DREAMS OF TRAVELLING

You’ve worked all your life and now you are looking forward to retirement. How will you spend your time?

Many people have not created balance in their lives between work and play, so when it comes to leisure time or retirement, they don’t know what to do with their time.

If you no longer have to work, or you are working less, here are five areas that you can attend to regarding how you spend your time.

PHYSICAL HEALTH

Consider joining a gym, getting on a regular exercise program, taking up a sport, taking dance lessons, and/or learning yoga or tai chi. Leisure years can be filled with aliveness if you take excellent care of your health.

Do some research on nutrition and learn how to create healthy meals. There are many excellent books on achieving a high level of health, even in your later years. You might have years to live so you might as well learn how to live them in a vital and healthy way!

EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH

If you had not given much attention to your emotional and spiritual health – to the journey of your soul – now is a good time to do it. Now you have the time to read the excellent and inspiring books on achieving inner peace and joy. You have the time to attend lectures, workshop and seminars on healing the beliefs that may be limiting you, on connecting with your personal spiritual Guidance, and on taking loving care of yourself and sharing your love with others.

If you have never been introspective and taken the time to get to know your self on the inner level, now is a great time!

GIVING TO OTHERS

The most fulfilled people in life are those who find ways of giving to others and to the planet. If you have had to work hard all your life, you might not have had the time to volunteer or find other ways of helping. Now you have the time to explore what ways of giving really bring you joy. Would you enjoy volunteering at a day care center, sharing your love with little ones? Would you enjoy becoming part of a peer counseling group, supporting others in being all they can be? Would you receive satisfaction from becoming involved with groups that are helping the environment, helping the homeless, helping battered women and battered families, or helping abused children? Perhaps you would love to be involved with supporting the arts?

There are many fulfilling ways of giving and now you have an opportunity to discover which ways bring you joy.

CREATIVITY

Being involved in creative activities is one of the most fulfilling ways of spending time. What have you always wanted to learn to do? Do you want to learn to draw, paint, or make ceramic pots? Do you want to learn to work in wood, carving or making furniture? Have you always wanted to try your hand at writing, perhaps writing poetry, a novel, or a screenplay? Do you want to become an excellent chef? Maybe you want to learn more about interior design and home decorating? Perhaps you want to create a beautiful garden or learn about flower arranging? Have you always wanted to learn more about jewelry making, weaving, needlepoint, sewing or knitting?

Now is a great time to discover what creative activities being you inner peace and joy.

PLAY

You might find that your physical activities – golf, bowling, and so on are the ways you play. Or your creative activities may be the ways you play. You might also want to find other ways to play, such as playing board games, card games, or doing puzzles. You might enjoy computer games or the many games that are available through TV.

Don’t let your leisure years be boring and unfulfilling. If you do not have to work, you have great opportunities to develop yourself in so many ways!

When you own a self catering holiday home, it is important that you give it enough exposure in all the right places in order to receive lots of enquiries and bookings.

With a worldwide audience of literally billions of people in hundreds of countries, the internet has now become the de facto when advertising anything from your second hand guitar to your holiday home. With the internet, the barriers presented by more conventional style advertising such as newspapers and magazines have been torn down, with advertisers now having the ability to advertise to a worldwide audience via the internet.

There are many places that you can advertise your holiday home online including the following:-

Holiday rental listing sites

There are many Holiday rental listing sites on the internet that enable you to advertise your self catering accommodation for a small yearly fee or even for free. Most provide you with the facility to upload around 10 photo’s of your property, to give a good description of your property, including location, local events, how to get there, testimonials, rates and an availability calendar.

The many advantages of the holiday rental listing site is that it is easy to set up your listing in a matter of minutes, have the ability to change your ads photo’s and text 24 hours a day, control your own availability calendar and keep track of how many enquiries and bookings you have had. Most sites have an email form whereby enquirers can contact you direct meaning that there is no middleman involved, such as a rental agent.

Most owners find that advertising their self catering property on a number of paid sites and as many free ones as possible, helps to give their property plenty of coverage.

Blogs

Web logs or Blogs as they are more commonly referred to, is a content management system that enables you to add postings to your site and have them listed chronologically and placed into certain categories. They are mainly used as an online diary but more and more people are using them to advertise their own private holiday rentals, talking about their holiday home, the local area, travel news and other relevant subjects.

Blogs are very easy to set up. If you have your own private website with a hosting account you may like to check your control panel for your site as a lot of hosting companies do a one click install where you can install blog software such as Wordpress to your website and be up and running in minutes.

Another great place to start a new blog is by using Googles blogger.com. You can be blogging in minutes and the service is totally free.

The most important part of using a blog effectively is to provide your viewers with lots of original interesting content so that you become an authority on your holiday rentals area. So, say you owned a self catering holiday home in Normandy, you could blog regularly about local news in Normandy, restaurants, places of interest or special deals on offer for your holiday rental.

Don’t forget to add your blog to as many blog directories as you can to give it lots of exposure.

Personal websites

Another relatively cheap way of getting your self catering property even more exposure is to sign up a hosting account and domain name and design a simple website advertising your property. You can then submit your site to hundreds of web directories on the internet, helping to improve your rankings and generally putting it in front of even more prospective holiday home renters.

Forums

Internet forums can be found all over the internet and can provide you with the opportunity of advertising your holiday home. Find a forum on a subject or topic that interests you and get chatting and answer as many questions as possible. You will also need to update your profile details which gives you the opportunity of advertising your holiday rentals website or the site that lists it within your profile.

Free classifieds

There are many free classified websites on the internet, just Google for “free classifieds” and you will find many just waiting to be explored. Setting up a classified ad for your self catering holiday rental can be done in minutes and is another great way to get even more enquiries and bookings. You can even mention your web or blog address if you have one, so that you can provide viewers with even more information and photo’s.

WOM

The forgotten art of Word of Mouth is something that is not used enough. It is an extremely effective form of advertising and is totally free. One of the benefits of word of mouth is that it is normally done between friends or family meaning that there is obviously a lot of trust involved in the recommendation. Word of mouth alone could bag you a few more rental bookings every year. So go on, tell the world about your rental property!

This is just 6 of the best ways that you can advertise your self catering holiday home. If you put these into practice you shouldn’t have too much trouble filling that availability calendar.

Some of the best rafts in the world are constructed of Ferrari’s patented Preconstraint PVC fabric and urethane AIREcells, they set the standard for durability, performance and innovation.  Aire is one of the companies who carry’s one of the best. Types of rafts are: * Self Bailers * Catarafts * Paddle Rafts * ‘R2’? * Kayaks * J-Rigs and Sweep Boats * Dories

Let’s start with the Self Bailer and we will explain the rest in other articles. So how can a whitewater raft bail water out of itself? Well, an ingeniously simple design makes it happen. You see, the floor of a self bailing raft is a wide flat inflated chamber, sort of like a big air-mattress. The edges of the floor are stitched or laced to the rest of the raft. When inflated, the floor is about 4 or 5 inches thick, so the top surface of the floor floats above the surface of the water. When water splashes into the boat, it flows across the floor, down over the edge, and out through the lacing. This design works amazingly well. A self bailer filled to the brim with water will proceed to empty itself in just a few seconds on a Colorado River Rafting trip.

If you’ve ever bailed water out of a raft, you know how sweet it is to have a self bailer. In fact, if you float with someone who has an older non-self-bailing raft (known as a ‘bucket boat’ for the obvious trait – it retains water), you get to stop and wait for them to bail at the bottom of each major rapid. So, nowadays, when someone says ‘raft’, they are usually talking about a self bailer. If they say they’ve got a ‘bucket boat’, well, too bad for them.

Self bailers are the work horses on a raft trip in Colorado River Rafting because they can carry a lot of gear and passengers. Popular sizes are from 13 – 18 feet long, with 14 feet probably a minimum for carrying the gear and two adults on a multi-day raft trip. 15-16 feet is ideal, and 18 footers are nice to have on larger rivers. From a performance standpoint, rowing a self bailer is more like driving a bus. So the longer the raft, the slower it is to maneuver. And the performance of any raft is diminished if it’s overloaded, pressing it deeper into the water.