If you are interested in visiting Anna Maria Island there is decent write up on the location in Southern Living. Otherwise, here is a little summation of this mellow enclave on the Gulf of Mexico.
No Roofs.
No Doors.
No Windows.
No Bars.
Think I’ll go for a bike ride.
Originally referred to as “Parley’s Park,” the now famous ski resort destination known as Park City is keeping close to its roots. The city’s father, Parley Pratt, made his bread from the toll road that connected travelers to the West and the hopes of striking it rich in the California Gold Rush. Today, visitors to Park City still pay handsomely for a pass to the promise of sparkling richness, but instead of precious metal, they seek white gold born from the sky where cold temperatures and heavy moisture make their magic.
Jupiter Peak, which rises 10,000 feet above Park City, can carve out as much as 360 inches of snow per year from the low pressure systems that move across the Wasatch Mountains during the winter. It is not your average snow either, but something more akin to white puffy clouds and good cake. I sometimes feel like I am in an old Batman episode: Holy Fat Skis, Batman! POW! In all the years I have been going to the Park City area it has never let me down.
Planning a Ski Vacation
Whenever you plan a ski vacation, you know deep down it is a bit of a crap shoot. Setting aside time from work, plunking down a pile of benjamins, and putting yourself at the whims of your most tolerable airline (Go Southwest!) are just a few of the maneuvers we have to make to go on a ski vacation. Once there it could grow too warm, become too cold and windy, or even simply do nothing. When one of these unfortunate scenarios occur, you and your travel companions will bury disappointment and perpetually assure one another that – it still beats work! Secretly, you’ll wonder if the gods are conspiring against you. This is why powder hungry, ski resort destination travelers typically like to bet on as-sure-of-a-thing-as-possible.
Salt Lake City Ski Resorts
Every Salt Lake local has their favorite mountain. Whether it is Snowbird, Alta, Brighton, Solitude, The Canyons, Park City, Deer Valley, Snowbasin, or Powder Mountain, the point is there are plenty of options. Personally, I enjoy each one for different reasons, but if I am going to travel many miles, especially with a group of friends, it is hard not to set my sights on the Park City area. Reason: you have 3 rather large resorts right at your fingertips and a fun downtown area for apres anything you want. If you want to travel to the other ski resorts you can. In fact, after a few days of exploring Deer Valley, Park City, and The Canyons I highly recommend making the drive from Park City to Snowbasin. A little bit of a down time goes a long way, for Snowbasin is one of the best kept secrets in the West.
Park City
The ease in which you can make the transition from town, to Town Lift, to tackling the numerous runs and hikes Park City has to offer is seamless. I occasionally hear people say that Park City is too small, or not as sweet as – insert other ski resort – but I think it’s pretty awesome. It is pretty difficult to do the whole resort in one day, and throw in the fact that you will hardly ever wait in a lift line and, well, I’m sold.
There are some great restaurants in Park City. Two staples for me are Shabu and Bangkok Thai. Both a little spendy and touristy, but the food is good and I’m there to spend and be a tourist. After dinner, throw yourself on the meat market at the No Name Saloon. Down a few Polygamy Porters and the overwhelming amount of men will still seem like a lot of men, but the women may look less like men? Either way, you won’t see any fur coats in this place.
The Canyons
The Canyons is equally if not more kick ass than Park City. On a stormy day there are plenty of great aspects in the trees, and when it is clear there are some really stellar hikes and traverses that connect you right back down to the network of different lifts. This year I experienced a first for me at The Canyons. Yes, I participated in a timeshare presentation to get a free lift ticket!
My friend, William has a habit of getting me into situations that I would otherwise avoid like the plague. However, upon exiting the uncomfortable experience we inevitably derive so many countless hours of post amusement from it that is generally deemed a success. And I confess, in this case I did have some latent fascination with the whole sales and marketing process and was curious to observe the practice firsthand.
If you are interested in having your very own 1/2 of a 1/3 of a 1/4 of a 1/6 then do I have a deal for you! For your very own week – for life – at an exclusive, amazing, star-spangled metropolis complete with saunas, pools, gyms, restaurants, and more people than you ever thought could co-habit one structure, you must only throw down somewhere in the realm of $58,000 plus fees, and who knows what else, maybe your soul? Just don’t forget that figure is based off of 52 weeks in the year. “But it doesn’t snow year round?,” you may ask. Genius. And the guy that looks like a cross between Dusty Rhoades and Gary Busey, who burns through a half-a-millions dollars like its chump change, may respond, “it’s 2 for 1.” He will then pull out a photo album containing pictures of his tan hide in like 50 other tropical locations, which have nothing to do with skiing, but also have giant hotels and timeshares that look like they could house an entire alien nation. If you are the type of person that enjoys these kinds of experiences, there could be some more opportunities at Deer Valley. Currently, it looks like they are building a giant Death Star with more rooms requiring more fractional investment. Despite all my sarcasm, if this stuff is for you then great. Needless to say, I am not their demographic, but I did appreciate the semi-free day of skiing.
My group stayed in a townhome not far off Main Street, and it was a nice place equipped with a kitchen and most importantly, a private hot tub with great views of the surrounding mountains. While we were in essence throwing money away for the experience, I feel great calm in the flexibility to choose something completely different the next time. Park City Lodging or Mountain Reservations can hook it up.
For more information on skiing in Utah, there is the Ski Utah blog, which is a collective effort of the local CVB and some ski resorts in the area. There are also quite a few ski resorts on Twitter. Local Park City veteran, Eric Hoffman has compiled a pretty comprehensive list on his blog. Whatever you do and wherever you go I hope you get the goods.
Here in Park City, Utah on Day 2 of a little mini ski vacation. Today, we went to Canyons after receiving 10 inches of snow overnight. Good fun and definitely feeling every minute of it. Here’s a picture of my friend William working out every ounce of 9-5 angst he’s stored up since we were here last year. All work and no play is, well, reeeeediculous. Deer Valley and Park City proper on the list, but now it is time to head down to Main Street.
Tomorrow Jennifer Buch and I will be meeting up with our CEO, David LaPlante in Washington DC for DMAI’s Destination Showcase. David will be giving a presentation on the effective use of web technology and social media for destination marketing and event planning and management. Really looking forward to seeing all of our nation’s great destinations and the individuals who help fuel their tourism economies in attendance. If you are planning on attending, please look for us and say hi or leave a comment below.
Destinations Showcase Conference & Expos are the meeting industry’s largest forums exclusively bringing attending corporate, government, association, and independent meeting planners together with exhibiting destination marketing organizations (DMOs and CVBs) from the U.S. and beyond.
The details of David’s presentation are:
Meeting Expectations with Greater Integration & Multi-Channel Marketing Programs.
Sponsored by MPI
Never before have there been so many technology-based tools and strategies available to meeting planners. Never before has there been so much confusion and consternation on where, when, what, and how to use them. Compounding the challenge is the disparities between what “IT and Operations” leaders feel are appropriate, and what you need at your fingertips today.
In this session, David LaPlante, CEO of online brand marketing and messaging technology company, Twelve Horses will share with you stories and strategies of how to “sell technology” to your management and what strategies are having a meaningful and competitive impact today.
In this session, you’ll learn about:
Comprehensive solutions for integrating and automating.
What new technologies successful and leading meeting planners are relying on.
How to sell the adoption of new technology to your management.
Avoiding common pitfalls of implementing new technology.
Proven strategies for building a better online collaboration.
Leveraging latent and persistent online conversations to drive greater attendance and interaction.
Deriving new revenue streams for your events with new technologies.
Once again, if you are planning on attending, please look for us and say hi or leave a comment below. We look forward to seeing you there!
I enjoy exploring different forms of images I’ve captured with a camera. In this case I took an original picture and made it look like a dark watercolor that conveys a feeling of alienation and uncertainty about what lies ahead.
There are certain people who are absolutely fanatical when it comes to their fascinations with dolphins. I call these special treats, Porpoise People. And trust me, these unique individuals are by no means exclusive to beach communities. I can’t tell you how many times I have been driving through some little poedunk mountain town, East or West, and marveled at some maniac’s yard centered around a giant porpoise fountain. Inevitably, they also have a mailbox fashioned into a life size replica of a dolphin, and guaranteed, if you enter their house you’ll find china dolphins prominently placed, collector dolphin plates affixed to the wall, and quite possibly some ridiculously large and expensive statue made out of metal or crystal that the dog is completely afraid of.
What is up with this obsession?
Just the other day I was out paddling my sea kayak off the coast of Honeymoon Island, and a number of them surrounded me while hunting for food. The way they wrangle fish is so dramatic and fun to watch that one can’t help but feel a little jealous. It would be like getting up from the dinner table and doing a triple back flip followed by a few smacks of your ass on the table just for good measure.
I have to admit there is something captivating about these creatures. Dolphin’s actions wreak of intelligence, their physical abilities are astounding, and they seem so damn happy and carefree one would think they had the option to be human but decided, ‘Nah, I’m cool here, thanks.”
So, maybe I am a little understanding of Porpoise People. At least they don’t surround themselves with idols they eat like those crazy Pig People…
As email marketers, we are faced with a myriad of tasks when it comes to constructing successful email campaigns. Proper design, messaging, and the integration of actionable items are just a few of the required steps. Once you finally get to the point of hitting send, you want to be confident your message will reach its intended recipients. If only it were that easy!
Spam is on the rise and has been since its origin. It was recently reported[1] that close to 200 Billion spam email messages are sent each day – approximately 90% of the world’s email. To combat this, Internet and email providers aggressively monitor their networks for user complaints, stale data, and malicious content. They establish reputation models that identify if an email sender is legitimate or not, and then use this data to determine whether to deliver, bulk, or block incoming messages.
Companies that are in the business of sending email marketing messages find themselves in a position where they are trying to send large volumes of legitimate email, but at the same time not look like a spammer. To help bridge this perception gap a number of email sender best practices have been developed and recommended by the email industry at large. These best practices help email senders to identify themselves as legitimate companies, sending legitimate email to recipients that have requested it.
There are some fundamental steps you need to take on your own, but then there are also several services your ESP should provide.
Accountability
Email providers continually monitor their inbound mail to determine what messages are legitimate and don’t cause user complaints. To that end, there are a number of steps a sender can do to look as legitimate and authentic as possible:
If you are not sure whether your ESP provides these services then now is the time to ask. Nevertheless, not all deliverability services come automatically, and some take a little more effort on your part. But it is worth it.
Project Your Brand
Companies often make the mistake of not leading with their brand when they send email messages. Use the “from” field and subject line to distinguish your company, and live text in the preview pane to again communicate who the sender is. Be very aware of how your emails appear before images are downloaded by the recipient’s email client, and when in doubt setup and test send to multiple email clients from Gmail to Microsoft Outlook.
Maintain a Two-Way Dialogue
It is important that you give your recipients an easy means of responding. If you can email them then they can email you. Many times recipients will simply reply to the original senders address, so be sure to monitor those requests. It also helps to clearly provide a “Contact Us” link, or a preferred “reply to” address. Another means of leveraging the conversation is to point your email communications back to a company sponsored blog or forum.
List Hygiene and Maintenance
In order to maintain good deliverability rates, it is important that you keep your email lists up to date. The best means of doing this is to be sure you email everyone on your list at least once every 90 days. Senders should keep historical data on subscription signups, and quarantine email addresses that bounce, or are returned as not deliverable.
The plague of Spam has taught society to not trust email. As such, it is a continual uphill battle for legitimate senders to get their email delivered successfully. Nevertheless, if you take these steps it will go a long way to demonstrate accountability and maintain email marketing as one of the most effective tools to reach your current and potential customers.
[1] “Cisco Report Spotlights Worldwide Cyber Security Threats”, http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_121508.html
Of course, there are a gazillion different things you can do with Flickr to get the most out of your photos. But one simple and easy-to-use service is Mosaic Maker by BigHugeLabs. You can quickly turn around something like the below poster I made from photos I took at this year’s O’Neill Sebastian Inlet Pro contest. No need for Photoshop, just plug the photo urls from Flickr in and hit Create. You’ll see there are a few different customization features to take advantage of, and best of all – it is free.
Testing the Sigma APO 80-400mm with OS.
This image was taken approximately 100 yards away in the middle of the day with a Canon Rebel XTi body mounted on a monopod.
You can click the image for a larger size.
Just north of Caladesi Island is Honeymoon Island, and unlike the former it is completely accessible by car. Of course, this will naturally produce more people per acre of sand, but as the situation so often goes, if you are prepared to walk a little bit chances are high that you will find plenty of room to spread out.
Honeymoon Island offers some of the most contiguous undeveloped white sand beach located near the epicenter of Tampa Bay. As I strolled north I was able to count off the miles using the markers along the sand dunes – 1, 2, 3, where did everybody go? My advice: ditch the cooler and various accoutrements and just take a pack filled with the things you’ll really need for unobstructed, unmolested chilling on a wide open beautiful beach. Alternatively, you could take a kayak.
There is also a nice open trail that loops around the interior of the island. Right now there is a pair of nesting bald eagles at the north end of the island and more ospreys than you’ve probably ever seen in one place. Just keep an eye out for Diamond Backs and Poison Ivy.