Have you heard of “geotourism?” I first heard the term directly from Sheila Buckmaster, senior editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine, when I served on a panel alongside her in 2007. I remember scribbling the term in my notebook and thinking – that’s what we need in Washington!

Geotourism is defined as a form of travel that aims to sustain or enhance the geographical character of a place—its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage and the well-being of its residents. In fact, the term was first coined by National Geographic, and they remain a strong proponent of this concept today. And thanks to their new partnership with Experience Washington and Travel Oregon, geotourism has arrived in the Central Cascades!

Check it out at www.thecentralcascades.com. There you’ll find an interactive map guide to the 446 “geotourism locations” throughout the Central Cascades region. Each location fits into one of seven themes that help to define the character of the Central Cascades. Explore archaeological sites, scenic trails, wineries, wildlife habitats, places to eat and drink, lodging and agricultural sites. You’ll also find a downloadable map that looks beautiful but is not terribly useful on the computer screen – if you want one of the geotourism maps to take with you on your travels, order one to be sent to you (it’s $5 for shipping).

The sheer amount of fun things to do and experience on this map is mind-blowing, and all of the geotourism locations were nominated by Central cascades residents and visitors. I was particularly excited to see a favorite hiking destination of mine, the Goat Rocks Wilderness, featured as a geotourism location in Washington; I nominated it for consideration back when this project was just getting off the ground.

Scanning the list of 43 lodgings on the map, I couldn’t help but wonder what makes a lodging geotouristic? Which kinds of lodgings enhance the geographical character of the Central Cascades–its environment, culture and heritage? Places like Carson Mineral Hot Springs Resort ($75/night) in Carson, WA, where the mineral water from nearby springs is thought to have healing properties.

Or the Cowboy Tree Inn in Silver Lake, OR ($75 / night) where 30 oz sirloin steaks remind you that you’re staying at what was historically the halfway point on a popular cattle trail.

In Wolf Creek, Oregon is the Wolf Creek Inn ($75 – $105), a place I’ve been eager to check out for this blog. Opened in 1883, Wolf Creek Inn is the oldest continuously operated hotel in the Pacific Northwest. A neat little fact I learned from the geotourism map is that Jack London completed his novel Valley of the Moon while staying at the Wolf Creek Inn. According to the geotourism map,”it was an important stop on the 16-day stagecoach journey from San Francisco to Portland, and the Wolf Creek Inn has housed practically every important person found in the Northwest during the early history of Oregon, include Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable, Carol Lombard and Orson Welles, looking for refuge.” As of this writing, the link to the Wolf Creek Inn’s website on the geotourism map is incorrect; the correct url is www.historicwolfcreekinn.com.

More geotourism fun at www.thecentralcascades.com.

This blog post was adapted from my original post on the Central Cascades Geotourism project that appeared on The Signpost Blog at Washington Trails Association.

There is a Northwest travel blog that you must check out. Really. In fact, you should bookmark it right now.

Terry Richard is an outdoors and travel writer for the Oregonian newspaper, and writes a regular blog called Travels with Terry. From fly-fishing to wine tasting to spa-hopping, Terry knows where the best red is, when the fish bite, and how soft your robe will be. And he posts a lot (***hangs head in shame**). The angle Terry really covers well is outdoor recreation–camping, hiking, mountain biking, cabins and anything else outdoors–but truly, all of his topics are well-researched and incredibly fun to read about.

Throughout July, Terry has been on the open road, traveling throughout Oregon on reader travel tips and reporting back on his findings. His July blog posts thus far comprise the Oregonian’s “Send Terry on the Road” summer series, which is all about involving readers (like me!) in his adventures. OK, it’s about more than that. There is a prize involved. A really big, really awesome prize.

Click on this link to learn how to enter a contest to win a deluxe weekend getaway to central Oregon, provided by visitcentraloregon.com and www.traveloregon.com, which is also running a promotion called the Oregon 150 Challenge.

All you have to do is post a travel tip on one of Terry’s July Oregon travel blog posts. Share a relevant tip on a local activity to try, great place to eat, or overnight find of yours. That’s it!

(Wait a minute… why am I sharing this with you?? I should be keeping this to myself to increase my chances of winning that deluxe Oregon getaway!)

Happy and safe Northwest travels, everyone!

A good guidebook is a perfect companion for the budget traveler. In the travel guidebook world, Lonely Planet tops the list as the best shoestring guide for a whole bunch of global destinations– for pretty much anywhere in southeast Asia to hot destinations like the Czech Republic.  So when I saw one of their latest titles was for our neck of the woods, Pacific Northwest Trips, I was intrigued to see how it would stand up as a travel guide for a budget-minded local. So I asked them to mail me a copy for review, and they did. And they included an extra one for you, too. But more on that in a minute. First, about this book.  It’s been on my coffee table for the past three weeks, and I dare say, it won’t be put away anytime soon.

Pacific Northwest Trips isn’t much organized at all like a destination guidebook. Instead, it leads you on hundreds of journeys and experiences. I think that’s what makes it such a fantastic coffee table find for a Pacific Northwesterner. Whether you’ve got just one Saturday free to journey along Chuckanut Drive in Washington, or a whole series of Saturdays to explore the eleven destinations that comprise “Oddball Oregon” (care to tour the world’s only museum of velvet paintings, anyone?), the guide will keep you traveling locally for a long, long time.

There are 52 themed “trips” in the book. I think the themed trips are quite a nifty way to organize the 1000+ suggested places to see, eat, and sleep. The theme categories for the trips are as follows:  Iconic Trips, Routes, Food & Drink, Outdoors, History & Culture, and Offbeat. The eleven “Iconic Trips” are definitively Pacific Northwest, designed to plunge you into the heart and soul of the region, so expect to drink microbrews, gaze at totem poles, and explore an active volcano on these. Again, this book is all about experiencing your trip. The guide even includes a list of suggested songs to load onto your Ipod for the Northwest roadtrip, and includes such tunes as Elliott Smith’s “Rose Parade” and Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway.”

The trip ideas have maps, driving times and directions and all offer detour ideas, places to eat and sleep, and fun things to do along the way. And, they’re totally clever. Here are a few of my favorites:

Trip #5: Whistle Stop Brewery Tour (Iconic Trip) Sure, I like coffee and wine. A lot. But it is Pacific Northwest microbrewed beer that stole my heart. This trip takes you on a tour of some of the Pacific Northwest’s best breweries by train – no designated driver necessary! Start in Eugene and make your way north with whistle stops in Portland, Centralia, Olympia, Seattle, La Conner and Vancouver. You’ll be sipping at fifteen brewpubs in all.

Trip #23: Cowboys & Kerouac: The North Cascades (Outdoors) Care to sample “Cascade Mountain oysters,” proudly served on the menu at the Buffalo Inn Restaurant in Marblemount? These “oysters” are actually deep-friend buffalo testicles. Which I will not be eating. This trip also takes you to an organic farm, one of the best campgrounds for families  in all of Washington state (Colonial Creek), and gets you to roadside views of Desolation Peak, where Jack Kerouac spent 63 days holed up in a fire lookout practicing Buddhism. Before your trip ends in Winthrop, a detour takes you up to Hart’s Pass at 6197 feet, the highest point you can drive to in Washington.

Trip #37: Prehistoric Oregon Trip (History & Culture) The painted hills and fossil beds of central Oregon are one of the coolest, most beautiful landscapes in all of the Pacific Northwest, yet many locals have never made the trip there. But you must go, because this place is spectacular!  (See my former post on this area here.) This trip begins in Clarno and ends in Mitchell, with an optional trip extension to the town of John Day. The John Day Fossil Beds National Monument comprises 22-square miles of prehistoric goodness and fabulous scenery. Great cheap sleeps are sprinkled throughout the area, with decent camping opportunities, too.

Pacific Northwest Trips goes well beyond the typical guidebook in providing road trip opportunities for exploring hidden fun and offbeat experiences.  I love the way it is organized and have been dreaming up trips ever since I got the book. Not all of the trips are practical, though. One trip, called Washington Roadside Curios, outlines a road trip past eleven funky roadside attractions, from what I call a “tacky art” residence in Ellensburg to the World’s Largest Frying Pan in Long Beach. The thing is, the trip is 690 miles long! So in practice, you may want to combine elements of several “trips” on your excursions in order to save time and gas money, or just do bits and pieces of trips.

Now, about that free book. What are your summer vacation plans? Leave a comment on this post and tell me where you are headed this summer. On May 22, I’ll select a comment at random and if it’s yours, I’ll send you a brand new copy of Lonely Planet’s Pacific Northwest Trips!

I think Washington state is probably the best place for a weeklong road trip in the whole United States.

Seriously. Imagine taking a week off of work this June or July, renting a fuel-efficient car and hitting the open road, from the Olympic coast to the Walla Walla wine country.

Experience Washington wants to help you plan your trip. Just click here, fill out the simple form, and they’ll send you the official Washington State Travel Planner – for free. The Guide is 144 pages of what to see and things to do across the state, and of course, where to stay. They throw in a separate Lodging Guide Supplement with even more places to stay, from country inn to motels.

When my subscription issue of Sunset magazine arrives in our mailbox each month, my husband knows just what to do. He leaves me alone! It takes a good couple of hours sprawled out on the couch for me to make my way through a new issue. I pore over the home decor ideas, daydream about travel destinations, take detailed notes for my garden, and plan out meals from the recipes.

It’s true, I’m a HUGE Sunset magazine fan, and so of course was overjoyed to see my May issue arrive yesterday, on a Saturday. A day when I actually had some time to sit around and read a magazine! And, this month’s cover story is on one of my favorite topics–camping!

Fifty campgrounds were selected as the best places to pitch a tent in the West. I have no bones to pick with their list – the writers clearly did their homework. Not only does the article recommend great sites, it tells you how to book your reservation and has great tips on scoring even the most popular sites (hint – it’s a little like getting tickets to a rock concert that you know will sell out within minutes). Never been camping before? The May issue of Sunset also has an illustrated guide to all the gear you will need as a beginning camper, from your sleeping bag to a quality first-aid kit.

I often camp at least a night or two when I travel throughout the West–from hiking trips in southern Utah to visiting family in New Mexico–and I admit I’ve struck out more than once.  For instance, we once made an unplanned stop for the night at a remote National Forest campground in southwest Idaho. It was already a bit crowded with some nice folks on a religious retreat, but they made room for us. The problem? They spent the better part of the night speaking in tongues. Then there was that time I booked a waterfront campsite on Lopez Island for our wedding anniversary, only to discover upon our arrival that each campsite was about 10×10 feet in size and separated from each other by a thin string of rope. Of course, we were sandwiched between a family of six on one side and a group of high school boys on the other. Great view? You bet! Romantic? Not so much.

Needless to say, I will now be keeping Sunset’s list close by as a reference so I’ll know just where to go!

One thing that really impressed me about their list is the variety of campgrounds they highlighted – from geography to topography, from state parks to national parks. Also, several are quite off the beaten path. I’ve been to a good many of their recommendations here in the Pacific Northwest, and they are all campgrounds I would gladly return to. Here are a few unexpected picks that stood out on their list:

OREGON: Strawberry Campground, Malheur National Forest. Only 11 campsites at 5700 feet! Right near the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness. This is a great area of the state for hiking, and a perfect side trip if you are headed in this direction for the John Day Fossil Beds or to go birdwatching at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

WASHINGTON: Lone Fir Campground, Okanogan National Forest. This campground is off Highway 20 in the Methow Valley, west of Mazama. Although this campground is not far off the highway, its beautiful and is in a great location for nearby hiking trails into North Cascades National Park and the Pasayten Wilderness. The only drawback is it tends to melt out a little late in the season.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Nairn Falls Provincial Park, north of Whistler. This campground makes my list not because I’ve been there before, but because I hope to go! I hear the hiking in this region is phenomenal.

For more great budget travel ideas, I keep up with the Sunset Traveler blog. It’s in my blogroll to the right, in case you hadn’t found it already.

Happy camping!

Photo: That’s Brian setting up camp at a lovely spot in the Escalante region in southern Utah.

You may land the best lodging bargain in the Pacific Northwest these days where you least expect to find one –at nice downtown hotels.

Carol Pucci’s article in the Seattle Times this week, Travel slump hits home, but bargains await, was an eye-opener on just how bad things have become for the tourist-dependent hotel industry in cities like Seattle.

Slashes in business travel budgets, canceled conventions and declines in domestic and international tourism have all piled onto the snowball that has hit downtown hotels with occupancy rates down 20% over last year.

Which means that for the first time in a long time, you can get a nice room at a  nice downtown hotel at a nice price. You may have to hunt around for it, though.

In Pucci’s article, travelers scored great deals bidding on four-star hotels at Priceline.com; rooms at the Edgewater and Hotel Vintage Park were had for around $70 a night. If you haven’t used Priceline to bid on a hotel before, here’s how it works: Just enter your destination city and the dates you’ll be visiting. Then choose “Name Your Own Price,” and enter what part of the city you want, what you are willing to pay per night for your accommodation, and what level of accommodation you want (e.g. a 3-star hotel). This is your “offer.” If your offer gets accepted, you’ll have reservations booked at the price you wanted and will soon be told which hotel you’ll be staying at. The catch? You agree to pay for your place up front, before you even make your offer or know which hotel you will be staying at. And hotels are non-refundable, non-transferable and non-changeable even if the reservation is not used.

Another website that came up in the article’s comments is BiddingForTravel.com, a great forum to use in tandem with bidding at Priceline.  Basically, people are posting here about the hotel deals they got over at Priceline and the details of their offer. For example, a poster named “noodlesniebauer” recently posted that she scored a room at the Edgewater in Seattle on 3/22 for $67 (the lowest rate on the Edgewater’s website is $174). Her first bid was at $60, she got a counter-offer for $77, then narrowed the Seattle neighborhood to the Spaceneedle area and rebid at $67, which was accepted. She says, “The FAQ is a great tool, if I hadn’t read it, I might have taken the counter-offer instead of trying again.” (By the way, it’s encouraged that you read BiddingForTravel’s FAQ section on bidding on hotels before placing a bid on Priceline. The FAQs “teach how to become an informed bidder and greatly minimize your chances of making a first timer’s mistake.”)

What other websites do you use for getting great rates on bigger hotels? What has your experience been reserving a hotel on Priceline? Leave a comment and share your experiences with all of us.

Photo of the Edgewater by Hillary H.

When I haven’t traveled in awhile (and I haven’t traveled in awhile), I start to make lists of where I want to go. Right now, the Methow Valley is on that list, right near the top, for a late winter snowshoe trip. It’s a fantasy, but I’m leaving it on there. This spring, I want to make it to the Walla Walla region for the first time, both to hike in the nearby Blue Mountain range and sip some wine at some of the smaller regional wineries. That’s a trip that will probably happen. And then this coming August, I want to return to North Cascades National Park for a fabulous, rugged backpacking trip. (Having a ten-month old may put a small wrench in that one).

Imagine my joy, then, to open the January issue of Seattle Metropolitan magazine. Talk about a list! The cover story is “52 Great Weekends — Northwest Getaways for Every Week of the Year.” Just reading through this list of weekend excursions got me mentally packing my bags and pulling out the old gazetteer.

Granted, most of the suggested trips don’t point you to cheap sleeps for your overnight accommodations (in the Methow valley, for example, they’ll send you to the uber expensive Sun Mountain Lodge, which bears little resemblance to the Idle-a-While.) But that’s okay. Let them be out-of-touch. It’s not the recommendation to stay at the Fairmont Vancouver that makes this article so great. It’s the reminder – all 52 reminders – of all the Northwest has to offer. Even in 2-3 day chunks. And especially for locals.

The trip suggestions aren’t original, but they’re fun. How about an art-filled weekend in Tacoma? (If you are turning up your nose, you haven’t been to Tacoma lately.) Offbeat weekend ideas include crabbing along the Oregon Coast or apple-picking in Wenatchee. For adventurous types, spend a Saturday surfing in Tofino (on the west side of Vancouver Island) or take in the rodeo in Pendleton. Personally, I’d pass on the golfing weekend at Suncadia Resort near Cle Elum. Ditto for the luxery resort at the Tulalip Casino. I just might have to check out the Bronze, Blues and Brews Fest in Joseph, Oregon this August, though. I wonder if they allow ten-month olds…

I don’t know about you, but my wallet is weighing a bit lighter these days. Lattes have been downgraded to drip coffee, I haven’t had good sushi in months, and my husband is wondering why we aren’t buying the organic bananas anymore (I smartly figured the peel protects the fruit of a banana from harmful pesticides, hence worth the savings of 30 cents a pound. Hope I’m right about that!)

Turns out a lot of folks are thinking thrift about travel, and some terrific people have shared their budget travel tips over at Budget Travel’s blog. Read it here: Reader’s Money Saving Tips. Much of the advice you may well know, but a little refresher always helps in this economy.

We all know that traveling off-season saves us money. Book your vacation to France in the wintertime and you’ll enjoy cheaper airfare, budget room prices, and tourists so few in number you could don a beret and practically blend in with the locals. Also, airfares change over time, so keep tabs on posted fares for your chosen destination for months in advance, using tools like Farecast and Kayak. That’ll help you pinpoint the lowest fare going at the perfect moment.

Great. So what about tips on cheaper places to lay your head at night? Readers recommend seeking out hotels that include breakfast with your stay or B&Bs to save yourself some money and time in the morning. Check out state parks for cabin or yurt rentals that sometimes cost as little as $20 a night and include a kitchen, where you can whip up you own meals and save even more.

To these excellent tips, I’ve just a few to add.

The first of which, of course, is to save transportation costs and support your local economies by traveling locally in the Pacific Northwest!

A lot of places offer mid-week rates significantly lower than their weekend rates, so consider booking your trip mid-week. Also, some lodgings now are offering “recession specials” with still lower rates; its worth asking about this even if you don’t see it advertised, as places may need to fill their vacancies and will work with you.

Test out your bartering skills. Seriously. I once avoided a $35 cleaning fee at cabin rental near Wenatchee by promising to clean it myself. At a newly-opened posh B&B in rural Oregon, my photographer friend offered to take some professional pics of the property for their publicity in exchange for two free nights, and they took her up on it.

Hostels are not just for European travel. Don’t be afraid of them! Throughout the Northwest are hostels that rival other lodging options in comfort, cleanliness and charm – at a fraction of the price. Check out hostels in the Columbia Gorge, Vashon Island, and Victoria B.C.