Destination: United States
Route 66 Hotels Face ‘Four-Lane, Divided Highway Called Progress’
by Michael Yessis | 05.21.07 | 4:40 PM ET
More hard evidence of the sad demise of Route 66: The AP reports that “at least 3,000 motels along the route are in various states of repair or disrepair.” They’re now “historical footnotes,” with little or no hope of revival. “Today, many structures that made the road what it was—the diners, family-owned service stations, barbecue joints—have fallen apart,” writes Justin Juozapavicius. “With efforts to fix up these architectural landmarks scarce, time has become the road’s worst enemy.”
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Yahoo! BuzzThe World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: From Chocolate to Kaiseki
by Michael Yessis | 05.18.07 | 5:09 PM ET
Or, in other words, travelers’ interests this week range from Hershey, Pennsylvania to the streets of Japan. Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
Magnificient Trees of the World
* The Lone Cypress in Pebble Beach, California (pictured) makes the list.
Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
A Tour of Japanese Cuisine With Spago Chef Lee Hefter
* From the same writers: A look at kaiseki
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Japan’s Latest Budget Accommodation: Internet Cafes
* The nation that brought us the capsule hotel has done it again.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Hershey Honors its Past, Looks to the Future
Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph (current)
Amsterdam: Telegraph Travel Guides
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Farecast
Most Read Feature Story
World Hum (this week)
Mark Ellingham: Rough Guides and the Ethics of Travel
“Hot This Week” Destination
Yahoo! (this week)
Playa del Carmen
Thou, Yosemite, Art His Goddess
by Jim Benning | 05.15.07 | 11:35 AM ET
Gary Kamiya recently returned from a visit to Yosemite, where he found spring turning in a typically brilliant performance. His eloquent essay in Salon today celebrates all places wild and California’s grandest national park, in particular. Kamiya draws heavily on the writings of John Muir. He also sprinkles in quotes from Melville, Camus, Shelley and even Edmund from “King Lear.” “The planet is putting on its most spectacular show right now in Yosemite,” he begins. “Over an ancient sun-soaked cliff, a river that moments ago was as staid and obedient as you and me is hurling itself over the edge like a runaway roller coaster, turning into a hundred-headed shower of white downward-streaking comets, twisting and turning and dissolving and embracing and vanishing and reappearing, falling 500, a thousand, 1,500 feet before it collides with the rocks and disappears into a maelstrom of foam and mist.” For the uninitiated, that’s Yosemite Falls.
Related on World Hum:
* Celebrating California’s Highway 395
* Gary Snyder: ‘Our Western Thoreau’
* Can Slow Travel Save the Planet?
Photo by i_r_e_n_e via Flickr, (Creative Commons).
R.I.P. William Becker, Co-Founder of Motel 6
by Michael Yessis | 05.14.07 | 9:23 AM ET
Photo by independentman via Flickr (Creative Commons).
The “6” in Motel 6 famously represents the $6 William Becker and his co-founder, Paul Greene, charged travelers per night when the budget chain opened its first property in Santa Barbara, California in 1962. According to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Becker “had been inspired by a monthlong, cross-country car trip from Santa Barbara to his family’s farm in Greenwich, N.Y., in the summer of 1960.” The two founders leveraged their background in building low-cost tract homes, and turned out rooms with no-iron sheets, coin-operated televisions and “shower stalls with rounded edges rather than corners to reduce cleaning time.”
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: The Naked and the Red
by Michael Yessis | 05.11.07 | 3:45 PM ET
From Sin City to St. Petersburg, Russia, we’re not worried about traveling with too many clothes this week. Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
36 Hours in St. Petersburg, Russia
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Sin City Uncovered: Vegas Strips Down to Embrace its Naughty Side
* It’s an $8 billion embrace.
Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph (current)
The Perfect Break: Jersey
* The island, not the home of Bon Jovi.
Most Viewed Travel Story
Brisbane Times (current)
Gang Violence Marring NZ’s Image
Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
A Mass-Transit Trek Through Portland’s Singular Sites
Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
* It’s been so many weeks now we’ve stopped counting.
The ‘Naughty Side’ of Las Vegas: An $8 Billion a Year Enterprise
by Michael Yessis | 05.11.07 | 2:23 PM ET
That astronomical figure comes from a titillating look at Las Vegas’s adult entertainment offerings in USA Today. It’s an estimate from Sin City’s chamber of commerce, and, if accurate, it’s more than the gambling haul on the Las Vegas Strip in 2006. Analysts put that at an estimated $6.5 billion. I was surprised by the staggering figure, but perhaps I shouldn’t be considering the ubiquity and success of the “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign. “Our vice squad is busy,” officer Martin Wright, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, tells USA Today’s Kitty Bean Yancey.
Going to a Time-Share Sales Pitch? You’ll Swim with Sharks.
by Jim Benning | 05.09.07 | 12:31 PM ET
On my first trip to Hawaii, when I was 22 and fresh out of college, I got suckered into going to a time-share sales pitch in exchange for a free snorkel trip. A guy in an Aloha shirt standing behind a kiosk explained how it worked. I would just give them a couple of hours of my time and wouldn’t have to buy a thing. Afterward, they’d hand me the snorkel voucher and I’d soon be exploring some of Kauai’s best reefs by boat, ogling tropical fish of every imaginable hue. I had little money and (I thought) all the time in the world, so I figured it wasn’t a bad deal. Inside a room overlooking the Pacific, Hawaiian music played. I munched on a raspberry Danish, sipped freshly squeezed orange juice and, with dozens of others, watched a video about the wonders of vacation time-shares. So far so good. Then out came the salespeople.
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Hawaii, Highways and One Hot Book
by Michael Yessis | 05.04.07 | 5:14 PM ET
Restaurants ‘Nudge Diners’ in Campaign for Zagat Votes
by Michael Yessis | 05.04.07 | 8:26 AM ET
The Zagat guides took another punch this week. The New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo revealed that restaurant owners in New York are mounting e-mail campaigns to have diners vote for their restaurants, a practice allegedly forbidden by the Zagats. Yet, according to the Post, the Zagats don’t seem to be enforcing their rules.
The Fastest Cities in the World on Two Feet
by Jim Benning | 05.02.07 | 9:17 AM ET
Researchers who secretly studied pedestrians in 32 cities around the globe found that people in Singapore walk the most swiftly, covering 60 feet in 10.55 seconds. Copenhagen came next at 10.82 seconds, followed by Madrid, Guangzhou and Dublin. New Yorkers ranked 8th at 12 seconds flat. (Come on, New York, we know you can do better than that. Let’s get a move on.) Not surprisingly, technology is blamed at least in part for the increasingly frenetic pace of life. The radio show Marketplace notes a correlation between cities where people are walking faster than they did a decade ago and economic growth. The two cities where walking speeds have increased the most in the last decade: Singapore and Guangzhou, China.
The New U.S. Passport: ‘It Is Like Being Given A Coloring Book That Your Brother Already Colored In’
by Michael Yessis | 05.01.07 | 9:41 AM ET
Reviews of the new U.S. passport are rolling in and we can all agree on one thing: It’s really, really patriotic. Should we expect anything less from a document called “American Icon”? “The short, 28-page version of the passport comes with 13 inspirational quotes, including six from United States presidents and one from a Mohawk Thanksgiving speech,” writes Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times. “The pages, done in a pink-grey-blue palate, are rife with portraits of Americana ranging from a clipper ship to Mount Rushmore to a long-horn cattle drive.”
Border Stories: Why Do Nations Build Walls?*
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.07 | 8:53 AM ET
Because of fear and the desire for control, writes Charles Bowden in a terrific story in the May issue of National Geographic. Bowden primarily focuses on the barriers between the United States and Mexico, but he ties them to a historical trend—a trend, generally, of failure. “Walls are curious statements of human needs,” he writes. “Sometimes they are built to keep restive populations from fleeing. The Berlin Wall was designed to keep citizens from escaping from communist East Germany. But most walls are for keeping people out. They all work for a while, until human appetites or sheer numbers overwhelm them.”
Las Vegas (Who Else?) Leads in U.S. Tourism Ad Spending
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.07 | 8:18 AM ET
Sin City spent $52,158,800 in advertising in 2006 to lure travelers to the desert, almost tripling the outlay for the runner-up on the list, Puerto Rico. Texas, Florida and Arkansas round out the top five. Brandweek has a list of the top 25. (Via Jaunted)
y’ Success”>Australia’s ‘Bloody’ Success
Talking Books, Writing and Travel in New York and Los Angeles
by Jim Benning | 04.23.07 | 4:55 PM ET
It’s a good week for literature lovers on the East and West coasts. In New York, the PEN World Voices Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday. It’s packed with compelling events featuring authors from around the globe. Among the highlights: Tomorrow, Pico Iyer and Billy Collins, both the subject of World Hum interviews, will discuss the environment. On Wednesday, novelist Don Delillo makes a rare appearance on a panel entitled Writing Home. (It was in DeLillo’s novel “The Names” that we first came across the phrase “world hum.”) Thursday’s schedule features Multiple Passports: Writers on Homeland and Identity, which includes Ian Buruma, author of the excellent Asia travel book “God’s Dust.” And Sunday brings two panels for travel literature fans: Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing, featuring Alain de Botton, among others, and A Tribute to Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Celebrating California’s Highway 395
by Jim Benning | 04.23.07 | 12:24 PM ET
When it comes to scenic California roads, coastal Highway 1 gets most of the attention, but there’s another route equally worthy of adoration: Highway 395. It winds along the Eastern Sierra, delivering anglers to lakes and rivers, skiers to the slopes of Mammoth, and hikers and climbers to the lower 48 states’ tallest mountain, Mt. Whitney. I’ve always loved driving the highway, especially in winter, when the Sierra is blanketed in snow. So I was jazzed to see it featured prominently in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Staff writer Hugo Martin highlights points of interest along the highway, from the Alabama Hills, where countless Westerns have been filmed, to Bodie Ghost Town.