Travel Blog
Morning Links: A ‘Tropical Havisham Enigma,’ iPhone Travel Apps and More
by Michael Yessis | 03.03.09 | 9:54 AM ET
- Pico Iyer investigates a “tropical Havisham enigma” in southern Sri Lanka.
- There’s a good reason why airline passengers lost fewer bags in 2008.
- Roger Yu evaluates some iPhone travel applications.
- Gulliver asks: “How will the recession affect green business travel?”
- Forbes lists America’s worst intersections.
- The fine Southwest has to pay for flying those planes that had missed safety checks: $7.5 million.
- The “very unconventional” lodging at Pixel Hotel Linz is spread all over the Austrian city. (via This Just In)
- Finally, here’s a look at the art of yarn bombing—“improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time”—in Vancouver B.C.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzTravel Nostalgia: The World in Vintage Posters
by Eva Holland | 03.02.09 | 5:23 PM ET
I’ve confessed to my abiding love of postcards before, and now I have another confession: I am a total sucker for the vintage travel poster and all its varied (fridge magnet, notebook, calendar, tote bag) incarnations. There’s something so refreshing about those old Cunard posters, or the early advertisements for transcontinental passenger rail. They have a guileless wonder to them, and a total lack of cynicism or irony—because they come from an era when nobody thought they had already seen it all. So I was thrilled to read on the Shoretrips blog about a major vintage poster auction being held in New York.
The auction’s already come and gone, but the entire collection is still viewable online. There are more than 400 posters in the sale, though, and only some of them are travel-related—so for all my fellow vintage-travel-poster-lovers (and I know you’re out there) I’ve put together a list of my favorites, and a cheat sheet for the rest.
What Not to do When Late for a Flight
by Rob Verger | 03.02.09 | 3:27 PM ET
The best thing not to do, when it’s clear you’ve missed your flight, is to pretend to be an air marshal.
A Good Time for a Flyover Vacation
by Sophia Dembling | 03.02.09 | 2:57 PM ET
Now is a great time to plan a vacation in a flyover state. Southwest Airlines and AirTran have kicked off what’s likely to be a spate of domestic fare sales and USA Today reports that convention hotels are hungry for business. This adds up to bargains on domestic vacations.
And here’s a story to clip and carry on your trip: The Chicago Tribune polled baristas at a coffee competition for the best places to get a fine cuppa Joe in several flyover cities. Very useful. (By the way, they agreed that there is no good coffee in New Orleans. Really?)
Making Tracks to Laos
by Julia Ross | 03.02.09 | 1:30 PM ET
Who says there are no new frontiers to cross? The Guardian reports that the first rail line into Laos is set to open Friday, connecting Nong Khai,Thailand, to the village of Tha na Lang, over a newly built bridge crossing the Mekong river. From Tha na Lang, it’s a 20-mile hop up to Vientiane, by bus or tuk-tuk, creating a new overland route from Bangkok to the Laotian capital. Laos has been on my list for a long time, so this is extra enticement to go, and the Thailand part of the route holds extra allure because it wends through the relatively untouristed (for now) Isaan region.
Maybe this is one train journey I’ll get to before Paul Theroux.
Budget Tips from the Twitterverse
by Eva Holland | 03.02.09 | 12:13 PM ET
Well, the Daily Beast may have declared that Twitter jumped the shark this week, but that didn’t stop me from collecting a few good travel tips and deals from the micro-blogging site—all in 140 characters or less, of course. NewYorkology notes that the Restaurant Week that won’t die has been extended yet again. The Snow Junkies offer up 54 ways to get discounted lift tickets in March. Jaunted points out that a round-the-world ticket from Virgin Atlantic can now be had for less than $3,000 (and asks: “Who’s in?”), and finally, in more good flight news, Conde Nast Traveler’s Wendy Perrin writes: “Experts I’ve been interviewing for my May column for @CNTraveler say airfares to Europe will remain supercheap throughout the summer.”
I’m Dreaming of a Green Dubai (or at Least Some Clean Beaches)
by Joanna Kakissis | 03.02.09 | 11:16 AM ET
It’s been a rough few months of sewage-on-the-beach damage control for the city of excess and $25,000-a-night hotel suites on artificial islands shaped like palm trees. After raw sewage, chemical waste and toilet paper washed up on opulent, luxury hotel-lined Jumeirah Beach and made international headlines, an environmental group is trying to clean up the beach and others along the United Arab Emirates coastline. The Emirates Wildlife Association will encourage managers of the beaches to apply for a Blue Flag designation and meet international standards for water quality and cleanliness.
R.I.P. Paul Harvey
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.09 | 10:20 AM ET
The radio legend joined me on many a road trip, filling the wide-open spaces of the U.S. with what the Washington Post calls his “authoritative baritone voice.” I rarely took a long drive without tuning in a crackling A.M. station and hearing Harvey deliver “the rest of the story.” Among the noteworthy achievements of his broadcasting career: He apparently invented the word “skyjacker.” He was 90.
Morning Links: War Hotels, the Solas Awards and More
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.09 | 9:06 AM ET
- A major snowstorm in the eastern U.S. has disrupted travel throughout the country.
- GlobalPost began a five-part series about the favorite hotels of war correspondents.
- NPR says the “stimulus puts high-speed rail on the fast track.”
- Rome’s mayor announced an unorthodox way to fight “violence and thuggery” in the city. (via @theroadto)
- What can modern cities learn from slums?
- World Hum contributor Eric Lucas is dumbfounded that nobody tells the truth about Las Vegas.
- Some travelers are feeling guilty about traveling at all in this economic climate.
- Thailand thinks you’ll want to visit the country more if it has a signature cocktail. So it created the “Siam Sunrays.”
- Congrats to the winners of this year’s Solas Awards. David Torrey Peters took the grand prize for best travel story of the year.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
What We Loved This Week: Food Tours, Traveling Through the Harper’s Index and More
by World Hum | 02.27.09 | 5:03 PM ET
Bakhat Singh in the Moonlight Our contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.
Michael Yessis
The searchable Harper’s Index. The magazine has been delivering pithy factual tidbits since 1984, and now you can search through all of them online by topic. Here are the 90 matches in my search for items about travel. One of my favorites comes from 1990: “Amount the U.S. Air Force spent this year to study the effects of jet noise on pregnant horses: $100,000.”
Joanna Kakissis
I’ve always wanted to host my own YouTube cooking show, because doesn’t the whole world really want to see me make my secret baklava recipe to the beat of “Chains of Love” by Erasure? But I doubt my show would ever be as awesome as the sensational “Cooking With Clara,” which features Great Depression-era recipes by 93-year-old Sicilian-American Clara Cannucciari.
Global Warming Tourism: The Rising Sea Level Slideshow!
by Joanna Kakissis | 02.27.09 | 3:37 PM ET
Florida’s Key West as well as the Maldives, Tuvalu and the islands of Pate and Ndau in the Lamu Archipelago off the Northern coast of Kenya are among eight places that rising sea levels due to climate change will soon make uninhabitable, according to a provocative slideshow at Treehugger.
I hope this doesn’t start a trend in “climate-change cruises.”
Tweet Revenge: The Tale of Gary Vaynerchuk and the Mondrian
by Alexander Basek | 02.27.09 | 12:26 PM ET
Is there no quadrant of the web untouched by internet impresario Gary Vaynerchuk? In a video posted to his site on Wednesday, Vaynerchuk (host of Wine Library TV and a new media keynote guru, for those of you who haven’t heard of him) told a cautionary tale about the Mondrian in South Beach. In short: Gary Vee went to the hotel’s bar expecting to party—because the Mondrian has a party rep—and the house turned on the lights around 1:30 a.m., booting Gary (and friends) upstairs to their rooms. Normally, the tale would end there, but Gary’s pal tweeted the event, and someone immediately responded that they were not going to stay at the Mondrian after hearing the tale of woe. The power of Web 2.0! Right?
All the ‘Slumdog’ News That’s Fit to Print
by Eva Holland | 02.27.09 | 11:25 AM ET
If I hadn’t already used the unstoppable Slumdog line a few weeks ago, you can bet I’d be putting it into play now. Since its big win at the Oscars, the name has been popping up everywhere, and frankly—despite the fact that I loved the movie—I’m reaching my saturation point.
Let’s briefly review the latest developments, and then (I promise) I’ll clam up on this movie-turned-full-blown-phenomenon. Here goes: the two young stars may or may not be the leads in a real-life love story, flats are being rented and trust funds set aside for the youngest child actors (who are slum-dwellers in their off-screen lives, too), and amidst all the media noise the film’s box office haul has just passed the $100-million mark. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a Broadway musical in the works?
Whew. With all the gossip flying around, it’s easy to lose track of the things that got everyone talking “Slumdog” in the first place—namely the movie’s unforgettable sounds and colors, and the universality of its fairy-tale story. So for my last word on this subject, I’ll call on rapper M.I.A. She’s got a video reminder, after the jump:
Crime Doesn’t Pay (But It Sure Can Be Funny)
by Jenna Schnuer | 02.27.09 | 10:39 AM ET
Feeling mad love for Small Town Misfit and BeeNews.com. They’re two of the best stand-ins around for those times you can’t indulge in the ultimate on-the-road entertainment: a gander at a community newspaper’s police blotter while drinking a cup of coffee at the local diner.
Morning Links: Walking on Broadway, Fees for Airline Toilets and More
by Michael Yessis | 02.27.09 | 9:43 AM ET
- New York City plans to turn parts of Broadway into pedestrian malls.
- The inevitable Coldplay reference comes only four seconds into this video about that ice music festival in northern Italy.
- Are the “taste police” out to get German bakers?
- The literature of men in boats vs. women in houses. (via Arts & Letters Daily)
- Here’s the latest Carnival of Cities.
- Happy belated 90th birthday, Grand Canyon National Park. (thanks for the reminder @evaholland and @AlisonSWellner)
- The economic downturn has boosted Peace Corps applications and the number of financial types snowboarding the Alps.
- Mule drivers in period costumes need TSA security clearance, too! So Boing Boing started a contest to create mule-driver TSA IDs.
- Will passengers soon need to pay to use the toilet on Ryanair? Just how ridiculous can the carrier get?
- Finally, this is fun to say: Sassy the Sustainable Sasquatch.
Got a suggestion? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) your link.
