Antarctica, Hurtigruten Cruise (C) Sonne

Start of para-sailing, Caribbean coast, Cancun, Mexico (C)Sonne

Dream. Go. Discover. Explore. Set your sails.

Take a leap. Sit still somewhere new. Meet yourself.

Add kindness in different time zones. Share beauty. Create laughter.

Spark an idea. Illuminate.

Whether you want to explore all seven continents or experience  your own neighborhood better, here are some inspiring travel quotes, and some images from my travels.

“Make voyages! Attempt them-there’s nothing else.”

– Tennessee Williams

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ”

– often attributed to Mark Twain

“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

Bilbao Museum, Basque Country, Spain, (c) Sonne

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. ”
St. Augustine 

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” –Mohammed

Zip-lining, Nicaragua, Austin Lehman Adventures, (c) Sonne

 

 

 

“Adventure is worthwhile.”

– Aristotle

 

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

-Helen Keller

 

” Not I, not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.” –

-Walt Whitman

World’s largest Hot Air Balloon Festival, Albuquerque, New Mexico (c)Sonne

 

 

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

— Martin Buber

 

“Three things restore a person’s good spirits: beautiful sounds, sights, and smells.”

-Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot

 

 

 

 

Moroccan Woman in the Atlas Mountains of Africa, Access Travels trip (c)Sonne

“All life is travel through time and space. Think outside the cube.”
-Lisa TE Sonne

 

 

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

– Maya Angelou

Buddhist, Himalayas, Royal Kingdom of Bhutan, Asia (c)Sonne

“Hitler didn’t travel. Stalin didn’t travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn’t want to have their orthodoxy challenged.”

— Dr. Howard Gardner

“Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves”

– Euripides

“When travelling, kindness can be  the greatest gift, and dearest souvenir.” -Lisa TE Sonne

“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.”        -Anna Quindlen

Lady Astor, Queen Victoria, Gandhi, Charlie Chaplin, Lawrence of Arabia, Kipling, Henry James, Henry Ford, Churchill all walked the grounds and halls before Cliveden House in England became a five star hotel to top the lifestyles of Downton Abbey (c) Sonne.

Maasai walking in Kenya, Africa (c)Sonne

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

– Bill Bryson

Parenting chinstrap penguin,sitting on an egg and a chick  below:

“I  like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.”

– David Attenborough

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”                                             – Marcel Proust

After traveling on all seven continents, I saw this dolphin wave surfing at the Pacific beach fifteen minutes from my home. (c)Sonne

“To move, to breath, to fly, to float…to travel is to live.”  -Hans Christian Andersen.

Sonne and a polka-dotted whale shark by Danny Heilprin

-Lisa TE Sonne, excerpts for Luxury Travel Mavens

@ExploreTraveler

(c) Lisa TE Sonne, Selects from a book she is working on

All above photos by Lisa TE Sonne. Please contact her for permission to use. Lisa@Sonne.org

Please add your own inspiration and any travel/ exploration quotes you want to share in the comments section below or email them. Thanks!

If these walls could talk… Babe Ruth, Mark Twain, you?

Mark Twain stayed at the Belleclaire. So did home-run champ Babe Ruth. “I never visited a place so kindling to my imagination,” extolled Russian writer Max Gorky on his first US visit while looking out at the Hudson River from his 9^th floor Belleclaire suite (New York Times, 1906).

Now my husband and I are on the same 9^th floor with a 2013 New York Times spread over luxurious sheets.  Our views are up Broadway via one curved window, and across 77^th to the Belvedere Castle in Central Park through another. Our luscious round room is part of the Broadway King Suite – King as in the size of the bed, not the kind of ruling royalty that Twain and Gorky criticized together, in favor of freedom for all instead!

Carillon bells from a nearby 19^th century church start playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and we can hear it over the hum of the room’s air conditioner, one of the modern pleasures that sits not far from a large flat screen TV, a mini-fridge, Dean and Deluca gourmet snacks, free WiFi, and bottled water in our round room. A multi-million dollar renovation includes a gym, media room, and coffee lounge as part of the amenities. A roof-top garden restaurant will be a stellar future addition.

Belleclaire lobby hub for people watching with silver and glass ice tea pitchers one way, wooden check-in counter under a skylight another way , Coffee Bean pastries and drinks to the right, elevators and media center to the left, from the entrance on the Upper West Side.

The Belleclaire is celebrating its 110^th anniversary and its legacy and location are its best luxuries. It’s a taste of New York’s history – an Emery Roth-designed beauty – one of the first residential “skyscrapers” in the world, at ten stories high with 18-foot ceilings. The limestone and brick, Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts hybrid is also a comfortable base for today’s Upper West Side life. Guests can stroll out from the cafe lounge and sky-lighted lobby over the original 1903 tiles that Babe Ruth walked on, and head to the neighborhood’s Zabars, Riverside Park, the Anthorp, churches from the 17th to 21st centuries, the Castle in Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium.

To commemorate the building’s 110^th, the hotel is offering two specials for the summer of 2013. One package includes a walk through millions of years of time with super passes for the famed American Museum of Natural History, with the Hayden Planetarium’s spiraling walkway of cosmic time. The other package special is for Yankee fans, with box seats and special stadium tours. The Bronx Bombers were playing out of town during our stay,  so we opted for the world class museum for an afternoon of time travel with the cosmos, whales, and food – all special exhibits there now. And then back to our elegant turret in the NYC sky.

The Belleclaire will continue to offer home run specials throughout its anniversary year and to provide many options to combine past and present for indelible New York memories!

-Lisa TE Sonne for Luxury Travel Mavens.com

The Belleclaire today celebrating 110 years!