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

Hello Everyone -

Once again we have worked today on how this website appears to you out there.  We received some helpful comments about the look of the site and hopefully have improved it from what you experienced yesterday. 

What an amazing journey this website construction/re-construction has become.  We are utilizing our healthy living tips to just deal with the stress of making all this come together in a way that loads quickly and makes some sense when you read it.

So we went online this morning and looked for additional tools to handle the stress of constructing your own website so we can remain healthy and keep this site going.  And we found some stress reduction tools that were either free or very reasonable.  So we are going to try out some of these stress reduction tools and let you know in a product review what works for us.  And this now has us working on yet another page or two.

Oh, and we finally got our first article published with ezinearticle.com.  We had no idea it would take us 5 submissions to get just a small article online.  What a learning experience that was and so now we can work on more articles.

Is there anyone out there who has mastered the fine art of publishing travel tips?  As a full-time Road Warrior, I would love to hear about your experiences and check out those tips.

Thanks,

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.

There should be something for just about everyone on this healthy travel blog eventually.  We are going to cover how to be healthy when traveling by cruise line, airline and RV as well as traveling by train or driven vehicle.   Just about any kind of travel you can think of.

Think of us as the BMW of Travel Health Sites–Healthy Body, Healthy Mind and a Healthy Wallet so you may even find ways to save on your travel here.   

But first I want to make sure that you all know this site is not about dispensing medical advice of any kind.  This site is about communicating and exchanging tips and hints of what helps keep us healthy when we travel.  There are excellent travel medical sites out there that do dispense advice but this is not one of them.  We may feature some tips from those medical sites here through links however.  Plus we encourage you to search for the other sites that do dispense medical advice if that is your need.

Welcome to the Healthy Living and Travel Tips blog! Why blog about being a healthy traveler you might ask? And who am I to talk about this subject?

This is my 14th year of full-time travel.  I can hardly believe it has been that long!  I am a business consultant who works everywhere but where I live.  So that makes me one of those road-warriors you see so many of in airports across the country. You know, those people shuffling a big heavy computer bag plus a carry-on, looking haggard and run-down, a cell-phone or two permanently plastered to their head, overweight and wandering around the concourse looking for anything close to fresh fruit.

I didn’t plan on this career, it kind of found me. And it was supposed to be exciting and glamorous!  But folks, traveling full-time is anything but that. It can be hard on your health if you allow it (and I did). If you can make it through security in one piece without losing any of your precious liquids, you thank your lucky stars that this leg of the trip is another one down. You often ask yourself “When am I going to NOT have to do this? How do I regain the health and vitality I had before I started on the road full-time while I am still traveling?”

That’s me. I am someone who has been traveling a long time, someone who will still have to travel for awhile due to the financial crisis and someone who needed to regain their health and vitality. I let some of mine slip away over the years.  But am regaining that health and vitality back!  And that’s what part of this blog is about–helping me and others regain their health and vitality back.

So the healthy travel tips I have learned through trial and error over the years I hope will be helpful for you no matter whether you travel only on occasion or are like me and travel way too much.  And I hope that you will comment and pass along some of your travel tips to the rest of us as we road-warriors (and occasional travelers) both need all the help we can get!