If you scan down the 750 or so items listed in our events column you will find strange, amusing and oddish ones that reflect the make up of our countries. Take, for example, the National Scything Championships at the annual Green Scythe Fair that were held exactly a week ago at Thorney Lakes in Somerset. Who does ego to fairs like this? How much interest can there be apart maybe, from enthusiastic scythers?
Quite a lot seems to be the answer because record crowds gathered including lots of children. What is a record crowd for an event like this I hear you ask? 50? 500? The answer is more than 2,000 for what I would have thought was of only little interest. How wrong I am.
According to the organisers scything is a sport. Agriculture’s answer to snowboarding.

Today’s the day.
It’s the grand opening of Universal’s new theme park, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. At Orlando in Florida, Universal have put a lot of time, effort and money (Universal won’t say how much but figures of close to $200 million have been bandied around) into creating a spectacular attraction that they are hoping will dazzle visitors from around the world.
Will it?
Last month they held a sneak preview from buyers around the world and the general view amongst world weary travel executives and journalists was that it would.

Last week, Visit Chester & Cheshire held their annual tourism awards. There were 15 categories and Tatton Park won the award for best visitor attraction of the year. It isn’t the first time it has been successful, this being the third time this century. Receiving over 750,000 visitors each year, some of the reasons for its likely success are that it combines 50 acres of gardens, (out of 1,000 in all) a mansion, a park and it is easy to get to from two motorways. They also have a large number of events operating throughout the year and you can see those by looking at CD-Traveller’s event pages.
Of course, they weren’t the only winners. The award for the best tourism experience went to the shark dive at the Blue Planet Aquarium near Ellesmere Port. Sharks have never been one of my favourite things so I am one of the exceptions since the Aquarium even gets large numbers voting in its favourite shark category. (Bella the Black Tip Reef Shark won last years with 3,000 plus votes!)

If you haven’t voted for the Art Fund Prize yet then you have only until the 18th of June to do so. You can vote at www.artfundprize.org.uk/2010/vote/ for one of the final four contenders. The prize, £100,000, will be awarded by the judges after the closing date and your vote will help to influence them. The 30th of June will be the date that the winner will be announced and we’ll let you know as soon as we can which is the lucky museum.

You might wonder what an African country and the largest conservation charity in the UK have in common. At this time of the year there are tourism awards that are given out and both have received a pretty similar award.
The World Travel & Tourism Council, (WTTC) is a body that you may not have come across. It is a forum for 100 of the top business leaders in travel and tourism across the world. They have just announced what they call their Tourism for Tomorrow Awards which reward sustainable tourism. The destination that has won this year’s Destination Stewardship Award is Botswana for the way that it treats tourism in the Okavango delta

Last week was National Ice Cream Week. Where are most ice creams sold? I haven’t a clue, possibly at beaches, but I do know that the end of the week coincides with the announcements of where we think the best beach in the UK is. The Cadbury Flake Great British Beach Awards (you can guess who the sponsor is) are not decided by water quality, cleanliness of the beaches or some government team. You will have voted for them online so therefore the winners were totally up to you and based on your own criteria.
And Rhossili Bay in the Gower was voted the runaway winner. It received 47% of all the votes with Tresco in the Scilly Isles coming second on 19%. Then came Margate and Blackpool on 10%.

Now that June is on upon us and the weather is improving (ie no more bank holiday weather with luck), we are into the season of the village days. These village days are the way that money is raised for community projects. It could be for a new hall at one extreme, its maintenance or it could be just for local charities. It brings people into the villages and some people I know go from one to the other in June. The end of the season comes at about the time the schools break up for the summer holidays.
Virtually every weekend in June we have a village day in our district and on some Saturdays, two or three.
You may have the same in your area. And if you want to let others know where they can go for a good day out, e-mail us at editor@cd-traveller.com and it will be listed in our events section.

This morning, easyJet held a press conference to announce that a solution might have been found to one of the problems that significantly affected us during April and May. The Icelandic volcanic eruption caused cancellations in Europe, disrupted travel plans and contributed to reduced economic activity. EasyJet said that the disruption cost them between £50 and £75 million. Two of my flights were cancelled and train services did well out of me, being able to charge higher rates than I would normally pay in order to get back home. Now easyJet think that this solution, called AVOID, could prevent a similar issue affecting us in the same way. And it is all down to Fred.
Fred is actually Dr Fred Prata, a scientist working at NILU (Norwegian Institute of Air Research) and he has been working on this technology since 1993. It is he who has developed AVOID which for the technically minded of you stands for Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector.

The mid-west of America is the place that is most associated with farm crops. Here, vast soybean and corn fields cover the land. Here agriculture is the staple employment and the staple comment of conversation. But down in a triangle stretching from Chicago to the Quad Cities on the Illinois/Iowa borders, then down to Champaign and back up to Chicago there is another topic of conversation,-tourism. But tourism with a slight difference This is agri-tourism. Tourism for those people interested in farming, how crops are grown, how the land is managed and how and what machinery is used.
Did you know such tourism existed? Here’s a holiday with limited appeal.

Remember the Route 66 competition that the Chicago and Illinois Tourist Office announced about a week ago? If you haven’t entered yet, then hurry because the first part ends this weekend. The prize is a 3 day trip to Chicago for 2 people and a hire car so you can explore some of Route 66. The website to go to, in case you’ve forgotten is www.chicagoroute66ambassador.co.uk.
Those people in Illinois, the state in which Chicago is, are working hard to persuade us to visit them. From the May bank holiday weekend for about a month , they will have taxis in Manchester emblazoned with their publicity. On a particular day each week, catch the right taxi, and your fare will be free. How do you know which day and which taxi? You don’t. It might be the same day each week but it needn’t be. It won’t be the same taxi so its no point taking the number plate. That’s as much as I could find out for you.