What are your favourite travel food memories? You know the ones I mean. Sometimes you have a gastronomic experience that is so great that you can still almost taste it 10 or 20 years later. Sometimes it’s not about the food but about the context while at other times it is very much about the food. Here are some of my best loved food travel experiences.

Iced Tea, Venezuela

It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia.

Paella and Guitar, Barcelona

Fast forward a few years and I was in Barcelona with a couple of friends. It was our first trip and we decided that we had to sample paella. We couldn’t have picked a better location. It was a cafe with a view of the beach. It was warm and breezy. When we ordered we got a paella large enough to feed six — or so it seemed. It was beautifully presented and we tucked in with gusto. But the experience got even better when a thin man with very few teeth came to our table and started to play the Spanish guitar. While we knew it was probably a cheesy tourist gimmick the guitar added the right setting for our Spanish meal.

Garlic Pizza, the Alps

What’s exciting about garlic pizza, you may ask? This is one case where the context made the dish exciting. A friend and I had been visiting Nice when she had a problem with the car. It was a Saab and had to go to a registered dealer. The problem proved to be easy to fix but quite costly so we emptied our pockets to pay for the repairs so we could resume our trip to Germany. We left just enough for emergencies. We set off, driving through the night across the Alps, sharing a bottle of water and waiting until the last possible minute before getting something to eat as we knew that would be the last meal we would have for about eight hours.  At last we happened upon a little mountain cafe. We went in and looked at the menu — all we could afford was the garlic pizza, but we were so hungry that nothing had ever tasted that good.

These are just a few of my food travel experiences, have you got any to share?

(Photo: vanaclocha)

Are you blogging and writing about travel? Want to make some money and gain the recognition of your peers and others? Check out these travel writing and blogging contests.

Telegraph Travel Writing Competition

Called Just Back, the weekly competition offers writers the chance to win £200 in the currency of their choice. Just submit an entry of up to 500 words to justback@telegraph.co.uk (UK residents; see full T&C)

Solas Awards

An annual competition for which submissions are open all year round, the Solas Awards have a submission length of 750 words. Entry fees apply. (US residents; see full T&C). Closing date for this year’s competition is September 21, 2010.

52 Perfect Days Travel Writing Contest

Submit up to 1,000 words on an experience in a National Monument, National Seashore or Historic Parks in the United State or Canada. The prize for the 52 Perfect Days Travel Writing Contest is a trip to Hawaii. (US, Canada, Mexico residents; see full T&C). Closing date: October 31, 2010.

Gran Tourismo Monthly Travel Blogging Competition

Starting this month and running all year, Gran Tourismo has a monthly travel blogging competition on different themes. You need 500 words of “evocative travel writing”. There are three prizes on offer. (T&C) Closing date for this month: March 28,2010.

Holiday Velvet

Holiday Velvet is offering a weekend in Barcelona for writers of an original short travel story (bloggers welcome too). It’s open to everyone except professional travel writers. (See the T&C for a definition). Closing date: September 10,2010.

Do you know of any travel writing and travel blogging competitions? Let us know in the comments, please.

Preservation Foundation

Preservation Foundation runs a number of contests for unpublished writers, including a travel non fiction contest, with a prize of $100. Stories must be between 1,500 and 5,000 in length.

Annual Contests to Watch

The following contests are currently closed, but usually run annually.

• The Sliced Bread Magazine Travel Writing Contest. Offers $300 in prize money. (T&C)
• Wanderlust and Lipstick has run a travel writing contest for two years.
• The Guardian in the UK runs a summer travel writing competition. (See also this link.)

Photo: WarzauWynn

Today I wanted to share with you some of the new places where Park Ride Fly USA will be hanging out online from now on. They’re not really that new but we are new to using them, at least in this incarnation. You already know how to find us on Twitter (big shout out to all our followers) which is where we’re most active at the moment.

But if you prefer to spend your online time on other sites there are a few new places where you can also connect with us. (By the way, I’m not using the ‘royal we’ — other people from the company may make an input from time to time.) On most sites you can find us as either Sharon at PRF (that’s me), parkrideflyusa or parkridefly.

One new place where we are happy to be is on Facebook where we have a brand new page. On our Park Ride Fly USA Facebook page we are sharing a few of the articles, posts and resources we find useful. I am happy to say that it’s not just going to be a rehash of our Twitter stream — our Facebook page will include items that we don’t share anywhere else. And once we’ve built up a community we hope to use that page to have more in-depth discussions about travel related issues.

We’ve also got a spanking-new Google profile so that we can take part in conversations on Buzz and we’re also enjoying taking part in Friendfeed. These four places are where you’re most likely to find us online but if you want to connect with us on other sites, I will be maintaining a list of all our online hangouts through our Retaggr profile. See you in cyberspace!

Something a bit different this week - some more inspirational travel quotes. Hope you enjoy them, and feel free to share yours in the comments.

1. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. - Maya Angelou
2. We must travel in the direction of our fear. - John Berryman
3. It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end. - Ursula Le Guin
4. The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  – St. Augustine
5. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust
6. To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. - Richard Bach
7. The only journey is the one within. - Rainer Maria Rilke
8. You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. - Rabindranath Tagore
9. Shoot for the moon and if you miss you will still be among the stars. - Les Brown
10. Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia. - Peanuts
11. We may run, walk, stumble, drive, or fly, but let us never lost sight of the reason for the journey, or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way. - Gloria Gaither
12. A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles - Tim Cahill
13. Voyage upon life’s sea, To yourself be true, And, whatever your lot may be, Paddle your own canoe. - Sarah Boulton
14. Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it. - Greg Anderson
15. You are not the child of the people you call mother and father, but their fellow-adventurer on a bright journey to understand the things that are.” - Richard Bach
16. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost
17. Make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards! — Nikolai Gogol
18. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.- Mark Twain
19. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. - Lao Tzu
20. In America, there are two classes of travel — first class, and with children. - Robert Benchley

(Photo: magro_kr)

According to a recent study vacation planning makes us happier than taking a vacation. I found this little titbit through a post on by Christine Garvin on the Matador network, titled The Truth About Happiness and Travel. In it, the author examines this study and finds that there might be some truth in those results but I began to think about how this applies to my own situation, and concluded that I didn’t entirely agree.

Planning A Trip

For me, while there is some anticipation in the planning stage  of a trip (mainly because I’ll be thinking about a really great place) this part of the process can also be stressful. That could be because I’m a control freak — or to be a little kinder to myself, like to get every detail right. When making decisions about how to travel and where to stay, I have no idea how it will turn out. Depending on how good my research is, that might be a cause of stress.

Where’s The Fun?

I agree with Christine Garvin that some parts of travel aren’t as much fun as they could be. As I said before, when ranting about the things that annoyed me about travel, spending hours in queues even when you are using the fast bag drop, the interminable security process, cramped seats and poor airplane food (when you get any) make the journey to your destination not that much fun. Some people relax the minute they decide to go on holiday; I only relax when I’ve reached to where I’m staying. (I’m not saying that’s the way to do it; that’s just the way I am.)

Vacation Travel — Still A Thrill

Where I disagree, however, is in finding that the actual vacation experience is less thrilling than I anticipated. Generally speaking I really enjoy vacations. They represent a good chance to see, do and eat something different. They are a change of scene. It doesn’t much matter whether I am traveling for a short while longer period — I still enjoy the experience of being in a new place. Keeping some perspective also helps make vacation travel an enjoyable experience. If you don’t expect everything to be the same as it is at home then you will find difference exciting rather than exasperating.

For me, this was the best point Christine made in her post:

The point of travel is not only to achieve a high return on happiness – it’s also to learn about ourselves, other cultures, and even to be challenged to grow via those pesky annoyances.

I definitely agree with that.

A recent post by Ken McGuire wondered whether airport parking online was a bit too easy. He discussed his experience of travelling through Dublin airport and avoiding the old hassles of having to pay for your space before getting on the bus to get you back to the car. He commented favorably on the rate offered for a weekend’s airport parking. For our money, this is the way it should always be. What’s the point of looking airport parking online if it doesn’t save you hassle?

Choosing Off Airport Parking

When I travel I always arrange airport parking in advance. It’s usually offsite and I usually get an excellent deal. There’s no big secret to this — it just involves looking around to see who has an off airport parking lot close to the airport I will be flying from. That usually narrows it down to just a couple of options. My next step is to see how else I can save. For example, if I’m collecting air miles or have loyalty cards from hotels or car rental firms, then I see if they have a deal with the off airport parking lot I plan to use. Depending on the length of my stay, this can save me quite a bit.

And let’s not forget the airport parking provider itself. They often have specials that will allow me to get a reduction on parking charges. Where possible I try to use the same provider at a variety of airports. That’s because they often give discounts for using their service more than once. So even if I don’t save that much the first time, the discount I get on subsequent visits is well worth it.

Keeping It Simple

What I always find interesting is the way different airport parking firms have different approaches to getting your car booked in. In the UK the process often involves queuing up to show your documentation relating to the space you have booked. In other cases it is as easy as swiping a card, ditching your car and boarding a shuttle bus. That really works for me — the more the process is automated, the easier it is for the traveler. And with other parts of your journey becoming more difficult thanks to more onerous security measures, saving time with off airport parking is a bonus.

It’s been a busy month for us here on Park Ride Fly USA. We’ve been getting more active on sites like Facebook and Friendfeed and we’ve begun stumbling our favourite sites on StumbleUpon. That means that we for even more great posts for this edition of  our occasional Traveling The Blogosphere blog carnival (last edition here). Read on and enjoy!

Volunteering and Seeing the World on the Sharing Travel Experiences blog. Lillie talks about an extended trip around the world featuring learning, laughter, liberty and love. She says:

Travel is about love of humanity, love of one’s inner self, and (for a solo gal like me) an underlying quest for what future long-term love could and should look like.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading.

It’s OK To Hate Some Places on the Fox Nomad blog explodes the myth that you have to love everywhere you travel to. As Anil points out:

You’ll end up finding that the things you don’t like say more about you than anything else. Whether its the cleanliness, people, or food you can’t stand it’s all about you.

This post really struck a chord with many people as there are around 30 comments.

The Travel section of MainStreet.com has an informational post on The Most Expensive Airports in the U.S. Alabama boasts the most expensive airport, while New Jersey has the cheapest. The original post includes average flight prices and other useful contextual information.

Not a post, but a list, something else that caught my eye this month was a list of the wonders of the world - ancient, medieval, modern, natural, underwater and more. Each link takes you to more information on the sight (or site). One of the most interesting parts of the list is the section on the forgotten wonders - see how many you remember.

The Solo Traveler Blog has a guest post from one of my favorite travel people, Andy Hayes on Why I Travel Solo. There are some great reasons for traveling alone, including:

when I travel I like to soak up the experience. Notice the details. Feel something – the sounds, the taste, the smell. As a solo traveler, you can give your undivided attention to the experience.

Read the other reasons in the original post.

On Roaming Tales, Caitlin posts an open letter to the airlines: Dear Airlines: Humans come in all shapes and sizes. She says:

If you … want to be in the passenger airline business, then you need to quit treating humans as if they were standard-size freight. All paying customers have an equal right to fly, not just thin ones.

Caitlin makes some great points in this letter.

Finally, there’s an inspiring post from Corbett Barr on Free Pursuits, titled At What Age is it Hardest to Radically Change Your Life? Corbett says:

Are most of the people pursuing lifestyle design really that young? It could be that the people talking about lifestyle design are younger, but in fact plenty of “older people” are also trying to radically change their lives too.

Lots of food for thought in this one. We’ll be back with a new edition next month. Happy reading!

I’ve never been mugged on vacation. That doesn’t mean that everywhere I’ve travelled to has been a walk in the park. Caracas is no picnic but I managed to spend a month in the city without getting into serious difficulty (unless you count the scary night I’ve already told you about). Staying out of trouble is often a matter of common sense. Here are some travel safety tips that will make your vacation more enjoyable.

Safety At Home