Todays Featured Poster • Tampa Bay

A sailboat returns to Tampa Bay at sunset. If you’re looking for a place with beaches and water access Tampa – St. Pete is worth serious consideration. Within a few miles of Tampa’s natural bay are beach towns like St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Dunedin along with great places to explore like Tampa and Tarpon Springs.

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Argentina’s Port of Call Ushuaia

Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego and The Primary Gateway to Antarctica

Introduction

Ushuaia is often referred to as the end of the world and is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. It is recognized as the southernmost city in the world. Ushuaia is located in a wide bay on the southern coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, bounded on the north by the Martial mountain range, and on the south by the Beagle Channel. It is a popular port of departure for ships and expeditions headed to Antarctica. A little over a decade ago the cities population was less than 10,000 while today it is approaching 100,000. This is partly due to the growing popularity of Antarctic tourism but equally because the Argentinian government has encouraged manufacturing with special tax breaks as well as subsidies for people living here.

The Beagle Channel is the most southern natural channel connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific and has been a popular shipping lane in the past. Split by the Beagle Channel is Tierra del Fuego which means land of fire. Because the area was often shrouded in fog early explorers called it the land of smoke which was exaggerated in Europe for advertising purposes into land of fire. A large part of Tierra del Fuego is an Argentine national park.

Where Your Ship Dock

Ushuaia has a large pier right at the cities waterfront capable of handling most ships. It is usually busy in season with expedition boats getting ready for Antarctic tours along with large cruise ships rounding the Horn or setting out for Antarctic waters. Right at the end of the pier is the cities visitor center with facilities and information on tours and the city. Also along the waterfront are a number of tour booking offices.

Wheelchair Accessibility

Disembarking – This port has a developed cruise ship pier but the ease of disembarking varies by the individual ships gangway designs. For passengers using wheelchairs there can be a moderate ramp incline to deal with.

Port City Characteristics – This port has average wheelchair infrastructure typical of moderate sized cities. The port area has modest inclines in sidewalks. Intersection crosswalks may have curbs or other wheelchair obstacles.

Transportation

While the city has a population of almost 100,000 it is geographically compact with most restaurants, cafes and shops located within a ten by six block area. The Pan-American Highway passes right through the city the area is really isolated with no other towns or cities within hundreds of miles. The areas big attractions for visitors is the Tierra del Fuego National Park and the incredible animal life on islands in the Beagle Channel. Both are best visited on a guided tour or boat tour.

Currency

At this writing the exchange rate is about 38 Argentine Pesos to one US Dollar. Because of inflation rates over the past several years buying Pesos before leaving the United States is almost impossible. In the city many shops will accept Euros and American Dollars but it is advisable to exchange some currency for convenience. Credit cards are welcome and it is recommended to keep the charges in local currency to avoid unusual charges.

Attractions

Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego (Tierra del Fuego National Park) is probably one of the major attractions in the area. It is also the terminus of the Pan-American Highway that ends in a narrow dirt road inside the park. There are also a number of islands near the city in the Beagle Channel that are popular with penguins, seals, sea lions, cormorants along with whales depending on the season. There are a number of tour boats along the waterfront that you can book.

In town there are a number of excellent restaurants, cafes, and chocolate shops along with interesting gift shops. Terra del Fuego and Antarctic T-shirts are very popular. The city also can boast that they are home to the most Southern Hard Rock Cafe in the world.

On Blogging Part 6 – The Delusion

Maybe it’s time to face reality…

This site has been my hobby (TheIntentionalTraveler.com at Intend2Travel.info). I was a photographer, an engineer and a business owner with a fair amount of success in each. For the past decade I’ve been retired, and now in my seventies I live to travel. Six continents, over 100 countries and islands and every one of the worlds oceans.

I started up with a free WordPress site almost five years ago to let friends and family see where I am and where I’ve been. It was a casual pursuit and had nothing to do with money, but as people visited and subscribed it may have become about validation. At some point fame and money started becoming a possibility but it was still my hobby.

Today I manage two additional free websites, a paid WordPress site (I ran out of room) two online store sites (only marginally successful) and almost a dozen social media sites along with two Etsy outlets, mostly to feed the sites. After all that, I confess that I understand very little about how to succeed on the web.

Before diving into the internet I traveled with a camera, a tablet, usually loaded with a dozen books to read and a laptop that I used to edit photos and write various essays on things that interested me.

After getting involved in posting things to the internet my time spent traveling shifted to working on this travel website. Less book reading and casual writing. I used to plan my trips understanding that I would mostly be without internet. Today finding internet service has become much more important to me and it often comes with a price.

The e-commerce stores were originally set up as a project for one of our sons and after he lost interest and moved on, we were left with keeping the business going. In retirement we are reasonably comfortable with enough savings to support our world travels – so what the hell are we doing? If I look at the income the stores provide much less than minimum wages and it’s not like we need the money. The web sites are now clearly OCD with literally no chance of producing much income and consuming way too much of our lives.

If I’m honest in my evaluation of the travel sites traffic almost 80+% of those thirty or forty daily visitors come from inside the echo chamber – they’re not “organic” visitors interested in finding travel information. Their main motivation is to help their own websites traffic.

The e-commerce stores are about to enter the holiday shopping period that could produce a major amount of the years income. At best it means a few thousand dollars of net sales for a couple of thousand hours that were invested over the past ten months. By January sales will again drop off to a one or two hundred dollars a month.

Were To From Here?

It’s obvious I’ve been deluding myself. I can no longer invest in a future that is increasingly not likely to produce any return either financial or emotional. Without some miracle over the next 45 days it will be time to shut most of my internet projects down and return to my life of travel, reading and writing in my journals.

The investment in keeping the travel site active is well under $100 a year but I already have experience with websites that aren’t adding content. My original free travel site active after I transferred to a paying site. The free site continued to attract traffic but each month it dropped in half. It’s still there but while it once saw two or three hundred visitors a month it now has none for over six months. If you don’t post the search engines just stop paying attention. I have no reason to believe that a site that currently attracts an average of two thousand visitors a month with over a thousand subscribers won’t see the same fate.

It’s Not Just An Obsession We’re Being Played

I can think of no other human activity, except pushing drugs, that is as invested in keeping you obsessed in a habit than the online social media companies and the major search engines. These companies know us better than we know ourselves and they have the ability to keep us involved and prevent us from walking away. Every time we start dialing back something happens to get us back in the game. Even a number of the software inventors that gave us “likes”, and “shares” and “comments” believe that what they created is destructive.

It’s time to understand that what we are involved in is a form of OCD and maybe it’s time for a plan for us like AA for what ails us.

Questions We Need To Ask Ourselves

  • Is this better than what we did before?
  • How much time do we invest in the internet each week?
  • Being honest, where do we see ourselves a year from now?
  • If we weren’t doing this what could we do?
  • Can we just stop and walk away?

Todays Featured Poster • Cobh Ireland

Cobh, The Republic Of Ireland was known until 1920 as Queenstown and is a seaport town on the southeast coast. Cobh has Ireland’s only dedicated cruise terminal located right next to the cities main train station offering easy access the city of Cork and nearby Blarney. Queenstown became famous as the last port visited by the HMS Titanic before she sailed into the Atlantic and on into history.

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Todays Featured Poster • Providence Canyon, Georgia

Located in southwest Georgia, Providence Canyon State Park offers numerous hiking opportunities inside the various levels of the canyon. The canyon itself was created over a hundred years ago by bad farming practices. Erosion was so bad that the village of Providence had to relocate its church to keep it from falling into the expanding canyon.

These giclée prints are available in several sizes custom printed for each order on archival paper using fade resistant inks.

My first in a series of travel images converted using posterization for a more dramatic and stylized appearance. Feedback is encouraged.

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Todays Featured Poster • The Eiffel Tower

The iconic symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower is an iron tower on the Champ de Mars. Named for the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Locally nicknamed “La dame de fer” (the iron lady), it was constructed in 1887 as the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair.

These giclée prints are available in several sizes custom printed for each order on archival paper using fade resistant inks.

My first in a series of travel images converted using posterization for a more dramatic and stylized appearance. Feedback is encouraged.

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Join us as we visit historic treasures, natural wonders and vibrant cities set against backdrops that are endlessly changing and visually magnificent. Celebrate a world of travel experiences with these decorating accessories that are perfect for framing.

Haven’t Joined Us Yet? We Promise To Make It Worth Your While.