If you read this blog, you're probably a lot like us, constantly planning your next trip, collecting passport stamps like medals of honor, and always looking for that next peak to climb. The older I get the more keenly I feel that if I love travel this much, I also have a responsibility to preserve beloved destinations for my children and my children's children.

Responsible or green travel is at heart a conservation movement, a desire to keep pristine places around the world as they are--or even restore them to how they were. Here are 10 green travel resolutions you can make for Mother Earth. I've listed them from simplest to most ambitious so you can choose where you'd like to start. If we all make a pact to do just one of these resolutions, I think you'd be surprised at the huge impact it would have over time.

Even if budgets are a little snug this year, travel hopes remain high. Here's a list of affordable travel gifts for the globetrotter on your list. The best part? All of the items are $60 or less (and in many cases, much, much less). Happy holiday shopping!

For the Green Globetrotter

VeloPouch $45

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There's nothing quite like taking a few months to wander around Europe "finding" yourself---why, it's practically a rite of passage for college kids. So maybe that's why A&O Hostels---a chain of youth hostels with locations in Berlin, Prague, and other top European destinations---is offering free stays to anyone whose parents gave them one of the top baby names of 1989.

Oh yes, it's true. A&0 has chosen eight of the most popular names from 1989---four for boys, four for girls---and is offering free stays to kids with those names during January 2010. Sure, Leipzig in the winter certainly isn't Paris in the springtime, but when you're 21 and backpacking around Europe on pennies a day, free is a pretty good price for a night's accommodation.

What are some of the most expensive flight itineraries out there right now on planet Earth? As an experiment, I plugged in San Francisco as my departure city and Dubai as my destination (I picked Dubai at random), and did a search for first-class flight tickets over the Christmas holiday. Most flights I pulled up were in the $6,000 range, although one flight actually went for a whopping $19,517! At least it was direct!

Richard Branson is betting you’d pay $200,000 for a direct trip to outer space (which is quite a stretch from Dubai), and so far, he’s found 300 takers, even though the flights won’t even begin until 2011 at the very earliest, will only last for 2 ½ hours each (with less than five minutes of zero gravity), and will require a few days of training beforehand.

Pity poor Pittsburgh: I mocked the city right here on this blog in 2007; we called it a “destination you never wanted to visit” in 2008. Well, I just returned from a stay in Steeler Country, and I’m eating my words along with my Primanti Brothers sandwich. My new line? Pittsburgh is indeed a town worthy of a weekend getaway.

It's not even Thanksgiving, and many cities already look like Christmas. Department store windows are festooned in silver snowflakes and star-shaped lights, and some have even sprung up genuine evergreens.

But in some places, the holidays aren't just a winter affectation. Check out these pit stops and roadside attractions that do "seasonal" in a big, weird way:

Gozzi's Turkey Farm (Guilford, CT)

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Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days. - Benjamin Franklin

Whether you're crashing on Aunt Edna's floral couch or hosting your in-laws for a week, the holidays are about bonding with loved ones in cramped quarters. We asked our readers to send us their most hair-raising tales of guests gone bad. Here are your houseguest horror stories!

Via LiveScience.com: Need a pick-me-up? Travel where it’s happy. According to an article by Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience.com, researchers have determined that well-being is at its highest in states that lie in the U.S. mountains and in the far West. The Mid-Atlantic, New England, and the Midwest came next. Southern states were deemed the least happy.

Recently I discovered How I Met Your Mother, which means I was the second-to-last person on Earth to get obsessed with it. This show nails what it's like to be a young adult in the city. And so far my favorite episode has been "Murtaugh." In it, Ted says he has a list of things he is now too old to do, like pull an all-nighter or drink from a beer bong. The list is named after the main character in Lethal Weapon, Roger Murtaugh, who famously says, "I'm gettin' too old for this sh*t." But the item on Ted's Murtaugh List that resonated the most with me was: Crash on a friend's futon for the night instead of getting a hotel room.

Many a traveler has planned a trip simply to sample local tipples; the popularity of the Napa Valley wine trail is a testament to that. So how about blazing a brewery trail in one of the urban hubs leading the pack in American beer making?

These eight cities, known for their high concentrations of high-quality breweries, are perfect destinations for tasting beer, Napa-style. Channel your inner barfly and get ready for hops from brewery to brewery.