When you travel and stay in a hotel, do you ever notice the flowers in the public areas?  Maybe I am the only person who takes these things seriously, but I have chosen places to stay based on the quality of the floral displays. Some of my favourite places get their fresh cut flowers at Proflowers.com to impress visitors to their establishments. That is far better than a B & B where we stayed last week.  The sad soliary dusty grey silk flowere on the landing was so sad that I wanted to throw them away.  Only I was worried that someone might think I had taken it …………….

Top 10 Haunted Hotels pt 3

This is the final chapter in my little series on the most haunted hotels in the world. This last post includes a hotel in the home of one of the most famous murders in history, a newspaper-reading and coffee-thieving railroad tycoon, a mischievous doctor who likes to play pranks from beyond the grave, and the former home of a fake doctor who autopsied the bodies of the patients he killed.

Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, Massachusetts: In 1892 Andrew and Abby Borden were found brutally murdered in their home. They were both killed with a hatchet, Abby while she was kneeling down making a bed, and Andrew while he was asleep on the sofa in the living room. Their eldest daughter Lizzie was accused of killing them, but was never found guilty and the case has remained unresolved. Guests staying at this macabre B & B have reported hearing a child’s laughter and seeing faint outlines of what appear to be faces in their photos.

Jekyll Island Club Hotel, Georgia: I find this story particularly frightening. Samuel Spencer was what you would call a railroad tycoon, or perhaps a railroad magnate. Every morning he would read the newspaper over coffee at the exclusive hunt club. In a fit of supreme irony he was killed in a train accident in 1906. To this day guests and club members continue to find their newspapers shuffled or disturbed and, most horrifying of all, their coffee cups sipped on ever since. What? I think it’s scary. But then, we all know how I feel about coffee…

Carolina Inn: This hotel seems to be haunted by the spectre of one of their long-time residents, one Dr. William Jacocks, who made the Inn his home for nearly 20 years. Often guests tell of being followed by a man that disappears as they turned to face him. Staff and guests also tell of a large heavy set man, dressed in a black suit wearing a knit hat and a long blue parker-style coat, who wanders the halls checking to find any open doors.

This ghost moves methodically down the hall. From room to room. Jiggling the door knobs trying to get in. He has been reported many times to the staff, sometimes from guests in the rooms saying their doors are opening on their own, other times from guests witnessing him move throughout the halls. However, no one matching the description has ever been found.

Guests who stay in the second-floor room that was once the home of Dr. Jacocks often find themselves locked out. At one time, the room’s door had to be completely removed from its hinges because it wouldn’t budge. Paranormal researchers have collected an abundance of video and audio proof of ghostly happenings in this hotel, including piano notes, softly spoken words, and an orb-like object floating in the air.

Crescent Hotel, Arkansas: The Crescent Hotel is quite proud of their ghosts stories, so much so that they run a ghost tour year round. One story involves a masonry worker who plunged to his death in Room 218 during the initial construction of the hotel. Other tales from the hotel involve a fake doctor and the hospital/morgue he set up in the basement of the hotel. I put a couple of the spookier stories here, but there is about sixteen different videos on YouTube. Just run a search for Crescent Hotel, and you find some.

Shibley, 42, says that while sleeping in a double bed with her mother there in April of 2009, something held down her legs and arms and began suffocating her.

“It was like a great force of intense pressure pressing down over my whole body, and I couldn’t breathe,” Shibley, who works as a graphic artist, says of the 2 a.m. experience. Shibley says her heart was pounding and, in desperation, she tapped her mother. The suffocating feeling stopped, she says, and she could move again. But there was a bad smell in the air, like a mixture of sulfur and the smell of earth and sweat after working in a garden. About 30 minutes later, something grabbed her ankles and pulled her halfway down the bed under the blankets, she says. Bill Ott, the hotel’s director of marketing and communications since 1997, has never seen a ghost but says he doesn’t understand what happened there one night several years ago. He and two staff members of the Deal Or No Deal TV show were alone in the hotel’s dining room. They heard three or four people laughing in the room for 25 to 30 seconds, though no one else was in the room or in an adjacent lobby and kitchen, Ott says. Josh Silberman, a former producer for the TV show, was there and confirms the incident.

“It freaks me out to think about it,” Silberman says. “The place was creepy. When you walk up stairs, it feels like you’re being chased.”

At the Crescent, paranormal researchers Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, stars of the Ghost Hunters show, say they caught on a thermal-imaging camera “the Holy Grail” of paranormal investigation: “a full-body apparition” wearing a hat and nodding.

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Jonathan Meier is the Marketing and Social Media Coordinator for O Hotel Suites, the premiere property manager for furnished apartment rentals and long term stays in Calgary, Alberta. Check out the stlyish suites at http://www.ohotelsuites.com . When he’s not at the Hotel, Jonathan is usually out in the mountains near his hometown of Canmore where he can be seen climbing, or doing anything at all that doesn’t involve computers.

Looking Back at the Eruption of Mount St. Helens

It was a day that will live in infamy for Pacific Northwest residents: May 18, 1980, the day Mount St. Helens, Washington’s fifth highest peak, blew its top. Most people living in the Northwest at the time remember exactly where they were and what they were doing.

We’re no exception. Now, 30 years later, our recollections are just as vivid as they were immediately following the event. One reason is that the actual eruption was just part of the story and was followed by weeks of breathless reporting by a national news media obsessed with how this life-changing event had impacted the Pacific Northwest and its population.

News reports leading up to the eruption had everyone a little on edge with scientists strongly hinting that all the signs were there – it was quite possible, even likely that Washington’s long dormant volcano, Mount St. Helens, would erupt soon. Anyone paying the slightest attention to the news had to realize that there was potential danger lurking just on the horizon. It was over a period of several weeks that scientists noticed the mountain was starting to release plumes of smoke and gasses and then, on April 1, the first harmonic tremor was recorded. The countdown to the major eruption was intensifying.

Yet vacationers and weekenders still took camping trips into the general vicinity of the mountain and there developed almost a circus atmosphere where certain vantage points many miles from the mountain were over-run by hundreds of volcano-watchers, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mountain’s impending eruption. The plumes seen thus far seemed relatively harmless, floating off into the sky and, for most people, it was difficult to imagine the destruction that would soon come to Southwest Washington.

One example you may remember is Harry Truman, the old man on the mountain who refused to evacuate his Mount St. Helens Lodge, located at just about Ground Zero for any potential cataclysmic activity.

He seemed to ignore the warnings of local officials and his refusal to leave the mountain became a running narrative on local TV and in Seattle newspapers. The Longview Daily News quoted Harry as saying: “I think the whole damn thing is over-exaggerated…Spirit Lake and Mount St. Helens are my life…You couldn’t pull me out with a mule team.”

Our travels that weekend took us north of Seattle where we were enjoying the use of a rented motor home touring beautiful Whidbey Island with friends. We enjoyed an overnight at South Whidbey State Park — a family weekend of beachcombing and barbecues that began on a gorgeous blue-sky Saturday. We retired for the evening not knowing we were just hours away from experiencing one of the most notable natural disasters in the history of the Pacific Northwest.

We awakened early to a bright, calm day and were just cooking up breakfast in our motor home when, at 8:32 a.m., we heard a bomb go off – or so we thought. If you plotted our location on a map and measured the distance to the volcano, it would be about 100 miles. Yet the sound we heard sounded and felt to me as if the military had just dropped a 500-pound bomb on a nearby hill. A friend who was with us had just stepped outside the camper to take his daughter to see some nearby cows when he remembers he heard “the sound of rolling thunder, or a sonic boom, came up from the south. It was eerie. I thought maybe World War III had started.”

It took just a few seconds for us to put two and two together: With all the talk about how the St. Helens eruption was imminent, that’s really the only thing it could be. Yet no one had prepared us for this blast that we had experienced. Somehow we didn’t have it pictured in our minds that the eruption, when it came, would make this kind of sound. And since we were so far from the volcano, we still couldn’t quite believe that we were hearing an eruption that was 100 miles away.

It was a gorgeous Sunday and we were reluctant to leave the island but we were all due back at work on Monday. As we packed up and headed south to our home south of Seattle, the radio airwaves were crackling with live news reports as reporters rushed to the scene by car and by helicopter and frantically called in their on-the-scene descriptions of the devastation. Once we got home, we were seeing TV reports of news people caught in ash clouds, unable to see or navigate. Almost everyone, it seemed, has been surprised at just how destructive this eruption had been.

In all, 57 people died because of the eruption that day, including Harry Truman. The volcano’s magma had burst forth creating a large pyroclastic flow that flattened buildings and vegetation over a total area of more than 230 square miles. Volcanic mudflows stretched many miles down the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers destroying bridges and lumber camps. The famous video of houses floating down the muddy rivers is just as clear in my mind today as it was on the TV back then.

During the eruption, a huge ash column grew to a height of 12 miles above the expanding crater in less than 10 minutes. Altogether, ash spewed into the atmosphere for 10 straight hours and reached cities like Yakima and Spokane where several inches piled up like so much dirty snow on homes, cars, streets – everything. The sun was obscured by the ash, plunging cities in to darkness within minutes of the eruption.

Since we were to the northwest of the eruption, our three-hour trip home that Sunday was relative uneventful – until we too experienced some of the ash falling in Southeast King County, albeit to a lesser degree than cities in Eastern Washington. Since we were reporting for a Seattle-area newspaper, the eruption of Mount St. Helens turned out to be much more than a one-day event. Our entire newsroom sprang into action that Sunday night and, for several weeks after, focused one of the biggest stories in Pacific Northwest history. Everyone stopped concentrating on the cost of electronic cigarettes, because we had witnessed an event that few people get to experience in their lifetime, and now it was up to our news staff to record every impact, every reaction, and every story that had an angle related to Mount St. Helens.

May 18, 1980 was not exactly a “slow news day” for residents of the Pacific Northwest — it was a day no one living there at the time will ever forget.

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Cary Ordway publishes websites focused on regional getaway travel. Among the sites currently offered are http://www.californiaweekend.com , covering California travel destinations, and http://www.northwesttraveladvisor.com , covering Pacific Northwest travel destinations.

Best Timeshare Vacation Exchanges Available

A Timeshare vacation exchange program means that you exchange your timeshare with another party to enjoy vacation at other resorts. One of the reasons of timeshare popularity is this advantage of timeshare exchanges. If you want to spend time at other resorts or at time other than your specified timeshare slot, you can search for the exchange options available by yourself. Read more »

Shopping Destinations in Leeds

Leeds is located in the metropolitan area of West Yorkshire, England. This area is very well known for it’s shopping district as well as it’s beautiful architectural designs. Besides London, Leeds is one of the largest areas for legal, financial and business services. It is also one of the fastest growing cities in the UK with an approximate current population of 770,800. Read more »

Travel and Vacation Without Damaging the Enviroment

Green friendly travelers can often be stumped as to how to take a vacation without damaging the environment. Taking a vacation should be fun – not guilt inducing. This article will explore how to travel while doing the least damaged and sticking to your ideals.

The key is to compromise. Nobody can have zero environmental impact. If you use good practices in your normal life, then you’re justified in loosening your rules a little bit on vacation. With a little forethought you can enjoy your vacation without doing the damage that most vacationers do.

1. Non-flying vacations? As you may know, flying is extremely damaging to the environment. Really think about taking a trip by some other form of transportation besides airplanes. I’m not saying you should base your vacation plans on this one thing, but why not at least look into things in your part of the world that you haven’t experienced? For example, is there a National Park in your state that you haven’t visited? Look at a travel guidebook for your state or region, and you may be surprised by how many things there are in your area that you didn’t even know about.

But again, the thought of taking a local vacation can be a real downer, so don’t base your decision on this. If you do everything else right on your vacation, flying is okay, especially if you take a direct flight.

2. Sustainable transportation: Wherever you end up going, look into public transportation options. If you’re visiting a major foreign city, for instance, you’ll have no trouble taking the local trains or buses. Meanwhile, many non-U.S. countries have great rail coverage. In places like Japan and Europe, you can see practically everything without ever getting in a car. Take this into consideration when planning your trip. Perhaps you can avoid destinations with limited travel options.

3. Support local businesses. Let’s say you’re visiting Paris. For many Americans, there’s a temptation in foreign places to patronize American businesses. For instance, Starbucks can be found throughout Paris, and because Starbucks is so familiar and comfortable to us, it’s tempting to go there for our coffee. But the Parisian Starbucks are far more likely than other coffee shops to import their coffees from abroad and to use non-sustainable practices. Support the local French places instead. It may not be the most luxurious vacation that you have ever taken but you can think of it as an adventure.

4. Good hotel practices: When you exit your hotel room for an outing, leave a note to the staff not to leave the lights or the television on, as many hotels do. And it is never necessary to have your towels changed on a daily basis. In fact, sometimes it’s easier just to keep the staff from entering your room at all. Also, some hotels like to pump the air conditioner or the heat in copper sinks unnecessarily high. If you can adjust it yourself, moderate the settings or turn it off completely.

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Caterina Christakos is a published author and reviewer. Read her latest reviews of: http://www.outsourcingservicesoffshore.com

Holiday In Korykos Turkey

Korykos (Kizkalesi) is a Turkish city in the Mersin Province, whose existence is traced as far back as 191 BCE. In times past, Korykos was known for its commercial exploits and economic opportunities. Their fame attracted the Romans who consequently conquered it during the middle ages. The Romans used its strong bases to monitor piracy activities over the Mediterranean Sea.

Today, the city is an international attraction because of its ancient ruins and historical places that stretch hundreds of yards. The medieval coastal castles are the main attraction. The Maiden Castel, from which the name Korykos (Kizkalesi) is derived is one of the most popular attractions. Other tourist sites include the remains of the Christian tombs, the relic plateaus, cisterns, aqueducts and the basilicas that date back from the Necropolis and Byzantine era. Read more »