I try to be as environmentally conscious as I can. True, we do not have an electric car, but with the price of electricity in NH it would kill our budget. That is, if we even had a budget.
We would love to go solar, but we live in the woods and I am quite fond of our trees.
- We do recycle.
- Carry our own water bottles, courtesy of Hydro Flask.
- Carry our own coffee mugs, Hydro Flask and Yeti.
- We compost and have a stash in our back field for meat scraps, away from our four dogs, who don’t seem to deter wildlife. https://youtube.com/shorts/4G6By0zArJI?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/A4e_1bLkpYg?feature=share
- We reuse as many take-out containers as we can. Not going out to dinner and cleaning our plates when we do means there are not a lot of those.
- Bread bags are always reused.
- Grocery totes are used instead of plastic. Unless of course I left the bags in the other car. Then I try to get paper, helps in starting the wood stove.
- Trying to shop with a minimum of single use plastic. Not easy.
- We do not use paper towels.
- We do use scratchy, septic safe toilet paper. There never seemed to be a Covid shortage.
- We keep the heat down, or off. Most of our heat comes from our wood stoves. The wood comes from our back pasture, dead trees cut down with my battery operated chain saw. Which, by the way, I love.
Greta Thunberg tried not to fly. However, we did not have that option on our trip. Read, I did not have that option. Next trip out to Yellowstone and Glacier, hoping to take the train. I love trains! And Amtrak stops at Glacier!
Kudos to Logan airport. They had water bottle fill-ups and many recycling stations around. Many of the vendors within tried to use recyclable materials.
We tried to rent a small fuel-efficient car from Enterprise, but they were all taken. I suppose that is a good sign? They actually had only one car left with 4 wheel drive capability. But, it was comfy.
Nebraska had many huge wind farms. I liked to think that some rancher is making money as the turbines turn.
Sadly, most of the trip was appalling as far as care of the environment. Hotels had little thought for it. Plastic and single-use reigned supreme. It was very off-putting. The signs that say save on laundry have been up for years, as have the please turn out the lights. Purely cost-saving, rather than environment saving. There were few hotels with any recycling bins.
We use Hilton honors and Marriot Bonvoy when we travel. Marriot won us over with their Element Hotels. The one in Bozeman Montana is now a favorite, and we will be back. Recycle bins everywhere. Use of real utensils if they could be substituted for plastic. None of those tiny worthless shampoo etc. bottles.
I hope in the future more hotels will practice green. It is the little steps that make a big difference. If all hotels would work, as the Element Hotels do, to do their bit, even slightly, it will make a difference.
The other welcome trend we saw was how many small midwestern and western towns were preserving and caring for their historic buildings. The Weaver Hotel had been restored by the townspeople of Waterville Kansas, and was maintained by volunteers. Many of the retirees who were instrumental worried about whether the younger generation would continue their love of the place.
The Irma also maintained its love of history, but it was more geared to tourism.
“Our appreciation of western history and architecture motivated us to originally purchase and restore the hotel. …A National Historic Register building.”
As someone who cares deeply about the environment, and knows I still do not do enough, one change to be made will be in how we travel. We will hopefully take the train more. Stay in more environmentally careful hotels, look for more historic hotels.
Always looking for ways to help save this planet and learning constantly, it would be great to read what tricks you have to make your travel a bit greener, or what you do in your daily life to make even little changes.
As always, please like, and share the heck out of my posts and check out my blog on local trails in NH at mikicc.org.
Travel well.
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