The Joy of Climate Aligned Travel

Reducing our emissions requires that we re-think many vacation options while maintaining a focus on trips that bring joy to our lives.

As this blog posts on Wednesday, July 1, Celeste and I are driving home from a trip to celebrate our 30th anniversary. Taking this trip definitely caused greenhouse gas emissions, no question about that. I want to explore the trip as an example of trying to hold to the disciplines of a climate concerned consumer while also deeply enjoying a week away together.

A critical discipline is choosing where to dream about spending a week to celebrate our anniversary. We chose a trip to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a favorite small town in the mountains just 100 miles from our home in Asheville.

Transportation

We drove our Tesla Y. Starting with a battery charged to 85%, we made it there easily with enough charge left in the battery to make it home. We did use an on-site destination charger to top off our battery, the equivalent of free gas. Overall, we traveled about 200 miles. With a typical energy use of 0.3 kWh/mi, and the typical emission for the electric grid in North Carolina of 670 lbs of CO2/MWh, driving 200 miles on this trip caused 18 kg of CO2e emissions (or 0.018 metric tons CO2e).

The choice of transportation, which directly relates to the destination, can be the largest segment of our emissions for a trip. A likely alternative would have been flying back to Boise, Idaho to drive up to Ketchum, Idaho for a week in the Sawtooth Mountains (a place we would enjoy returning to). Two people flying from Asheville to Boise and back would emit around 2,600 kg or 2.6 metric tons of CO2e (estimated on MyClimate). This single trip to Ketchum would have caused more emissions than an average person emits in a year in 90 developing countries, including India where over a billion people average under 2 tons CO2e per year per person.

And if we would let our mind fixate on getting back to the Swiss Alps and returning to Grindelwald, Switzerland, our round trip flights from Asheville to Zurich would have emitted around 6,200 kg or 6.2 metric tons of CO2e! That is a lot of carbon emissions for a week or two in the Alps, an area where the mountain glaciers are melting and pulling back as the climate warms.

The key for us is to focus on the benefits of visiting Blowing Rock. Many of the benefits are outlined below, but they also include our ability to drive to Blowing Rock in 2 hours with no waiting in lines, no cramped flights, no jet lag, and no TSA check points.

Accommodations

A night in a hotel does cause extra emissions beyond our home energy use. While we save energy at home by limiting heating and cooling, setting our hot water heater to vacation mode, and not having the lights on, there are additional energy use and emissions from our accommodations. A hotel has emissions from these very same items: heating or cooling our room, heating our hot water, and providing electricity to recharge our phone and turn on the lights. Furthermore, even if we didn’t use them, hotels directly maintain other spaces that are heated or cooled and lit - these include hallways, elevators, a lobby, sometimes full restaurants or a food bar, maybe a swimming pool and other amenities like a weight room or exercise facility. And don’t forget the laundry from the sheets and towels.

Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index offers some data on actual hotel emission per room-night calculated by averaging the entire energy budget from actual hotels over the number of rooms they have. While we are on the road, we often stay at a Holiday Inn Express so we can centralize our hotel points and because they have units along the freeway route that takes us to our kids in Michigan and Illinois. These are considered somewhere in the 2 to 3 star, limited-service segment of the hotel market that have average emissions of 12.6 to 15.4 kg CO2e/room-night. Staying in nicer hotels comes with emissions from more common areas, bigger and better restaurant(s), pool(s) and other amenities, so the average emission caused by staying at a four star hotel is 23.5 kg CO2e/room-night stay and a five star hotel with more amenities causes 41.6 kg CO2e/room-night.

On this trip to Blowing Rock, we stayed at a rented condo. While it is hard to find data on condo rentals, I did find some data that a 1,200 sqft condo has typical emissions below 4 tons CO2e/year which leads to about 11 kg CO2e/night. For our stay, I assume an emission factor about 25% higher than that to take into account the cleaning, washing sheets and towels once at the end of our stay, and administration. Assuming 14 kgCO2e/night emissions over our 8 nights leads to an estimated total emission from our accommodations of 112 kg CO2 for the eight nights of the trip.

The condo we rented was wonderful! A trail at the back of our parking lot connected into an extensive trail system in the Moses H. Cone area of the Blue Ridge Parkway that was great for walks and for birding. In addition, we were just a 15 minute walk into the town of Blowing Rock where there are good restaurants and shops. Yet we were far enough out of town that the area was quiet, scenic and relaxing. Renting this condo was more expensive than a hotel room, and there are wonderful options for hotel rooms nearby also for a lower cost trip.

For people considering a cruise, the emissions caused by traveling and spending a few days on a cruise ship are much higher. Emissions from cruise ships are surprisingly high, with emissions from a cruise being over twice as high as simply flying to a destination and driving yourself around to see the sites you want to see. Furthermore, once in international waters, cruise ships burn heavy fuel oil that also emits other pollutants like soot (PM2.5), sulfur oxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx); so there are additional pollution impacts from a cruise ship. Bottom line, avoiding cruise ships is even more important than flying less.

Enjoyable Eating While Traveling

We do change our eating habits when we travel, but we stay within our guard rails of mostly plant based meals with some added fish and eggs for protein. We ate out every night and a couple of breakfasts, while sticking to simple breakfasts and lunches we made ourselves. We tried to support restaurants that offer vegetarian options.

The Moon at Blowing Rock, a Thai and Asian restaurant, fed us for three delicious dinners. The setting was comfortable, the food was delicious, and the menu had a wide range of options for vegetarians.

We did eat meat twice - trout raised in Western North Carolina - at The Speckled Trout. Avoiding fish that is flown in fresh avoids a significant jump in emissions for fresh fish.

A favorite restaurant, Coyote Kitchen in Boone, serves up Southwest and Caribbean-inspired bowls and boats built on rice, beans, and extras like sweet potato, spinach, sautéed red peppers, roasted corn, plantain and garlic-lime vegan aioli. Delicious. Lots of options for vegetarian and vegan meals with beans to offer sufficient protein in our dishes.

One restaurant we had been to before used to have a delicious collard dish available as a main course. We got a table and ordered drinks before even looking at the menu. To our surprise, they had a completely new dinner menu and no longer offered any vegetarian main courses that we would order. None. We found a way to assemble a good meal from their sides and appetizers: roasted brussels sprouts, asparagus, broccolini, sweet potato fries, plantain, mashed potatoes and bread. It was delicious. The cooking staff clearly knows how to cook, the management simply doesn’t think there is a market for vegetarian meals. I wish there were more patrons asking for vegetarian meals so more restaurants would offer a few alternatives to meat centered entrees. That said, these sides were delicious and the food quality drew us back for a second night of sides.

One positive shift over the last decade as consumer preferences have shifted: the local Food Lion grocery store stocked a suite of Silk Almond Milk variations. I seem to be able to find unsweetened Silk (with no vanilla) in any destination I visit lately. That is a pleasant shift.

Birding

Celeste and I have adjusted our birding goals away from simply expanding our Life List (total species seen). Expanding beyond a few hundred birds observed does require traveling farther from home. Instead, we enjoyed exploring some no-longer maintained old roads that are now unmarked paths in a forest and expanding our bird count in Watauga County, North Carolina.

I will admit that I have to bite my tongue when I listen to birders describe their travel around the world to keep growing their Life List well past the thousand mark while causing significant CO2 emissions. It is hard to expect oil and gas companies or airlines to work to lower emissions if consumers simply don’t seem to care about emissions - even environmentally conscious birders who are passionate about preserving ecosystems and preserving bird species. But I typically don’t push this when a birder decides to tell me about their next trip to __________. (fill in the blank: Alaska, Columbia, Brazil, Africa, Thailand…) And I will admit, having birded in Arizona within the last few years, it is a thrill to explore new species and new ecological habitats and climate zones. But there are regional thrills I can intentionally choose to pursue.

We focused on the joy of seeing over 30 wood ducks, mostly young chicks searching out bugs on lily pads.

And the pleasure of close looks at woodland warblers while walking around Trout Lake on the Moses H. Cone property, including the four warblers below.

That was fun!

Overall, our anniversary trip allowed us to enjoy our week together and get away while maintaining our commitment to lower our emissions. And I finished 3/4s of a new book that nicely compliments this blog: Leave The Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao (2026). But more on that book in a later post.

Find joy, and reduce emissions. The two go together well.

Jim