Search results for ""Author Jeff Blumenfeld""

Christopher Columbus needed a sponsor for a dangerous expedition, but the king of Portugal wasn’t interested. He repackaged his proposal for the queen of Spain. She put Columbus on retainer, and the rest is history. Columbus may not have been the first to discover America, but he had a great publicist.That’s where Jeff Blumenfeld comes in. For many years, using a PR specialty called adventure marketing, Jeff has connected explorers and their projects with corporate sponsors looking to demonstrate product performance in extreme conditions. His book takes the reader from Erik Weihenmayer’s expedition to be the first blind man to summit Mount Everest, to the first confirmed dogsled expedition of the North Pole, to Audrey Mestre’s deadly free dive expedition off Bayahibe beach in the Dominican Republic. You Want to Go Where? is the only book that not only takes you behind the scenes of some of the most dangerous adventure expeditions in recent years, but also shows how you can fund and arrange your own trip, including details on everything from grants to sponsorships.For anyone who’s ever had a dream to scale the tallest mountain or cross the largest ocean, You Want to Go Where? is your ticket. Full of fascinating stories and practical advice, it’s ideal for armchair explorers and budding adventurers alike.

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Imagine yourself in a schoolroom in one of the most remote regions of one of the most hard-to-reach countries on earth. Nepal. The Lower Mustang region to be exact. To reach it takes a 14-hour flight from New York to Doha, Qatar. Then four hours by air to Kathmandu. Transfer at one of the world’s most dangerous airports to a 90-minute flight to Pokhara, followed by a jarring, eight-hour Jeep ride over a vertiginous dirt road – one side is a mountain wall, the other side a two-hundred foot cliff. Finally you arrive, but it’s not just any schoolroom. It has been converted into an operating room so that doctors from New York Eye & Ear Infirmary can provide the gift of sight to 24 Nepalis who were blind due to advanced cataracts. Jeff Blumenfeld witnessed this first hand. He was there as a traveler, but also as a volunteer. A voluntourist. People often wonder how they can explore the world and help the less fortunate even if they don’t possess specialized skills. These are people who make lousy vacationers. They’re bored sitting on a beach or touring umpteen churches on a cruise ship excursion. They want a meaningful role when they travel. That’s where voluntourism comes in – a mix of both travel and volunteering. Is it hard work building wells and schoolhouses or excavating dinosaur bones? Yes, it is. But voluntourism doesn’t take a particular outdoor skill, just plenty of sweat and the desire to see the world and leave it a better place. Travel With Purpose deals not with celebrities, nor the rich and famous. Instead, it relays examples from Blumenfeld’s travels and many others from Las Vegas to Nepal. From health care facilities to impoverished schools. These are stories of inspiration from everyday people, all of whom have definite opinions about the best way to approach that first volunteer vacation. You don’t need to be wealthy to travel to foreign lands to volunteer; you may not even have to go to foreign lands, as opportunities may exist within your own state. Blumenfeld shows readers how to identify the right location and volunteer situation, how to go about planning trips and preparing for activities, how to reach out, how to help. Through vivid examples and first hand stories from both recipients of volunteer work and the volunteers themselves, Travel with Purpose may make you rethink your next vacation.

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