Photo by Wit www.flickr.com/photos/-wit-/

You’re stuck at home. The sun is shining. You want to do something. You need to get away. You don’t want to spend May Day stuck in your living room or garden counting the tiles or writing inane comments on facebook. Seize the moment – check out our suggestions for a Last Minute May Day Getaway!

There’s plenty of classic May Day options available – from the traditional to the political. For instance you could cheer on an ’Obby ’Oss in Padstow surrounded by locals dressed in white during a 4000 year old celebration; sing ‘cuckoo’ as you dance around a maypole in Downton; be draped in garlands of flowers in Hawaii; make crosses from flowers in Spain; cross a scarecrow in England; set fire to a horse in Italy; bury a fish; get involved in some green morris dancing; or rock with the workers in Belgium.

There’s more than 140 other events you could attend this May Day. Let Joobili help you escape…

Whilst food and travel have been intimately linked since the advent of mass tourism, the proliferation of international cuisine might lead you to conclude that the furthest you need to travel for some exotic grub is your local town centre. But such thinking is wrong on two counts. Firstly, local ingredients matter: if your tomatoes haven’t been grown in volcanic soil on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, then your Margarita pizza is always going to fall short of what’s on offer in the winding streets of Naples. Secondly – at this is where Joobili comes in – timing is everything. There’s no point in turning up in such exotic locations as Prague or Barnsley just after they’ve cleared away the froth from the latest beer festival, you’ll be sick to the bottom of your stomach if miss out on a 500 year old festival in celebration of ham whilst on a gastronomically-inspired jaunt through  France, and your tongue will never forgive you if you don’t give it the pleasure of wallowing in some delicious red juices during the Strawberry Fair in Malta.

Yes folks, there is a world of food and drink inspired travel out there.

For some, food is yet one more arena for competition. It’s about gaining international fame through helping yourself to humongous helpings of hotdogs, about dazzling village folk through your potato peeling prowess at the World Dumplings Championship, or about having the largest avocado.

For others, food and drink are about celebrating local specialities whether it be great British cheese, the pumpkin pies, pumpkin waffles, pumpkin burgers, pumpkin chili and pumpkin ice creams of Circleville, or the horse semen shots (yes, you read that correctly) of New Zealand.

Finally, for some travellers, being abroad means letting go, forgetting the diet, and pigging out. And where better in the world to eat like our pink curly-tailed cousins than at Pig Out In The Park?

Plan your foodie travel in a timely fashion with Joobili.

Summer means its European music festival season.  We’ve all seen local jaws drop when travelers enter a crowded space speaking in voices that … carry. An unspoken rule easily broken in Europe, it seems, is speaking quietly. So European music festivals are the perfect antidote to these hush-hush sneers and glares.

To help you decide where to go when, we’ve created a top 10 list of our favorite European music festivals for July and August where noise *is* approved.

From the famous Glastonbury music festival to the renegade Exit festival in Serbia, to the low-key, free three-week music marathon in Florence, Italy, Europe literally has hundreds of summer music festivals.

Our top 10 list will give you a jump start on how you’ll be screaming with your new European friends in some of Europe’s top cities like Krakow, Poland, Salzberg, Austria and even Reykjavik, Iceland (BTW- Joobili has 11 reasons to unhate Iceland in case you’re still upset about the volcano).

Just remember, your ticket to noise expires once you leave the festival gates. So why not keep the noisemakers going? No one said you can’t do two summer festivals in Europe in one trip, right?

The Bristol Oxjam Music Festival is the local edition of the month long Oxjam Music Festival taking place across the UK. Bristol is using its green credentials to highlight the relationship between climate change and poverty:

• 100 million people will be affected by climate change by the end of the century.
• Rising sea levels will increase the risk of death and injury by drowning. Up to 20 per cent of the world’s population lives in river basins that are likely to be affected by increased flood hazard by the 2080s.
• Heat waves are likely to increase deaths among elderly or chronically sick people, young children, and the socially isolated. Europe’s 2003 heat wave – induced by climate change – resulted in 27,000 extra deaths.
• Future climate change is expected to put close to 50 million more people at risk of hunger by 2020, and an additional 132 million people by 2050.
• By 2020, between 75 and 250 million of people are predicted to be exposed to increased water shortage due to climate change
• In Africa, shrinking arable land, shorter growing seasons, and lower crop yields will exacerbate malnutrition. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by 50 per cent as soon as 2020.
• By 2020, between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa are likely to face greater water stress due to climate change.

Smaller music events will take place throughout October in Bristol, all leading up to the culminating concert on Oct. 25. If you are anywhere near Bristol it’s worth checking out the music and voicing your concern over the effects of climate change on world poverty.

Joobili is a playful misspelling of “jubilee”, meaning an anniversary or a season of festivities. It captures the elements of time and celebration, which is exactly what Timely Travel is all about. Plus, the name is fun to say and nearly every European language has a variation of the word jubilee. But what’s up with the funky spelling you ask? Here’s a little factoid. There are 500,000 words in the English language and an average person has a vocabulary of 20,000 words. There are 150,000,000 websites and blogs. That’s a long way of saying that finding a real word .com URL is nearly impossible (unless you’re buying it). And if you ask me, the Joobili spelling gives it some extra playfulness and energy. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, that’s the story behind the Joobili name. Feel free to express your love or hate for the name in the comments section. One thing naming did teach me is that you never want everyone to like your name. If everyone likes it then the name is too boring. So I’m hoping some of you hate it:)

A little over a year ago I was talking with my friend (and later business partner) Tamas Gabor about recent travels. I had just returned from St. Moritz, Switzerland feeling it was over-priced and over-touristy. Tamas had quite the opposite opinion. It turned out he visited St. Moritz in January on the weekend when Cartier hosts a Polo World Cup match on the frozen surface of Lake St. Moritz. He described horses kicking up mists of snow in natures stadium of ice and Alps. Same city, but radically different experiences, and the only variable was time. It got us reflecting on our best travel experiences and we concluded that the old saying “timing is everything” is especially true for travel. We started questioning why the first thing most travel sites make you do is enter your destination. What if I don’t know or don’t care where I go, so long as I do something cool and memorable? We set out on a journey to create travel inspirations based on timing.

Welcome to the Joobili blog…thanks for joining in the journey.