Why Trundlin?

Live life at breakneck speed, and what happens? (apart form breaking your neck!) – you forget. What did you do? Where? Who with?

This is what I love about evolution. The balance is (mostly) maintained.

To help me remember my travels I JPEG, I MPEG, I tweet, I dopplr, I email, I write and well, I RECORD everything in some way or other, as well as sharing it with my fellow human beings.

My favourite memory jogger? the still image, will video kill it now there are cameras like the Nikon D90 that can record HD video? I hope the still image doesn’t get reduced to a footnote in history?

Any thoughts readers?

Autumn Colour (or Fall Color?)

One fine way to see the autumn leaves turn is from the saddle of a bicycle. Rolling for 469 miles through the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Virginia the Blue Ridge Parkway would make for a great fall road riding route. Visit www.blueridgeparkway.org for maps and info.

Twixt Seattle and Vancouver…..

……lies Bellingham, one of those places in the Pacific Northwest that constantly features in magazines’ “Best towns to…” features.

Check out the Bellingham Whatcom County Tourism website’s outdoor recreation page for an idea of what you’re missing .

For all you tech geeks……

http://www.trundlin.com was conceived as a service in the SaaS mould, and is still in the early stages of development.

To keep the URL occupied, and build some traffic I’m blogging about parts of the travel sector that interest me and will correlate with the trundlin application once it gets further than an alpha concept!

This site is currently built on the WordPress platform and hosted by www.wordpress.com.

Over the next few days / weeks / years (I’ll come back and edit this when I have a better idea of timelines!) I aim to transition this to a self hosted WordPress site, so I can add extra functionality (including iPhone optimised GUI and an iPhone favicon).

All this in advance of rolling out the Trundlin service – which as you can probably guess will be a SaaS / cloud / Web 3.0 thang based on a certain top selling mobile device……..

……Or fiddle while Rome burns!

Stock markets fall, companies fail – perhaps what you need is luxury rather than solitude?

How about kicking back at http://www.thecarnerosinn.com/thecarnerosinn/ for some serious R&R if you need to escape from the economic meltdown and you call California home.

Chill out, and if San Jose is still open for business when you return home all the better!

It may be time to head for the hills!

“Survivalism” isn’t something you hear about too much in the UK. The Americans have a vast expanse to lose yourself in. Where your stockpile of guns, tins and candles won’t be found.

When Capitalism fails and anarchy takes over (tomorrow maybe?), if you;re English you’d do better to hole up in Russia, or wildest British Columbia.

Why? Well, nowhere in the UK seems to be more than a brisk walk away from civilisation (used in the loosest possible sense for most provincial English towns!).

Not quite as remote as a Shetland Bod, but a good introduction to a remote area are the lodges at Cadair View (http://www.cadairviewlodge.co.uk/).

Family friendly, great for exploring, mountain biking, walking, or just being away from the rat race, “off grid”. Check out the photos on the website and give it a go!.

Cadair View Lodge

What better way to trundl, than on a bike.

No sooner do I blog about the Pacific Northwest, and Seattle as a great trundlin city, do I stumble upon a great feature on road bike riding (pedals, not a v-twin on a Harley).

The feature is on the website of Rapha (www.rapha.cc) a British company who make exceedingly stylish high quality cycling clothing.

This is the epitome of trundlin. Clear mountain air, a bike, an experience. Read it and weep (or if you are in the Seattle region, read it and ride it !

Trundlin with Trazzler

A great little site for those who don’t necessarily want to wander too far is www.trazzler.com.

Conceived by a couple of the minds behind Twitter and Blogger this is a site for the Web 2.0 generation.

Visit, play, and be matched with the ideal trips for you – near and far.

This is what trundlin.com could have been if I had any coding skills ! Great site.

The best city to live in, trundlin wise…..

Magazines frequently feature “list” articles, detailing “The 20 Best Towns for…..”.

I’m going to be no different, and will try to build a list of locations where it’s easy to live, within easy reach of some great leisure locations.

The easy option would be to list all the great holiday destinations! However my aim is to show how many great destinations are within easy reach of some major conurbations.

First up, and for no particulate reason, apart from the fact I spent some formative years there is Zurich, Switzerland.

Visit www.zuerich.com for a taster, and in a few days I’ll elaborate on what the area has to offer.

Update: Dec 2011 – This post has received thousands of hits over the last two years. Check back soon, for more detail on how to travel leisurely around Zurich and its environs.

Trundl with protection

With today’s collapse into administration of the XL Leisure in the UK, it’s probably a good time to mention that the joys of trundlin are best appreciated when you’re financially protected against failure of the travel company.

In the UK that means booking a package that is ATOL bonded OR by paying for your travel products with a debit rather than credit card.

Book with care, so you don’t get credit crunched!