Organic Travelers

Sedona, Arizona

2008-07-31T21:50:00.000-07:00

So to top it off, we finish our trip by staying at Enchantment Resort/Miiamo Spa, which was ranked #1 in the world in 2007 according to Travel and Leisure Magazine. Nestled in Boynton Canyon, the place is amazing and breathtaking! They have a full schedule of activities daily. We played tennis, bocce ball, and croquet, went on a vortex walk, and participated in a dance fusion class. They have hikes, mountain biking, water aerobics, wine and tea tastings, watercolor classes, Native American drumming, meditation in the crystal grotto, and so much more! Of course there is a great pool, jacuzzi, steam room, and sauna. The chef was ever so kind as to cater to our organic requests and provided the best beet and tomato dish that I'v ever had! They even have fresh spring water coming from the sinks! We also dined out at the two local organic, vegan, raw places.....Bliss Cafe, which has it's own incredible garden and raw chocolate operation. (we had plenty of samples) and D'Lish, where we had one of the best sandwiches ever! Filled with portabella mushroms, avocado, caramelized onions, roasted red bell peppers, lettuce, and more! Yum Yum! We slid down the natural water slide and jumped off the cliffs at Slide Rock State Park, (which kind of hurts your butt) and picked the sweetest wild blackberries ever. This beautiful area is the home to the upcoming Raw Spirit Expo.....now we can see why. With it's unforgettable sunsets, surreal backgrounds, and new age community, Sedona should be on everyone's list of places to see. Tomorrow we head to LA!

Santa Fe, Taos, Jemez Mountains

2008-07-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

So this part of our trip was incredibly inspiring, spontaneous, and magical. First we drove up to Santa Fe, where we had a great meeting with Body...a community center with raw, organic vegan cuisine, a yoga center, day spa, entertainment stage, retail store, and kids center. Beautiful concept! We also checked out the Tree House, another great restaurant surrounded by a huge garden. Of course we went to the plaza, took tons of pictures, and bought some souvenirs, We drove down to Cerillos in search of crystals and turquoise.....didn't find much. After a few days in Santa Fe, we cruised up the high road to Taos. There were a few sites to see on the way and we met a very interesting character in Truchas who gave us a great interview and history of the area. Once in Taos, we stayed at the Best Western Kachina Lodge. They had a great pool, hot tub, and indian circle dances and entertainment every night. The place was in the heart of the plaza. The one organic, vegan restaurant was the Earth Garden, which was fabulous. We were there every day! They have a "chai guy" from India who bring them fresh home-made chai tea as well as a local baklava and pastry supplier. The place is full of authentic pottery and art and provides nightly music and entertainment. They had some amazing soups, teas, sandwiches and our favorite....shitake mushroom satay.....so good we went back for seconds. Cid's market provided us with some great coconuts as well as some other great fruits. We ate 10 coconuts and did a 2 day cleanse......it kind of happened unintentionally....but that's another story. We saw the Rio Grande from the Gorge Bridge, checked out the Pueblo, and went to two amazing hot springs.....Hondo and Stage Coach....both sit right along the river.....such an awesome experience. To top it off, we met this young magician who was staying in one of the Earthships (www.earthship.com) with his family and he invited us to join them. Wow was this place humbling! All solar, wind, and recycled materials. Beautiful glass designs. Half the place was full of plants and trees. The water system is recycled 4 times! So your sink water goes to the plants and things like that. This guy has been up there since the 60's building these sustainable houses....there are 60 of them! We bought the t-shirts! We also went white water rafting. Not as rough and scary as I thought it would be......good times though.

After Taos, we headed down through the Jemez Mountains, where more magic happened. There are tons of trails, waterfalls, and hot springs. We decided to spend the night because we couldn't get enough. After searching and searching, we found that all of the local inns were full. Someone directed us to a religious center where they sometimes take in visitors. So we pull up and the place is called the Bodhi Mandalla Zen Center. (coincidence? I think not!) So of course they take us in for only $45 a night! And they had their own private hot springs, which we had all to ourselves......unbelievable! So to all you Budha's out there.....this is the place for a retreat! New Mexico was the perfect place to get centered, grounded, and healthy!

Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas

2008-07-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Due to lack of internet connections and our extremely busy schedule, we just haven't been able to update you! But have no fear, we are back on track and boy has it been amazing! Miami was beautiful as usual. We checked out the Gansevoort South in action. The rooftop venue has a spectacular view and is very sheik. It has amazing potential for our trade shows, music events, and more. Since Florida hasn't caught on to the "no smoking in clubs and bars" , we will have to take matters into our own hands and create non-smoking events. We didn't go out other than the one night because we are determined not to expose ourselves to the smoke. The Standard was blissful as usual. We spent so many hours in the waterfall jacuzzi and hamam. We had some very useful insight in those moments. Such a shame we had to do so much research and development! We made a new friend who produces music and we discovered that we make a great duo! (look for our album in the future!)

On to New Orleans! So this is the home of some of our biggest future projects. One of our clients, Cesar Cedillo, just signed a 20 year lease at this amazing place right on the river in the heart of the French Quarter. It used to be called the Bella Luna. Soon to be alive again with great music and local organic food (with our help). We worked out a relationship with Mischa, who is a local foreger.....one who connects the farmers to the restaurant. This guy is unbelievable. He came to New Orleans after Katrina and created his own rescue team that provided real meals for the community. Then he created this position for himself in the farm community. The Fair Grinds coffee house proved to be a great stop as well. We had some fair trade Chai Tea and met the owner, who was part of the first whole foods co-op, before Whole Foods was born! (New Orleans housed the very first one). We also plan to get involved the the MIR project (make it right New Orleans), which is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's sustainable housing development project in the 9th ward. We hope to bring them the Mandalla! (check out our non-profit involvement at www.integralsocialventures.org)

On to Dallas! So we had 2 amazing workshops at Exhale at the Hotel Palomar, which has a beautiful outdoor pool and hot tub. We stayed with a friend, who needs some guidance in her health path. Everything she ate came from the Microwave! Gross! We don't even have one of those awful devices! Check out the dangers if you haven't already.

We also had some great meetings at Veria (www.veria.com) We did a workshop at their Plano wellness center. Very cute space. They also just opened a center in Bethesda, Maryland and have plans to open centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, and many other major markets. They also have a series of shows on the Dish Network as well as many other exciting projects that coincide with some of the things we are doing. We love Veria!

And of course we went to the Dallas Farmers market and found that there were only a couple of organic vendors....but boy did they have some interesting stories. One older man told us he spent his whole life on a strawberry farm and the NEVER used pesticides! So it can be done. We also ate at the Spiral Diner, which is a vegan organic family owned restaurant. I had the meatless meatballs and a chocolate, peanut butter, banana shake. Scott has the famous Texas BBQ....vegan style of course. He also interviewed everyone in the place! We even met a guy who has an organic gas station called Green Spot, which sells fuel from recycled vegetable oil and they offer organic healthy snacks! What a great concept!

Qi Revolution Day 2 Orlando

2008-06-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

It's 1am and we just learned a bit about editing footage from a great friend from the Art Army.....Chris Hansen. We are a little too tired to get into great details about today, but rest assured, it was an adventure as always. Look for the videos soon!

Qi Revolution Day 1 Orlando

2008-06-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

So of course we were exhausted having to get up at 7:30 am after we've been used to getting up whenever, but we made it to the convention center on time, where almost 2000 people were excited to learn Qigong. It was the largest Qigong gathering in history in the western hemisphere. (www.qigong.com) Since we are working with the producers of the event, we saw tons of friends and were welcomed with lots of love. One of our suggestions of course was to have organic concessions, which turned out to be a nightmare because of logistical challenges. The caterer managed to come up with an organic spinach salad as one of the choices, which is better than nothing. We also brought a few sponsors on board....Southwest Airlines, Raw Revolution, and Numi tea. Thanks to Raw Revolution and Garden of Eden, everyone enjoyed complimentary organic raw food bars. We learned some incredible things about food based healing. Some examples include:

Beets, which are good for blood issues. Celery lowers high blood pressure. Avocado seeds are full of soluble fiber and can be put in a smoothie if you have a 3 horsepower blender. And we should all be eating our apple seeds, pineapple stems, and broccoli bottoms. Most of this was news to us, but makes perfect sense. Life is in the seeds! After a long day, we still had to go to whole foods for our dinner, and more stuff for tomorrow. We were quite disappointed to find that they had no organic humus and more than half the stuff in the place is not organic! Very misleading. So we got salad, kale, soup, a cantaloupe, some strawberries, bananas, and our usual wrap ingredients. It was quite challenging as our hotel doesn't have kitchen. We got some styrofoam dinnerware, made some salads, and heated up our soup on the coffee maker. We have a microwave, but feel it kills the nutrition in the food. Thank god we have a fridge. The hot tub awaits us once again.

Day 4 Charleston to Savanna to Orlando

2008-06-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

I got up and road one of the bicycles down to the pool for some laps.....Scott slept in. After our oatmeal, we hit the road around noon. We decided to check out Savanna, GA and found it to be so cute with all it's little parks and such. Thanks to the internet we found the Brighter Day grocery store and Sentient Bean bakery/cafe. While I spent almost 30 minutes in the toothpaste aisle, Scott interviewed the store owner, who has been in business for 30 years, as well as some of the customers. We also met Farmer D, who takes the rotten fruit and such from Whole Foods and turns it into compost, which he sells at the Brighter Day. He also has a farm just south of Savanna and is very involved in the community supported agriculture. He passed on a contact for Mother Nature News, who is looking for video content on sustainable living. And Scott and I just so happen to have tons of footage on the subject.....we will keep you posted. We ran into some thunder again on the way to Orlando, but arrived safely and went straight to the Dandelion Cafe for an organic dinner. Their chili and summer of love rolls with peanut sauce were to die for. And we took a banana curry salad to go. We resisted the desserts this time! There were some familiar faces in the place....Deborah from the Girls Gone Green and the owner of the neighborhood green spa. We got some fabulous interview and then headed to our hotel where the hot tub was waiting.

A day in Charleston

2008-06-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

We spent the day in Charleston with Sara's sister as a hostess. Sara's brother-in-law, who used to work at a 5-star beach front resort, put us on a guest list to have pool and beach access for the day. Before taking off to enjoy The Sanctuary at Kiawah Island Golf Resort we had one of our usual oatmeal concoctions. Filled with fruits and nuts, it's always a pleasure. At the beach we enjoyed a warm ocean, pool and hot tub, and our own organic lunch wraps that we brought. Filled with Qinoa, tofu, bell peppers, humus, zucchini, squash, onions, garlic, and lettuce.....all rolled up in a spelt wrap. The hotel restaurant didn't have anything organic. It's crazy how much preparation goes into eating this way each day....especially when traveling. Sara's sister enjoyed the wrap we made for her and it was exciting to introduce her to some new foods. Before leaving we managed to take a tour of the spa and fitness center. We then took a tour of downtown Charleston, which is always charming, afterwards hitting up the Earth Fare for our dinner ingredients, which became the talk of the evening. (keeping this one a secret for now!) Of course we played another game as it is a family tradition. Cranium provided many good laughs on this night. After a very long discussion about why we are choosing to live the organic, sustainable life, we called it a night.

Day 2 Richmond to Charleston

2008-06-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Scott's friends in Richmond have a pool, so we got up and did some laps, stretched, prepared, and even caught some rays before hitting the road. We drove a few miles out of the way to the local organic grocery store where we not only got some sweet fruit and other snacks for the road, but we also interviewed some customers, employees, the store manager, and a local organic restaurant owner. Like other organic grocery stores, Ellwood Thompson's was full of happy healthy consumers and a friendly knowledgeable staff. On the road we got a call from my sister and her husband, who made a special trip to the organic grocery store so that we would be happy. They haven't adapted to the organic lifestyle yet and were shocked at how much more expensive everything was. Scott and I made them one of our famous salads (we may share the recipe here soon), which they both loved, and we finished the night with a humorous game of Scattergories.

Road Trip to Florida Day 1

2008-06-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn, NY to Richmond, VA

So we left early in the afternoon Tuesday June 24th just as it was starting to thunderstorm. Luckily it passed quickly and we had clear skies the rest of the way. We brought enough organic food for the road and made it to Richmond, Virginia. Our two Whole Foods bags were filled to the top with everything from fruits and nuts to our homemade wraps, which have become a popular addition to our diet since making our own humus as a spread. We also added our leftover salad toppings (which is almost always tempe, garlic, and onions) as well as many other goodies like kale, peppers, carrots, raisins, and nuts. We tried to stop at rest areas instead of gas stations for our "breaks" because they often provided picnic tables and clean restrooms. I was very tempted to get a coffee at the last stop as I was getting pretty run down from all the packing and planning, but Scott managed to talk me out of it! It's a good thing because that roadside stuff is dangerous! We had great house music the whole time and even got some work done.

2008-05-31T14:26:00.000-07:00