Tricky Travel: Nature's Special Events - Wildflowers, Eclipses, Bioluminescence and More

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[00:00:16] Nasreen Welcome to Time to Talk Travel. My name's Nasreen, and today it's Mo, Des, Ciaran and myself here to chat about special natural occasions that you have to plan differently for. So if you're going to go see the eclipse or you want to go check out the bluebonnets in Texas, how is planning a trip that centers around something that you can't really control different? So Ciaran, I'm going to have you jump in here because I know you are in California, which has a lot of wildflower seasons.

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We have so many things that the schedule is controlled by Mother Nature and not by the people who are coming to see it.

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Maybe a ferry schedule. If you're going to take that bioluminescence kayak tour, you can't do it when they have all the babies near the shoreline. How do people check for these special things that are happening? Is there a good spot to go look?

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It turned out it was bottlenose dolphins, which are bigger than you would expect, but I was worried that they might be the orcas when I first saw them swimming towards the surfers. And I saw a bunch of whale watching boats further out and clustered. And I was like, oh, oh, I don't want to see something I don't want to see.

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[00:03:18] Ciaran Yeah, they're pretty good about not eating people in the wild. They generally only go after seals. This has started a huge debate. Part of watching the whales involves watching them eat the seals. That is not a tour that I particularly ever want to go on.

I love seeing the whales come up, but I don't love seeing predators and prey. That's just not my scene.

But one of the Zodiac tours, the sea lion jumped onto the boat with them. It was this big moment of debate because do they intervene?

Do they save it? Do they shove it back in? What is our role in nature? This became a huge tourism debate online in the last few weeks.

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I go back to the resort, Hacienda Encantada, that I love in Cabo San Lucas. I'm sitting on my balcony and boom here they are, spouts. I was like, what?

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They're magnificent creatures. So I'm a little torn on whale watching tours. It's not my favorite thing. I wouldn't pay to go on one. Like you said, I'd rather go out on a boat and hope to see them. But I would see them go by. I would not want to be in a boat chasingthem.

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They keep a distance, they cut their engines. The reason why that Sea Lion jumped on that zodiac was because they had cut their engine. It wasn't safe to be running their engines to even get away from them. So they were a floating island for the sea lion to escape onto.

But it created that whole debate. I completely agree. You need to be respectful and know who you're going out with because it can get pretty dicey. And I was going to say, Des, if you want to see whales, a place to go in Mexico is to La Paz or to the West coast where the whales are all breeding and they're calving.

That's probably the most magical trip that I've ever been on that is completely out of your control, but you're pretty much guaranteed to see what you went down to see.

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[00:06:03] Mo Don't go on a whale watching

Tour with Des.

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[00:06:08] Mo Research is really important to all of these because some of the things are very short-lived, you've got maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. Being Canadian, I had people show up at the airport with their skis and stuff in July expecting snow.

Yes it does snow, but not in July. Unless you go really far north. But there's a lot of fun things that you can put on the calendar like we talked about the Texas bluebonnets . But again, with that, people pull over and they want to take beautiful pictures in these fields of blue flowers- that have rattlesnakes hiding in them. There's reasons why people wear cowboy boots in Texas. It has practical purposes. And little children sitting in these fields and it's a little scary. So you have to do your research and be respectful for sure.

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I was literally paralyzed. Like I didn't know what to do or say because other than you could be arrested for doing what you're doing.

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[00:07:40] Ciaran People are pretty dumb. We have the poppy bloom and I've seen people do terrible things to the poppies in the quest of getting that perfect Instagram picture. It gets so crowded here during the poppy season.

There's five or six different locations that are on the beaten path. That literally is a beaten path. What people don't realize is you can't just drive there, pop out of your car and suddenly be in a field of flowers. You need to plan ahead. You need to know what hours the park is open. You need to know what you're allowed to bring in. I watched somebody who was in the car in front of me last time. We waited for an hour and a half to enter this park. They got turned around because they had a dog in their car and you can't bring pets into the park. You need to do your research and figure out where you're going to park, what time you need to be there, and what you should and shouldn't bring with you when you're going on these flower expeditions.

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[00:09:06] Nasreen Yeah. And I know that there's two major ones I want to hit on. First I'll jump on the bluebonnet one. We've lived in Texas and New England, so we have experience with bluebonnets and leaf peepers, and foliage season. So those are the big ones. My husband has written articles about safety around bluebonnets because he's a medic and now a firefighter. Every year they would have issues with the bluebonnets ranging from snake bites to traffic accidents because of people pulling over.

With the bluebonnets, there is a bluebonnet trail that is the beaten path. There are a lot of places to see bluebonnets off of the beaten path and the season is about four to six weeks. They can start anywhere from late February all the way through about the third to fourth week of March if it's a late season.

The trail stretches across the state, so you can really time it with where in the state you're going. Because the further south you are, the earlier they will start. With the bluebonnets as Maureen said, there are snakes, there are things in the grass.

I know we lived in Brenham and there was a small historical site down the road in Independence that had bluebonnets. That was a great place to stop because it had a small parking lot. And it wasn't overgrown, so you could see what you were sitting in or what you were putting the kids in. Because the Bluebonnet photos are going to happen no matter what.

It's a Texas thing. We have them from every year my kids were there. But you also don't want to stop on the side of highways, on people's private property.

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[00:10:37] Nasreen Yeah, there are going to be more bluebonnets. The ones off the side of the main road where you're going 60 miles an hour are not the only bluebonnets there are.

There will be more. Don't stop on a windy back road where someone's going to come around a corner and hit your car. Look for a historical site in the area of bluebonnets. I promise you. There will be some there. There will be some.

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[00:11:01] Nasreen No, it's a horrible idea. And definitely, don't do it in sandals.

Try to wear close-toed shoes if you can. It's just a good idea. There's all kinds of fun stuff in there. The other thing is parking, don't run across streets, highways, things like that. Try to find somewhere to park to get out and to go. I promise you they exist. There are trackers all over the internet for where the bluebonnet phases are.

All of the towns that have bluebonnets and are known for them, put something up on their page. You can watch where they are. You can see live feeds of what they look like at that moment. Do your research ahead of time and plan where you're going to see them so that you don't get so excited when you see your first bluebonnet that you put your family in danger.

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Don't be cheap. Spend $5, it's not terribly expensive, but for five bucks you're going to have somewhere safe to park and you're going to have a much better experience and be walking through a wonderland that looks like it was CGI generated versus being on the side of the road potentially killed.

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You park right in the main plaza and walk right over to them. They exist where there's grass.

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which is an invasive species, but it turns all the hillsides yellow for a month or so in the springtime and it's really spectacular. If you go over to Catalina Island, which is near and dear to my heart, you can also see buffalo roaming.

And we have the same problem with the buffalo that Mo mentioned. There's always some idiot who's oh, take a picture with a buffalo. Do not try and take a picture with a buffalo. They will charge, it will be the running of the bulls.

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[00:13:19] Mo You are running from the buffalo.

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It is the most magical, amazing thing, but you never know when and where it's going to show up. There's not a bioluminescent tour that you can sign up for because it happens in Long Beach and then it happens in Huntington Beach and then it happens in Dana Point, and you never can one hundred percent predict where and when it's going to pop up.

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Have a plan for where you're going to park there and be ready to see it. I imagine it's similar with Northern Lights and other types of phenomenon that sort of come and go and are weather related. You have to know what are the best places to see it and where am I going to situate myself?

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Northern Lights, extremely likely in this area within the next 15 minutes. And I will tell you three nights in a row, I got that alert and I was already in bed. I still put on all five layers and got to the roof of my hotel so I could go see them.

I booked it specifically because of that rooftop zone. They said, you'll never see them from Reykjavik because there are too many city lights.

I saw them. A downer though, to prepare anybody going to see Northern Lights, when you look with the naked eye they are not these awe inspiring green and purple. It's like white light in the sky. It's so depressing because every image you've ever seen, it's like green lights, dancing in the sky. Nobody prepared me for that. No one. I felt like it was the biggest lie I'd ever been told in my life. You're not going to look up in the sky when you see the big white bands through the sky.

They say those are it. And I'm, no, they're not. That's white. But when you look through your phone, that's the green.

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[00:15:54] Des Oh, I was so like, what a lie. What a lie. But you can capture it on your phone easily. And everyone's oh, they're amazing. They are, and they're not still no regrets. Still would love to go back.

nner year for Northern Lights: 2024

[00:16:16] Nasreen While we're talking about specific years. We know there's a solar eclipse coming this year and that's a huge natural travel event. Not only is there a very limited geography within which it happens that we know will be busy because it's going to be hundreds of years until the next exact full solar eclipse happens.

But it's minutes. You've got what - three to seven minutes to see it, depending on where you are for the full eclipse. So there is timing and planning and allowing for the traffic of everybody else getting to where it is and trying to book yourself in the exact location so that you don't have to move around during that time and miss it. Those types of once in a lifetime trips have to be planned extremely carefully with a lot of contingencies built in so that you don't travel somewhere and miss it because you were stuck in traffic and didn't get to where you thought you were going to because you booked a hotel an hour away.

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[00:17:28] Mo Great memory. Still a good story.

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There's a very specific path and you can look it up. They've got a whole website for it with the bands where you can see part of it and the line where you can see the full of it and it doesn't go through major cities., I think the city I went closest to when I looked was Cleveland.

So a lot of this is going to be rural areas with limited hotels where you may not be familiar with their roads, where you could get stuck behind a tractor. But is anyone planning to see the eclipse or are we the only ones looking into it right now?

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[00:18:23] Mo I think it's happening in Waco, Texas.

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[00:18:26] Mo Everything in Waco has been booked forever.

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[00:18:31] Mo I think if you if you had your heart set on that, you might want to do some checking.

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[00:18:40] Mo There you go. And then just drive home.

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It is as spectacular in person as it is in photos. It never disappoints.

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This hundred year event happens like every five years.

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What did they do? And she goes, they give them glasses. And I'm like the same glasses that I'm wearing on the ground, so I don't go blind by looking at the sun? I don't know how I feel about this.

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[00:19:35] Nasreen We're not looking. We’re on autopilot right now. So I guess the other thing to remember about some of these special occasions that you are so excited about traveling for and I don't want to sound like Debbie Downer or negative Nancy or whatever.

For you they are special and you are traveling to see them. And for the people who live there, it is a nightmare. So bluebonnet season. All of a sudden we can't get anywhere. You have to worry about people coming out of every corner of the road when you're driving. There's small children running around on rural highways that are 60 miles an hour.

It's terrifying. In New Hampshire and Vermont, when I lived there, foliage season. People stopping in areas to take pictures. People driving 10 miles an hour on a main road that you're trying to get to work on. As I say in a lot of episodes have a little grace for the people who live there. Do a little bit of research ahead of time to prepare yourself for where you can go see things, where you can pull off safely.

Enjoy the drive. We're not telling you to not enjoy it, but just maybe if you notice someone behind you, just safely pull over for a moment and go back to looking at the colors. Because we do know it's gorgeous and we're blessed to live in places that have this type of scenery, but it does have an impact when it is adding stress to your life daily from other folks being there.

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It's like, Hey, this is an annual event here in DC and we really need to deal with this every single year. Or maybe they see it as opportunity and

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And just also seeing the charm of the area and what else there is to do there so that you aren't just devastated when you get there and you're visiting museums in DC instead of looking at cherry blossoms or you're patting alpacas in Vermont instead of seeing bright leaves.

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[00:23:09] Nasreen And if you are doing it all for the Gram you could make arrangements for that in advance. They had to shut down an entire road in Vermont that leaf peepers were changing their outfits to take pictures in front of and blocking the whole road. But if you know that there's a beautiful area that you want to visit, find a couple of local farms there.

They have social. Reach out. Say, Hey, I'd like to make sure I can take some images. Can I pay to park there and take some photos on your property? And they'll do it. It's income, they love to know ahead of time what's going to happen. I had friends who were maple farmers who used to let people onto their land to take pictures.

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Because if you just show up and try to pull over, it's not going to happen. You're not going to get the shots. The same thing in Europe too. I have to say, I was in Cinque Terre, which is not a natural phenomenon in the same sense, but the trails there are absolutely gorgeous. There were so many people that you couldn't pass.

There's so many people that were there with their parasols and six outfits and high heels about to fall off a cliff. That's a whole other episode.

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Not like a Monday holiday. Go during the week because you see these TikToks where it shows here's what it looked like on TikTok or Instagram and here's what it looked like when I got there. And it's just people everywhere. You will have a better experience if you do not go on a weekend in any of those locations.

It really doesn't matter what it is. Almost always a weekday is going to be better and less busy.

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[00:25:53] Nasreen The Airbnb hosts, they'll put pictures up around their property. They will put pictures up of the bluebonnets with the little cottage that you're staying in. They will put up pictures of the leaves. You will know it looks like that. You can even message them and be like, Hey. I'm looking at booking.

This is when I'm looking to come. I saw your gorgeous pictures. Do you have bluebonnets on your property every year? What's good to do around there for leaf peeping where I can get off and take some pictures and not be in everyone's way? And they will know then that you are coming for that.

And as they think of things, if they're good hosts, they will message and let you know of other things to do and you can ask them those questions so that it's a great time to immerse yourself and get further into the town with the Airbnb for sure.

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[00:27:02] Nasreen Absolutely. Anyone else have anything fun and natural?

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here. That's always exciting.

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Before you go birdwatching,

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There is a hidden side to every little pretty thing that people are going to see. Snakes in the grass for bluebonnets, hitting a moose when you're leaf peeping, seals when you're whale watching. And yeah, the butterflies definitely added a certain feeling to highways.

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We have them here too. Just like the thought of that hurts

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[00:28:14] Des It is a bit depressing to think about climate change too and its impact on all of this. For me, I'd love to go to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and I keep thinking if I don't get there soon, I hear it's going to be gone. I guess this is our nudge to go see the things while we can.

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[00:28:32] Des yes.

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[00:28:34] Nasreen Thank you for joining us on another episode of Time to Talk Travel. We'll be back next week with another travel topic.

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