Destination: United States
The Songlines of Key West: Doing the Duval Crawl
by Bill Belleville | 01.07.09 | 10:28 AM ET
Photo by Michelle Thatcher. In a three-part series, Bill Belleville burrows deep into the spirit of the mythic island.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzThe Songlines of Key West
by World Hum | 01.07.09 | 10:09 AM ET
Photo by Michelle Thatcher. Michelle Thatcher burrows into the spirit of the mythic island. Images from a three-part story series by Bill Belleville.
See the full photo slideshow »
Morning Links: Robots Around the World, ‘Pizza Huh’ and More
by Michael Yessis | 01.07.09 | 9:34 AM ET
Design by Open. - ReadyMade asked artists to “reimagine” Depression Era WPA posters. Open created a great one (pictured).
- McDnoald’s. Bucksstar Coffee. Pizza Huh. Is someone in China building a shopping mall filled with fake brands, or is it all just fake?
- Barack Obama: Restaurant critic. He loves his peach cobbler at Dixie Kitchen in Chicago.
- World Hum contributor David Farley talked travel with Arthur and Pauline Frommer.
- Voting begins on the New 7 Wonders of Nature. There are 261 nominees.
- An American tourist was stabbed outside a bar in Rome.
- Happy 50th birthday, Alaska.
- Farewell to the SS Catalina.
- Another farewell to the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn.
- Jon Bowermaster started a two-month residency at Gadling, writing from Antarctica. He calls the continent “the beating heart of Planet Earth.”
- Why not measure the world’s countries by robot density? Here are the top 10. (Via Passport)
- This may be the least scenic hot tub in the world. I prefer this view.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
The Road Less Eaten
by David Farley | 01.06.09 | 2:52 PM ET
America’s relationship with food from around the world has traveled a long way in the last few decades. Case in point: Weight Watchers “Worldwide Favorites” recipe cards from 1974. Say what you will about globalization, at least we no longer have to endure these fish “tacos” (their quotes), an anything-goes orgy of tomatoes and cheese, or ashen-gray Fish Balls or Fluffy Mackerel Pudding.
I’ve never been to Polynesia, but something tells me the combination of ingredients in the Polynesian Snack—fruit, buttermilk and sprouts—would make an islander eat sand before laying hands on anything from this recipe book. We’ve come along way, baby.
The Grateful Dead: On the Road Again
by Eva Holland | 01.06.09 | 11:39 AM ET
The surviving members of the Grateful Dead—whose classic track, “Truckin’,” recently landed at No. 28 on our list of the Top 40 Travel Songs of All Time—will reunite this spring for a new American tour, the CBC reports. Cue the inevitable headline: The Dead Keep On Truckin’.
Morning Links: T-Shirt Justice, Route 66’s International Appeal and More
by Michael Yessis | 01.06.09 | 8:35 AM ET
- The TSA and JetBlue settled with Raed Jarrar for $240,000, more than two years after he was forced to remove a T-shirt with the words “We Will Not Be Silent” in both Arabic and English before boarding a flight.
- Have centuries-old diaries of a “British explorer who saved the real-life Robinson Crusoe” been found?
- Route 66: It’s huge in Belgium and Sweden and the Czech Republic and Norway and…
- A Moscow to Atlanta flight ended up in Newfoundland because of an unruly passenger.
- Air India dismissed “overweight” flight attendants.
- New York City’s 86th Street subway station: It’s “the noisiest, if not the most unlikely, museum in the city.”
- A happy third birthday to Perceptive Travel.
- Chris Patten on “the joys of an Asia-Pacific book tour.”
- Authorities interrupted a German pair’s destination wedding. That’s apparently what happens when the couple consists of a 5-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl who try to take off for Africa while their parents are sleeping.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
Honolulu Overheard
by Pico Iyer | 01.05.09 | 8:21 AM ET
iStockPhoto Pico Iyer takes in the Hawaiian city through its sounds
Morning Links: Stilwell Road, the Delta Queen and More
by Michael Yessis | 01.05.09 | 8:14 AM ET
Photo by David Raterman - The amazing story of Stilwell Road— written by an anonymous Los Angeles Times writer.
- Robert Reid offers some suggestions for helping struggling travelers’ destinations. Among them: An alphabet throwing contest in Rila, Bulgaria.
- Passengers “run amok” on flight from England to Cuba.
- Christopher Elliott finds seven videos the airlines don’t want you to see.
- Gawker compiles video from a month of cruise ship disasters.
- P. J. O’Rourke on Disney’s “Innoventions Dream Home,” aka the House of the Future II.
- The Delta Queen: A new endangered historic site?
- Student abroad and accused murderer Amanda Knox was voted woman of the year in an Italian poll. Her trial begins later this month.
- The Cranky Flier remembers the airlines we lost in 2008.
- The New York Times discovers buzkashi in Afghanistan. We covered it in Tajikistan in 2002 and spelled it buskaschee. What is buzkashi/buskaschee? Goat-carcass polo.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
The Myth of the Carbon-Neutral Air Traveler?
by Joanna Kakissis | 01.02.09 | 2:27 PM ET
By 2025, air travel could hurl nearly 1.5 billion tons of carbon annually into the environment—about a half of what the 457 million people at the 27-nation European Union currently emit. If you care about the environment, this is a terrible trend to ponder on an international flight.
I’m in Athens, Greece, now spending the holidays with my family but my flight from Denver, Colorado, did its small part to pollute the earth, producing some 5,243 lbs of CO2, according to the TerraPass carbon footprint calculator. I felt bad, to some extent, but air travel is the most efficient way to visit people and places when we’re on tight schedules. (And there are many other things we can do to be better eco-travelers until the day all planes can run on biofuel, but that’s another blog post altogether.)
Some airlines already offer travelers opportunities to buy offsets that would help pay for carbon-reducing projects or programs (and perhaps reduce their eco-guilt). And San Francisco International Airport is set to become the nation’s (and perhaps the world’s) first airport with self-service kiosks where travelers can swipe their credit cards to buy carbon offset credits.
Morning Links: Warrior Monks, Sustainable Fuel, ‘The Big Belch’ and More
by Valerie Conners | 01.02.09 | 10:02 AM ET
As Eco-Tourism Grows, Struggle for Cultural Identity Remains
by Joanna Kakissis | 12.30.08 | 1:08 PM ET
In places heavy with history and natural beauty, eco-tourism often comes deeply infused with nostalgia. Consider the 300-year-old Aspros Potamos cottages in eastern Crete, where goatherds once spent wintry nights as their flocks grazed along the mountain gorge. An Athenian journalist rescued the cottages from dilapidation in 1985 and turned them into simple, solar-powered lodges for those who want to commune with nature and a disappearing culture.
This time of year, you may find young Greeks on winter holiday there, gathered around a communal campfire and singing their grandparents’ favorite folk songs. It’s as much an appreciation of Crete’s fragile natural beauty as an exercise in identity.
Morning Links: India Security, Peruvian Shamans, Las Vegas and More
by Jim Benning | 12.30.08 | 11:08 AM ET
- Is India safe for travelers? Depends who you ask.
- The Japanese man who mysteriously moved into Mexico City’s airport four months ago and became a celebrity of sorts up and left on Sunday. Go figure.
- Peruvian shamans held a ceremony to “protect the spirits” of Barack Obama and other leaders in 2009.
- Family members of the woman who disappeared off a cruise ship near Cancun say they believe she jumped, citing “previous emotional issues.”
- The Washington Post reviews “Bad Traffic, “a new novel from Welsh writer Simon Lewis, who “first gained attention as a travel writer.”
- Which helps impoverished people in developing countries more, cell phones or laptops? Good magazine debates the question. (Via Ideas Blog)
- In October, the last month for which numbers are available, gambling revenue in Las Vegas was down “an ominous 24.3% vs. the same month in 2007.” And that’s just the beginning. But hey, it’s nearly New Year’s Eve, so get out there and help the struggling city: Double down on 17.
Eating Like a Viking in Minneapolis
by David Farley | 12.29.08 | 6:45 PM ET
The first indication I knew I was in trouble was when the waitress told me I was the youngest person to order the dish since they put it on the menu a month ago. And I’m 37. The second—and the worst part—occurred when the dish actually arrived. Staring at me from a plus-sized plate was a variation on the theme of pale: diced boiled potatoes, golf ball-sized pearl onions, lefse (a flatbread not unlike lavash or tortilla), a thimble of butter, and, the plate’s tour de force, a three-inch quivering gelatinous beast. Otherwise known as lutefisk.
Cuban Exiles Recall Flights to U.S.
by Julia Ross | 12.29.08 | 3:32 PM ET
For the 265,000 Cubans who fled their homeland on U.S.-sponsored “Freedom Flights” from 1965 to 1973, the emotional 45-minute flight to a new life remains etched in memory. Now, a Miami Herald series on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution has given Cuban-Americans a chance to share photos and memories of their “Freedom Flight” experience, in conjunction with a database that makes names and arrival dates of refugees available to the public for the first time.
In reading through the online recollections submitted by exiles who were children at the time, I was struck by how many remember their first taste of the U.S.—a coke, a ham sandwich, a pack of Wrigley’s gum, many handed out in box lunches at Miami’s airport. Others recall the tense days leading up to their departure, and the clothes, jewelry, and dolls left behind.
With the recent publication of Rachel Kushner’s novel, Telex from Cuba, and Tom Gjelten’s Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause, along with the much-anticipated release of Steven Soderbergh’s Che next month, it seems Cuban history remains a hot topic in the U.S. Kudos to the Herald for rounding out that history with an important public record.
Smuggling Cinnamon Rolls
by Terry Ward | 12.29.08 | 12:09 PM ET
Photo by Frank Murray Terry Ward packed a couple of tubes for a trans-Atlantic flight. Then she encountered airport security.