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Cities with Big Style

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Iconic American Style - Cities

Summer is here and you more than likely have a week or two’s worth of holidays coming up.

Do you happen to live in one of these four Iconic American cities?  Naturally, not everyone can live in these four wonderful cities.  Heck, I don’t even live in the United States!  I live in Canada.

I can, however, say that I’ve been to Chicago and New York City and I absolutely loved both cities.  As stated in the information above each city has very distinct and memorable areas that are unique to each city.   I’d certainly love to visit Boston and San Francisco some day.

So what are you doing this summer?  Are you taking a road trip?  Driving to one of those wonderful cities for a week or two?






Goin2travel could make it easier for our to plan our next family reunion vacation

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I’m behind in my blog posts this weekend because we’re having our big family reunion this weekend. In about an hour I’ll be going over to my brothers home where we’ll be having a big barbecue. All of my brothers and my sister will be there with their spouses and children. It should be fun.

I expect at some point during todays activities we’ll begin to discuss what we’d like to do next year for our family reunion. In prior planning sessions we’ve discussed traveling to other countries for our reunions.

Obviously if we were going to hold one of our get togethers outside the country we’d probably look in to some kind of vacation rental as this would keep our costs down and I’m sure we’d have fun staying together in one or two vacation rentals.

So … I’m doing a bit of research before I leave for the BBQ. There’s a site called Goin2travel.com that specializes in worldwide vacation rentals. Owners and managers of various types of vacation rentals list their rentals and availability on the site and people like myself who are looking to rent can browse through the selection and find the ideal vacation rental.

One of my brothers went to San Diego a couple of years ago and he just loved the area so maybe we’ll look into San Diego vacation rental homes. Another idea might be to look for Newport beach rental homes. The beauty of this site is that you can find vacation rentals just about anywhere.

Actually … one of my brothers lives in Vancouver Canada and we haven’t had our family reunion out west yet. Perhaps I should look for vacation rentals in Whistler BC. Staying in a lovely mountain home sounds beautiful doesn’t it?

I’m bookmarking this site and I’m definitely going to be telling my siblings about it when I see them in an hour or so. It might really help us plan our next reunion.

Free blog community at Thoughts.com

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thoughts.jpg

I was asked to do a write up of Thoughts.com blogs – a 100% free online blog community.

Thoughts.com was given an appropriate name since it was created as a place for people to share their thoughts. It has since developed into a community of bloggers from all over the world.

As free blog communities go there are a few features that you’ll find on Thoughts.com that you won’t find elsewhere.

Unlike other blogging communities members of Thoughts.com can share videos, photos, music files and podcasts. Registered members can even rate other members videos, podcasts, blog posts and photos. In fact, if a member wanted to be able to make posts in the community blog sections of the site they would need to have been rated by other members and have attained a rating of 4 in order to post. So participation and interaction with other members is obviously encouraged.

I realize that many of the people that read my gardening blog have websites or blogs of their own, but not all of you do. Perhaps Thoughts.com might be a site to explore since you can upload your own photos and videos for others to see. If you were to sign up for a free membership you could use your blog as a journal and make entries about your plants or gardening methods.

The best feature of the site is of course that you can upload so many different types of multimedia all in one site. Other blog related communities or for that matter even personal blogs often need to host their photos, videos and podcasts on a variety of sites and then embed code into their blogs or posts in order to show others what they’ve created. Since you can store all your multimedia files right on thoughts.com I’m sure it’s easier to use photos and videos in your posts or point others to these files without having to leave the site.

Another great feature of Thoughts.com is the fact that they reward their top members with a free trip each year. This year they’ll be taking five of their most active members to Las Vegas. It’s an all expenses paid retreat. You can read all about it on the site but the winners will stay in a 4 star Las Vegas resort, have three free dinners and two free shows awarded to them, as well as having round trip airfare from anywhere in the continental United States.

Now that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. I can’t think of any other blog community that does anything like that. The best part is that all you have to do to win is be one of the most active on the site which is easy enough to do if you are uploading photos and videos, having them rating by members and rating other members items as well.

Check out Thoughts.com if you’d like to start your own free blog and socialize with others. Don’t forget to visit the community forums while you are there.

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