In one tab I was consulting a Montreal metro map. In a second tab I was checking out McGill summer accommodations, my alma mater, which I highly recommend for some of the lowest cost rooms in downtown Montreal.  I was also comparing information from a number of travel websites including hotels.com, venere.com, and tripadvisor.com (all of which we recommend).

In my mind, I was walking along the streets of Montreal, remembering the years I lived there as a student, thinking about all the museums and restaurants and little shops I looked forward to sharing with my parents…

And then Neil told me the time was running out on the parking meter, and Whoosh!—I was transported through time and space! Instead of walking down Rue Sherbrooke in Montreal in the late 1980′s, I found myself teleported to the Nob Hill Flying Star Cafe on Central Avenue in Albuquerque 20 years in the future. Wow!

It was completely mind-bending.  And completely disorienting.

And it is one of the things I love about travel: being totally and utterly shocked at the realization that right now, at this very moment, I am where I am.

In the short term, we want to get in shape and stay healthy on the road! So far, we’re trying to build healthier choices into the fabric of our travel life such as (even more) plant-based, whole foods eating; more walking; and more exercise in general.

I was really excited when I found this Quick A.M. Yoga Twist video with Rodney Yee from Gaiam because we can do the routine together by lying end-to-end on an average hotel bed. We just point towards the same wall at the same time rather than following the “left” and “right” instructions in the video.

If only we had bathing caps, we’d look like Ester Williams in stereo.

Unfortunately, Gaiam hasn’t set the video up so I can embed it for you here, but you can click over to watch it on their site. We just play it on a laptop, and we’ve found that after watching it once, we can follow along just by listening.

The 5 minute stretch seems to do wonders for our backs, and all the twisting gets our digestive apparatus revved up for breakfast.

If you try it out, with or without bathing caps, let us know what you think.

If you can recommend other simple stretches suitable for hotel rooms or highway rest stops, please let us know, too! We’re trying to pull off the road more often on long drives to stretch out and we haven’t settled on the perfect routine yet.

Photo Credit: Patita & Catita of Starfields

For Labor Day weekend, we traveled up through Vermont across the Canadian border to Montreal, over to Quebec City, and down into Maine. To do this without risking the loss of thousands of dollars in cell phone charges, we took the battery out of my BlackBerry before we crossed the border. (If you set many cell phones to forward somewhere else, not only do you get charged international phone charges for a long distance call to your phone, but you also get billed international roaming charges from your phone to forward the call back home.)

Returning back to the States, the BlackBerry kept insisting we were in Vermont.

Clearly, there was a caching issue.

After a quick look around the Internet, we established that we could clear the cache using BlackBerry Maps. There isn’t a ‘clear’ option in any other applications, that I’m aware of. (I don’t know if clearing the cache in the browser will affect the GPS cache, but it would be worth a test.) The fact that we had randomly just installed BBMaps came in handy.

How to clear your BlackBerry GPS cache with BlackBerry Maps

1. Run BlackBerry Maps
2. Press Menu key
3. Select ‘Options’
4. Press Menu key
5. Select ‘Clear Cache’

If any readers know how to prevent the caching problem or have other ways to address it, we’d love to hear your advice.

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