Traveling through another country will broaden your mind as you’ve never seen before. This is not just because of the new lifestyles, landscapes, and cultures your visit will allow you to see and experience on your travels. It is also because it will force you to become more of an observer and less of a tourist than you were at home. Traveling allows us to find out what the world is really about. It forces us to view everything with a new perspective, one where we aren’t in our own culture that we always become so accustomed to.
Coastal, Maine is the perfect destination for a relaxing getaway or a romantic weekend, and Topside Inn, a charming boutique hotel perched on the Camden Harbor waterfront offers both. The inn’s charming rooms offer all the amenities of a high-end motel, but with such incredible views that guests are constantly amazed at how a hotel room can still have a view. The breakfasts at the innkeepers’ house are prepared and cooked to order. The tasty dishes are made from scratch with local, seasonal ingredients: plenty of fruits and vegetables come from their onsite gardens, and other offerings come from the nearby farmer’s market. Topside Inn, Lincolnville ME cast a spell on me the first time I spent time there. The more I felt the inn envelope my spirit, the more I felt this was a special place with special people. The inn is handsomely appointed with an eclectic mix of antique and reproduction furniture. There are ten individually decorated rooms available, some with private baths. All have private entrances and share a balcony that overlooks gardens and woodland scenes.
Traditional Saudi clothing is all about covering up, no matter if you’re a man or woman. I was excited to be taking my first trip to Saudi Arabia, as a way to learn about that culture’s traditions. Treating people with respect and giving them the same level of attention that I would at home is important. I would learn about one of those traditions on my connecting flight from Istanbul to Riyadh. I spent time in the Middle East and it was one of the most colorful, beautiful, vibrant, and rich experiences. You don’t hear much about the good things in life…only the negative. CULTURAL TRAVEL is a positive, fun way to capture what I observed…I wanted to share with you a country where I saw a man on a donkey that had a 90-year-old woman riding on his back! It is also a country where Sharia Law allowed Mutawa, the religious police, to detain a man and a woman simply because they were an unmarried couple having a cup of coffee together at Starbucks.
Despite being the ancestral home of Islam and the site of its birth, Saudi Arabia functions as a paradox to many: rich religious history and architecture but closed society; ostentatious royal lifestyle but a great sense of family; and deep tradition coupled with burgeoning growth. The Arabian desert is a place of beauty. Whether one hikes the rocky, hard-packed sand or enjoys the softness of the Red Sands, ideal for sandboarding or riding in a dune buggy outside Riyadh, it’s a place you won’t want to miss while living abroad in this region. And what it lacks in lush greens and flowing waterfalls is made up for with windswept sand formations as far as the eye can see, including some of the most famous sand dunes in the world. If you haven’t already booked your flights and hotel reservations for your next trip to Riyadh, it doesn’t cost much to get excited about all that you’ll see there!
