Question 1:
You should use either the query_var arg of the custom taxonomy, or add the parameters
'taxonomy' =>'event-type' , 'term' => 'the-journey'

to the WP_Query.
BTW, taxonomies are not new to 3.0, and are much more limited than regular categories and post tags (forget about category__and , for instance). You'd better go with regular cats and tags, and maybe some option row in the database to group them.
Or use my ZYX Term Meta plugin, which allows to create term groups (which can be children of other term groups) with lots of features. This plugin is under development (actually, it's the docs that are missing and some UI), if you feel interested, mail me.

Question 2:
It depends a lot on what do you have inside that single page.
But all you need is to know, I suppose, if some post->ID has any term of that taxonomy attached to it. Just need to do:
wp_get_object_terms( $post->ID , 'event-type' );

It will return an empty array if it has no terms for event-type, so

count( wp_get_object_terms( $post->ID , 'event-type' ) )

will return "true" (1 or bigger) if that "single" has anything related to event-type.