Well we hope you all had great holidays and are now ready to begin not only a new year, but a new decade.  And it’s going to be a happy and healthy new decade.  We are searching the Internet for the best healthy living and travel tips and items to bring to you and hope that you will share here with us the tips and items that you have found.

Today’s post is focused on travel as many of you have probably just experienced some travel woes especially if you were on the East coast around the holidays.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to travel during that time.

As you may or may not know I am a full-time Road Warrior, traveling for business every week (have been for 14 years).  About a month ago I was challenged to put together the Top 10 Travel Tips for Road Warriors.  At first this task didn’t seem too daunting, however, simplifying all those years of experience into only 10 tips has proven to be very difficult.  I have it down to a Baker’s Dozen+ and each one of those tips has it’s own top 10 or so.

Sorry, we just couldn’t not tell you about so many things to look for, watch out for, avoid and do for a healthier and happy travel experience.  So for the next several posts, the focus will be on one of the Baker’s Dozen+ Top Travel Tips for Road Warrior Success you see below:

If you really are a Road Warrior or you just want to understand what Road Warriors go through, you understand that clients are the lifeblood or your career.  You must take care of them or you don’t last long.  So everything you will find here is predicated on taking care of clients.  And that means you need to be healthy and as stress-free as possible to do that.  Remember, almost no one likes surprises, least of all our clients, so having success strategies is essential where the following subjects are concerned:

The Top Baker’s Dozen+ Subjects for Road Warrior Success:

1.   Taking Care of Clients
2.   Air Travel
3.   Luggage/Packing
4.   Hotels
5.   Rental Vehicles
6.   Sleep
7.   Food & Water
8.   Personal Amenities
9.   Local Amenities
10. Arrival / Departure
11. Directions – GPS Support
12. Health on the Road
13. Tools (Laptops, Cells, Recorders, Headphones, Batteries, etc.)

As I mentioned above, in looking at this subject, the best I could do was a Baker’s Dozen but don’t be freaked out by the 13 subjects.  And to keep this post to a reasonable length, each subject above will be a separate post to give it adequate coverage.  And should you stay with us through the end (basically the next couple of weeks – think of these kind of like the 12 days of Christmas, only the 12 or 13 Subjects for Road Warriors), we’d like you to vote on which of the above subjects was most helpful and which did nothing for you.

So let’s get down to the “only” reason we Road Warriors exist – Our Clients/Customers! And what do they like or not like or will or will not put up with:

•  They don’t like surprises, who does?
•  They like for you to be prepared, confident and energetic
•  They might be distressed but you MUST NOT BE
•  They want you to help them, but remember, they might not like what you tell them, so you have to have some stamina to weather through the storms
•  They do not want to know you are having travel issues that could interfere with the project or cost them additional funds
•  You may be traveling between several sites for your clients, or perhaps overseas. They want to know you are geared for SUCCESS! And know how to handle yourself on the road. They don’t have time to teach you.

OK, we got so excited we started into the first subject.  It’s a long post, so we will end it here for now but let us know what you think so far.  Every effort will be made to stay in order so our next post here at Healthy Living and Travel Tips will be to finish the first subject for Road Warrior Success – Taking Care of Clients.

Thanks,

Mel

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, the rest of the holidays are upon us.  Staying healthy while that may not be the top priority for most of us, it can be a concern over the next few weeks.  So let’s explore staying healthy through the holidays (and we hope you don’t mind – we just had to add some color for the season).

Here is the list of what we think are the Top 10 Detractors from Healthy Living during the Holidays (not necessarily in this order):

1. Shopping (a stressor)
2. Family Get Togethers (a major stressor)
3. Eating too much (All those sugary, fattening Goodies)
4. Drinking too much (A problem for some of us)
5. Lack of Sleep (staying up late wrapping presents)
6. Parties, Parties, Parties (what to wear, why not invited)
7. Covering for Co-Workers on Vacation (and still having to do your own work)
8. Holiday travel (some of the worst travel days of the year)
9. Exposure to additional sicknesses/illness (from the above activities)
10. Spending too much (perhaps the worst stressor?)

So what can we do instead or at least think about doing to head off these calamities?  Here are our Top 10 Solutions for Staying Healthy during the Holidays:

1. Shopping (avoid Black Friday and Dec 26^th next year, shop early in the week during mid-day if you can, give gift cards – we love them and they are easy to do and very easy to wrap!!!)
2. Handle Family Get Togethers (hmmm . . . tolerance maybe?)
3. Eating too much (can’t help you here – we like all those goodies.  Perhaps eat moderately but we haven’t had much luck in that department.  Increase your repertoire of making healthy desserts?)
4. Drinking too much (Avoid the spiked punches and overly sweet drinks at least and find a designated driver)
5. Lack of Sleep (stay with your normal sleep schedule and rise earlier rather than stay up later)
6. Parties, Parties, Parties (the little black dress is always appropriate and clothes that can go from day to evening and if not invited, you might be the winner there so have your own party unless that’s a stressor too)
7. Covering for Co-Workers on Vacation (negotiate with your boss about what really has to be done)
8. Holiday Travel (leave a day earlier and stay a day longer to avoid peak travel days + this is also cheaper)
9. Exposure to additional sicknesses/illness (load up on your most effective anti-oxidants)
10. Spending too much (book travel well in advance, consider a holiday savings club for next year and layaway is back and a great way to budget your purchases)

That’s our list of issues and possible solutions.  We hope you have had a bit of fun reading our healthy holiday tips, healthy travel tips and general stress releivers.  Most of these activities cause distress which isn’t fun, so effective ways to handle stress like meditation, getting more rest and even increasing your exercise have been known to help.  So comment below and tell us your Top 10 Detractors from Healthy Living during the Holidays and how you handle them.

We’d love to hear,

Mel

So just how healthy are we going to be this Thanksgiving?  Well, we did go to the special grocery store down the road this morning to pick up a roasted turkey roll that came from a free-range, non-hormoned, not pumped up with solutions bird.  Does that count for healthy?  Oh, and does buying an already cooked roast help classify us as being green as well?

Not really but we’d like to think so.  We are also going to do the pumpkin cheesecake, the candied yams, the sausage-cornbread stuffing with oysters and turkey gravy and that’s all going to have to be heated up somehow.  This may not be a good example of healthy living. But it has to be healthy–we are leaving out the mashed potatoes and all that butter!!!

Well if you aren’t going to have the healthiest of feasts this Thanksgiving, then opt for a great and healthy travel day.

For all of you out there who are traveling this holiday to see family and friends, one of the best travel trips we can suggest is to take some healthy nibble food along because today is one of the worst (longest travel day, mostly late flights and crowded roadways) travel days of the year.  The only day worse might be the Sunday after Thanksgiving because it’s also the start of Hunting Season in many states as well as a major travel day.  Don’t be on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after 12:00pm noon that day if you want to get where you are going.

Now what do we mean by healthy nibble food?  Something we like to do besides take organic fruit is put really raw almonds (not the pasteurized ones), organic raisins and coconut chips, unsalted/raw sunflower seeds – all thrown together to give yourself a great trail mix.  This mix is a good way to curb hunger while flying and driving. 

There are also some great raw cacao bars being made these days (we plan to do a product review soon) that give you so many health benefits (read up on anything by David Wolfe) plus they taste great, impart that wonderful theobromine feeling of being in love and help maintain a high energy level.  Who would have thought there were healthy chocolate bars?  And I just heard about a new product–raw cacao brittle.  Have some of this on order – will let you know how it tastes after Dec. 15th.

And to get you through a long travel day, say your money and remain hydrated.  Checkout our earlier blog on how to have inexpensive and healthy water while in the airport (Click here).  Grab your filtering water bottle, your lemon or grapefruit essential oil and your liquid minerals and off you go.

So healthy flying or healthy driving and enjoy that maybe not so healthy Thanksgiving feast,

Mel

Featured in BizWeb eGazette  

Hello Everyone – Just got word from Jim at JDD Publishing www.bizweb2000.com that this website was being featured in his newsletter about his coaching clients who are completely new to doing business online.  Yes we are newbies when it comes to this website and blogging but we have been receiving great coaching support from him. 

As Jim mentioned in his eGazette, this site was built over the course of about a month using the WordPress Blog Template “Patagonia” and then it was rebuilt in about 5 days for a niche change (we decided to broaden our scope to both Healthy Living and Travel Tips).  Thank goodness for WP because I don’t think we could have pulled off the 2nd rebuild without this template and the techies at Hostgator.  

Has anyone out there gone through this, especially in your first few weeks online?

We have an Opt-in form that is still under construction – Aweber went live yesterday with their new Web Form Generator, so some of that re-build we did this past week, had to be completely re-done again.  So bear with us if things don’t appear quite like you would expect them to be. 

In fact, please leave us a comment below so we can fix anything that looks amiss.  And if you like what you see, tell us that too, so we can include more posts on those subjects.  Our posts here are somewhat long we know but that’s because there’s so much to talk about when it comes to healthy living and you already know that I am a Road Warrior traveling full-time both domestically and internationally.

So with all the stress of this site’s construction, we are taking the weekend off.  We need to return to a Healthy Body and a Healthy Mind(set).  I have been challenged to write about the Top 10 Tips for Road Warriors so we will be doing some thinking while we relax.

Drop us a comment or two on how you are de-stressing this weekend and what’s your best travel tip.

Thanks,

Mel

Hello everyone -

Just wanted to let everyone know why my other website disappeared this last week.  It seems that the title of that website interfered with another website’s trademark.  This was never our intention when we chose the site’s name.  And even though they are a clinic and do “doctor” and travel agency things like vaccinations and passport photos and we are nothing like that, rather than battle it out in court, we took that website down.  So we have spent the better part of the last 5 days completely re-constructing this new website.

I hope that all this change has not inconvenienced anyone other than us.  But enough about difficulties, we are about solutions here especially Healthy Living.  It’s another passion of ours that we now have broadened our focus to as a result of the change and of course our original subject Healthy Travel Solutions is still with us because you already know it is something we are totally focused on because we travel so much!

If you have not checked out our new Products page, you might want to see a new feature from Amazon.  It’s called a carousel which is simply another way of displaying healthy living and travel tip items on your website.  We have had selected some great items from all the things that can be purchased through Amazon and displayed it carousels.  We thought it is was kind of clever and searched for things we already own or know to have received mostly 4 and 5 star ratings from other purchasers.  It’s actually our ”Wish List” or list of some “Must Have’s” and over time we will go into more detail about items we have not reviewed yet on this site. 

There are 2 carousels on our Products page for your viewing pleasure.  Check them out here Healthy Living and Travel Tips Recommendations

In the meantime, we would love to hear about your healthy living solutions and anything you have found was a major travel help.  Join us in the re-launching of this site and about finding the best solutions.  We have added Healthy Living into the mix and we welcome your comments.

Thanks for hanging in there with us,

Mel and the Team

P.S.  A couple of other good things came from re-doing the site.  We feel it’s operating much faster and would like your thoughts on that as well, plus we ended up completely retyping the FREE eBook, Dealing with Flying Naturally, that we send you as a gift for subscribing to our healthy living and travel tips newsletter (which also had to be re-done).  The eBook magically went from 8 mb in size and was taking forever to download to about 4kb in size (so much faster).  So if you haven’t signed up for that gift, check it out here or send us a note through our Contact page and we will send you the new and improved version.