Search No More for Radio Stations in our City

With Sirius and other satellite radio services out there the need to find a local radio station has almost all but disappeared.  But if you’re like me you still find yourself going ‘old-school’ and do some channel surfing.  I can’t put my finger on the reason why but I still enjoy local radio stations!

And although there is some joy I get from scanning up and down the dial to find a station there are times I wish I could just jump to a preferred station.  I composed this list by format to help if you’re driving through our city or renting a car then you can use this to set your stations while you visit us.  Enjoy!

100.3 GenX Radio

106.5 Variety

107.7 Top 40

98.1 Top 40

103.3 Classic Rock & Oldies

96.3 Classic Rock & Oldies

102.5 Adult Contemporary

105.7 Rock & Alternative

99.1 Christian Contemporary

104.1 Hip Hop

93.7 Country

92.3 Country

1120 AM Radio: Cardinals Baseball!

Driving Through

If you choose to drive to your vacation spot you may want to think about stopping to rest before your next leg of your journey.  Fairfield Inn and Townplace in Fenton, MO offer great reasons to stop and chill.  We offer all the amenities to help you relax so you can maximize your sleep before getting up and finishing your trip.  We can even set a reservation for you on the way back to ensure you have your room for your return home.

Tired drivers have been attributed to many accidents on the road and there are even reports that claim a tired driver is as dangerous as a drunk driver.  If you’re traveling with your family this maybe a great opportunity to split the driving up and let the kids work off that pent up energy in our pool!  Plus you can sit down to a real meal instead of another 99¢ heart attack in a bag.

If you’re driving from some of these cities or states we see a spike in our reservations from these areas due to vacationing families driving through on their way to their final vacation spot.

1. Memphis, TN

2. Chicago, IL

3. Indianapolis, IN

4. Kansas City, MO

5. Springfield, IL

6. Little Rock, AR

7. Tulsa, OK

8. Oklahoma City, OK

9. Nashville, TN

10. Louisville, KY

If your coming from one of these cities or others please consider us for your break from driving and stretch your legs here and sleep peacefully before continuing to your final vacation destination.  Have a safe and wonderful vacation!

Traveling and Keeping to Your Diet

There are plenty of temptations on the road to divert you from your diet - but with some planning, you can stay committed.
Difficulty:
Moderate
Instructions
Things You'll Need

·         Bottled Water

·         Granola Bars

·         Hot Cereal Packets

·         Individual Boxes Of Cereal

·         Individual Cans Of Fruit

·         Camping Utensils

o        1  Avoid "road food" if you can by bringing along your own food on trips. Convenience foods such as granola bars, canned fruit, bottled water, single-serving boxes of cold cereal and packets of hot cereal require no refrigeration.

o        2  Carry around your own utensils so that you're not forced to rely on restaurants for meals. If you must dine out, have your own menu in mind without looking at the restaurant's. Think healthy, such as steamed vegetables, fish and grilled chicken.

o        3  Keep in mind methods of food preparation, calories and portions.

o        4  Give the airline 24 hours' notice and order a special meal if you're flying - you can usually select from a variety of foods. If not, eat before you get to the airport, or consider step 1.

o        5  Keep yourself busy to avoid excess snacking. Do you have an extended wait between connecting flights? Walk the magazine aisles. Anticipating long lines? Bring a book.

Give Up or Find New Inspiration!

Whenever I feel like giving up, which seems like a lot as I get older, where do I find inspiration?  How can I make myself get back on that bull that just knocked me down?

New Experiences

Inspiration can come about because of a change or seeing the possibility of change.  You must search out and have new experiences in order to find inspiration.  This works by seeing new places or people that can inspire you.  There are many ways to find and the inspiring moments and things will different for everyone.  Here are some ideas to find inspirational:

• Creative art and writing
• Stylish music and sound
• Innovation and brain science
• Life impact stories
• Underdog stories.  ‘Remember the Titans’ always makes me feel good!
• Overcoming crisis and trauma
• Go a day or a week without TV

These are just a few and everyone will have their own personal favorites that interest and inspire them. 

Keep An Open Mind

Once you do find new experiences, the unknown often drives fear or a defensive attitude towards it.  The change that inspiration is generated from will only be held back by those initial worries or reactions so you must keep an open mind in these situations to see them from new perspectives.  You want to let it shape you thoughts, change your initial response and give yourself some time to ponder the new things before denying any possible acceptance or further exploration of the subject.  You never know what you could be missing if you close your mind to new ideas.

Watch Your Emotions

Emotions are often tied to that initial response but they also relate so closely to your past experiences they are often limiting or blinding what we dare to see or believe. A story that might be inspiring to one person can easily make another upset or angry based on how they relate their own experiences to that.  Pay attention to your emotions, watch them carefully and try to control them.  They can hide many subtle things that lead to inspiration at the wrong time or place.  Keeping them under control and always trying to change the perspective you experience things in can help with getting past a negative emotional response.

Your emotions could just as easily be signals to find inspiration as often you feel deeply connected to something or you care a great deal about specific topics so you naturally gravitate and have interest their.  Use this when it ties in well with the types of inspiration you want in your life.

Share the Experience

Finding inspiration comes a whole lot easier when you are actually talking about it doing that and talking with other people.  This is where inspiration feeds inspiration in many cases as simply sharing one inspiring story with a friend or colleague can spark them to think of their own inspiring messages and it often waterfalls into a deeper relationship as you discuss important things between you.  Each of those items shared also reveals something that has meaning to a person and knowing that thing is meaningful to them will automatically add importance to it in your life, especially if you already valued it.

Sharing stories of meaning and value are also a great way to discover new things and inspiration as well.  The first step about searching for inspiration is made a whole lot simpler when other people bring those stories to you directly in conversation.  Of course you will never feel the same hear about a story then experiencing it directly but often it inspires you enough to go make a similar experience yourself and get over your fears of leaving your comfort zone.  Offering that same to others by sharing your experiences builds a stronger relationship where you can continue to share the inspiration and drive each other to find more of it.

Seek Out Solitude

While sharing your experience with others has it’s set of advantages and methods to find more inspiration, so does solitude at the opposite end of the spectrum.  Solitude offers a way to focus your mind and body, which can allow you to tune in to your surroundings, your thoughts and your life.  It lets you notice some of the things that inspire subtly and that you would have missed if stuck in a hectic noisy environment.

Solitude is also a place where we can find time for reflection and deep thinking.  It helps a person link their actions and experiences to their thoughts, their hopes and their faith.  Spending time in solitude can relax the mind and sharpen your senses which makes the impact of inspiration often more intense and lasting.  Solitude will be different for different people, some may enjoy that time to think and study, others may meditate to relax the mind and body, and some may spend the time connecting spiritually through prayer and their internal connection to God.  All these things help calm the emotions, alert the senses and help to make points of inspiration more obvious in your life, an important way to find more of the inspiration you are looking for.

Keep in Mind Your Role Models

Role models come about because they either inspire a person or make them jealous.  Ask yourself what does your role model do that you like about them.  Don’t look for what they have or can offer you, but only in what they do.  Is it how they handle a situation, the steps they take to overcome hardship, their ability to lead and accomplish great things or perhaps it’s the methods they use to build and encourage strong relationship. Whatever it is, you can draw on that not only for seeing the inspiration but also to seek out more.

Do your role models align with the areas in your life you are passionate about? In other words, are they the source of inspiration that is most important to you?   It’s worth looking at how your role models steer you as often people have role models that steer them away from the important areas of their life and do so more because of social influence than heartfelt inspiration.  I’m not suggesting you carve out your role models only from what is important to you right now, as that would limit finding new inspiration, however, it is important to ensure your role models are truly impacting you with inspiration that matters to you and not just because of social influence.

Align Your Actions

While most of this step will be broken out in my next article about taking action on inspiration, I think some alignment of your actions with what inspires you will also help you find more inspiration.  Taking action towards something reinforces in our minds that action and it can quickly build the neural connections in your brain to learn that new action and associated inspiration that led to it.  This makes inspiration last and grow in value in your mind so putting attention to something that inspires you along with specific actions will only strengthen that.  This stronger connection will drive you to seek out even more, as the value you have towards that grows stronger and stronger. 

Follow Your Faith

Finding inspiration is not easy, especially in our hectic world with so many false social influences and media bombardment.  Connecting what is really important to you with what you encounter is something that you must learn to do to separate the noise from the inspiration in your life.  This comes as no small tasks and while the steps above might all help in that, it’s going to come down to you trusting yourself and your beliefs to actually recognize what is inspirational to you.  You must learn to trust your own judgment here, no matter the source.  That source of judgment is founded in the faith you have towards knowing what matters, knowing what is right and knowing you will recognize the differences as you encounter them.  This faith, whether you consider it spiritual or not, is one to be followed when seeking out inspiration.

Remember the ‘Crackberry?’

It wasn’t that long ago that the Blackberry was everywhere.  That was the phone to have.  In looking back I think that phone change everything and even began the change in how we went from calling to texting.  They even made a term for the use of that phone… the ‘Crackberry.’

I used to say it, “Oh yeah, their on their ‘Crackberry,’ again,” in reference to some of my friends.  But it was ok they’d say it about me two minutes later when I jumped on mine.

Well what ever happened to all those Blackberrys that owned the mobile phone market only 6 short years ago.  Well along came Mr. Jobs and his iPhone!  Then Android limped in with it’s operating system and the numbers fell off for the Blackberry.

That’s not to say that the Blackberry is going to fade away but it is no where near it’s close to 50% market share that it once boasted.  Here is the current market share breakdown based on Nielson surveys. 

Some forecasters show Android will be the fast growing smartphone over the next year.  And why wouldn’t it be the next giant on the block, it’s owned by Google.  Which brings me to my next point, it’s a Google world and who can fight that?

But how does this affect us in the hotel world?  Well as things change and change fast we have to adapt.  And in order to adapt we have to pick and choose the right apps that can help our travelers find us or where they’re going.  So I say this currently there are more apps available with the Apple system and that system is probably the most user friendly so they have a leg up on things right now from that perspective.

But knowing that Android is powered by Google and it’s financial muscle it won’t be long before the gap in the number of apps available closes if not actually eclipsed by Android.  It’s a market share thing and right now the winner is Google Android.

How does a hotel use Social Media

What’s more social than a hotel?  We host business groups, family events, friend get-togethers, backyard vacations and so much more.  But when it comes to an online voice I have to admit, overall, most hotels don’t have a clue where to go and even when you have an idea it’s not always easy to navigate the waters that are the World Wide Web.

I guess you can say now that you know the www is very tricky then you’re half way there.  But if your walking from here to China, half way there puts you in the middle in the ocean and in many ways social media feels the same way.

So for us we want to make sure you are getting the most from us on every level and social media gives us a chance to find and discuss things we have heard others talking about when traveling into our city.  Of course we think our city is great and our hotel is even better but there are a lot of questions out there when it comes to booking and what to do or what’s good in a strange city or what can happen while your traveling.

Some of it is a crap shoot but most of it isn’t as long as you have the information ahead of time so you can prepare yourself.  That’s how we see the use of our social media.  Whether you connect with us via Facebook, Twitter or our Blog we hope you come out with information that will make your stay here that much more enjoyable because you saw something here that you wouldn’t have seen somewhere else. 

Thanks for listening to me rant and I hope this helps you decide what your next step is when coming to our city.

Bees Knows

As we constantly strive to give the best service we can to all of our guests, you’d be surprised where you can find inspiration.  Bees are wonderfully organized and seem to always have an answer for everything, just what we want to provide each guest.  I’m an Animal Planet fan an I’m going to summarize some of these bees truths for you.

Plan
Bees leave nothing to chance. When forager bees have found a lucrative patch of pollen and nectar, they don’t rest on their laurels. They continue to scout for others.

Not only that, they carefully plan for succession. Heirs-apparent to the queen are fed a special diet – copious amounts of royal jelly.

When a new queen emerges there’s – guess what – a period of transition. Not until she’s proven herself by laying her first eggs does she take over the reins.

Communicate
Bees are “wired for sound” – and sounding out. They give and receive clear messages. Foragers perform dances to guide other workers to rich sources of nectar. They leave trace hydrocarbons on petals to indicate flowers have already been “tapped.” They “perform a tremble dance and emit a piping sound” when they’ve more nectar than they can handle and need more receiver bees.

Invest in your team(s)
Bees are ruthless in the collective interest. Drones that’ve past their sell-by dates and can no longer mate with queen are tossed out of the hive.

But they look after each other, too. They cleanse each other of dust and ectoparasites, carriers of infection, etc. Older bees emit a chemical that prevents teen bees from venturing out too soon, and they “school” the young in the art of foraging.

The hive invests in its “bee capital.” Career progression – from basic tasks such as hive cleaning, through nursing, comb-building and guarding to foraging – ensures things run smoothly. So, too, does talent spotting. Workers forage according to their individual sensitivities: some collect water, some pollen, some nectar and some propolis, a resin that seals cracks in the hive.

What’s more, bees know that excessive hours are bad for business. They seek out patches that are lucrative but close to home. The hive won’t thrive if workers are exhausted.

Move from “me” to “we”
O’Malley advises, “Promote community, sanction self-interest.” Bees are so committed to the collective interest, so “socially programmed” that they forgo self-gratification. Cargoes of nectar are not “tested” en route to the hive: they’re unloaded intact, for the enjoyment of all.

Things that upset the balance of the hive are dealt with by “bee police,” who destroy surfeits of the eggs that develop into males. The last thing you want is hive full of idle, libidinous drones.

So, there you have it. Ego and individualism bad. Team energy and team commitment good. It’s the wisdom of bees.

Traveling Allergies

Fortunately if your coming into Fenton we are not on the list!  Allergies are on the rise.  Ragweed and mold are your top culprits, right now.  Phoenix tops cities with worst ragweed problems.  Are you traveling into an allergy nightmare?

Some studies are showing that sensitivities to common allergens, including ragweed, mold, two types of house dust mites, cats, dogs and five foods are on the rise by 15%.  The numbers maybe higher than that due to most people with allergies don’t bother to be tested.

The top, or worst, cities for ragweed are:
1.  Phoenix
2.  Las Vegas
3.  Kansas City
4.  Riverside-San Bernardino
5.  Dallas
6.  Chicago
7.  Sacramento
8.  Philadelphia
9.  Denver
10.  Washington
        Minneapolis/St. Paul (tied)

So knowing that you maybe traveling into an area of high allergens what can you do?  These tips work while you at home as well.

Pollens. Shower or bathe before bedtime to wash off pollen and other allergens in your hair and on your skin. Avoid going outside, especially on dry, windy days. Keep windows and doors shut, and use an air conditioner and in your car.

Mold. Open windows and use fans (where available) to increase air movement and help prevent mold.

What medicines can I take to help relieve my symptoms?  (These are our suggestions but please see a doctor before you use any of these)

Antihistamines help reduce the sneezing, runny nose and itchiness of allergies. They're more useful if you use them before you're exposed to allergens.

Some antihistamines can cause drowsiness and dry mouth. Others are less likely to cause these side effects, but some of these require a prescription. Ask your doctor which kind is best for you.

Decongestants, such as pseudoephedrine and phenylephrine help temporarily relieve the stuffy nose of allergies. Decongestants are found in many medicines and come as pills, nose sprays and nose drops. They are best used only for a short time. Nose sprays and drops shouldn't be used for more than 3 days because you can become dependent on them. This causes you to feel even more stopped-up when you try to quit using them.

You can buy decongestants without a doctor's prescription. However, decongestants can raise your blood pressure, so it's a good idea to talk to your family doctor before using them, especially if you have high blood pressure.

Cromolyn sodium is a nasal spray that helps prevent the body's reaction to allergens. Cromolyn sodium is more helpful if you use it before you're exposed to allergens. This medicine may take 2 to 4 weeks to start working. It is available without a prescription.

Nasal steroid sprays reduce the reaction of the nasal tissues to inhaled allergens. This helps relieve the swelling in your nose so that you feel less stopped-up. Nasal steroid sprays are available with a prescription from your doctor. You won't notice their benefits for up to 2 weeks after starting them.

Your doctor may prescribe steroid pills for a short time or give you a steroid shot if your symptoms are severe or if other medicines aren't working for you.

Eye drops. If your other medicines are not helping enough with your itchy, watery eyes, your doctor may prescribe eye drops for you.

I hope this helps your next trip!