loyalty Traveler blog in 2010 may not be aware that my wife was diagnosed with rectal cancer in January 2009 and she went through nine months of cancer chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation treatment. She has been cancer free for the past year.

SPG Insider is in bed with me and Huffington Post

After reading the TripAdvisor bad review story I noticed a Twitter link to instantly post the story to my Twitter account.

But what is this box for including “commercial text from Starwood Preferred Guest” on the Huffington Post page?

I checked the ‘Yes’ box to follow my own investigative travel journalism instinct.

And this is what it looked like when posting the TripAdvisor bad review story to Twitter.

[As a side note, The Bloggess is one of the funniest, irreverent women I follow. She was featured at BlogWorldExpo 2009 last October and I laughed so hard. She is a comic genius, if you are not too easily offended by her humor.]

Looking up #SPGInsider I see the twitter feed for HuffingtonPost travel is sponsored by Starwood Preferred Guest.

I don’t mind SPG being in my bed with me and HuffingtonPost. At least the option is there to not insert a #SPGInsider link in your tweet.

The internet is about brand exposure and data mining. The primary function for Twitter is self-promotion. The most practical use I have seen for Twitter is taking questions and comments remotely during a conference or seminar and displaying them for the audience to read in real time.

Hey SPG – isn’t HuffingtonPost leaning a little to the left? I actually voted for Arianna Huffington in the October 2003 California special election that gave us our 38th and current governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Arianna is an example of someone who had the ability to change political views to evolve into a left leaning political machine.

So what’s next for SPG? Might I suggest a corporate sponsorship tweet link for Democracy Now.

I get the news that truly matters to me during the 6am hour here in Monterey when our local cable access channel broadcasts Democracy Now bringing Amy Goodman to our breakfast table, one of America’s finest journalists.

I was born in the army, but I was never a military serviceman. I grew up on U.S. military bases surrounded by the U.S. Armed Forces. I went to U.S. military hospitals to be born, when I was sick, and when I broke my wrist. No need to worry about insurance or payment. The military is the most socialist subculture of America.

I lived in military housing with my sisters and parents. I learned to maintain the yard with a lawnmower and edge trimmer before I was ten and how to scrub surfaces on counters, walls, and cars to rigorous military standards for inspection clearance.

I was educated in elementary, junior high, and high schools on military bases in several states and Germany.

My impressions of the military and soldiers and war were formed as a child.

My father was a career army soldier and served three tours in Vietnam. He first served when I was three and he was back in Vietnam for the entire year I was in first grade. In 1970-71, when I was in fifth grade, my dad served his third and final tour in Vietnam. He returned home in time for my 12^th birthday. Just thirteen months later, January 1973, the Vietnam War ceasefire came.

Fort Sill, Oklahoma, adjacent to the city of Lawton, is where I experienced first-hand the only war death I recall from my life. The year was 1968 or 1969 and I was in third grade. Fort Sill offered suburban American life with sports fields, swimming pools, movie theaters, schools, churches and libraries.

The army housing area where we lived on Fort Sill was a series of one story duplexes. I don’t recall the family who shared our duplex, but across the street were the wild boys Lonnie and Ronnie and their older sisters. They were hellions and I recall getting my first strapping courtesy of their dad and with the permission of my parents for something unrecalled that I did with the wild bunch.

Living next to them on the other side of the duplex was a black family with a boy my age. I don’t recall his name, but we were friends and we played with his sizeable plastic army men collection regularly at each other’s houses until they moved.

Our duplex was on the corner lot and in the adjacent duplex building next to our house lived twins, two young girls, also in the third grade. We went to the same school at Fort Sill, but neither girl was in my classroom. The two blonde sisters next door were known to me, but we rarely socialized.

The girls living next door seemed to be the only kids on the block without a dad living at home in the military housing family neighborhood. Their father was in Vietnam.

One day my mother told me the girls’ dad was killed in Vietnam. She said the girls and their mother would have to move out of the duplex soon. I remember thinking it was strange that the girls had to leave their home so soon after their father had died.

As a kid it was difficult to comprehend the duplex on an army base in Oklahoma was not really their home. We were all brought together in that place at that time as part of the armed forces that included tens of thousands of family dependents in addition to the service men and women in active duty.

I asked my mother this Memorial Day 2010 what she remembered about the family next door at Fort Sill. She hadn’t thought of the woman in a long time. The thing she recalled was the neighbor lady gave her two wooden figurines of a woodcutter and his wife that still reside in my parents’ home. The serviceman’s widow gave these figurines to my mother as a thank you gift for helping take care of the girls after the loss of their father and helping her vacate their duplex at Fort Sill.

Military life is transitory.

A wooden memorial to a fallen soldier keeps a widow and her deprived children in my family’s hearts and minds more than forty years later.

Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have claimed the lives of more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Americans have been injured in the fighting this past decade. Most soldiers come home and carry on with the rest of their lives. Fortunate children grow old with their war veteran mothers and fathers.

Other soldiers do not return.

The casualties of war extend beyond the fighting men and women. There are the innocents who suffer loss. Widows, children, families and friends have memories and memorials.

I am remembering this Memorial Day.

I thought of the third grade girls as I read an LA Times story about the high kiddie tax on military survivor benefits for young children who have lost a parent in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the two other war stories caught my attention today.

Los Angeles Time – Critical decisions overwhelm those who lose spouses to war

AirForce Times -  Families: Survivor benefits overlook some (More than 140 single parents, most women, have died in Iraq.)

San Jose Mercury News – Remembering a Fallen Daughter (And the war drags on…)

Pacific Ocean sunset at Rocky Creek, Big Sur coast, Monterey County

I added some photos to FlyerTalk in my album titled Monterey. This is my first time playing with this feature. Here are some shots and commentary from places in and around Monterey.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/members/satori-albums-monterey.html