Travel Blog
Free Pizza Delivery…By Airplane
by Michael Yessis | 01.10.06 | 1:46 PM ET
More proof that Americans do love their pizza: A couple of Nome, Alaska entrepreneurs have started what could be the world’s first pizza parlor delivering its goods by airplane. Nome, a city of 3,500 so remote it’s the finish line for the Iditarod, had no take-out restaurants before Airport Pizza arrived on the scene in early August. Now Alaskans from hundreds of miles away are hooked on Airport Pizza’s pies, which are carried by Frontier Flying Service.
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Yahoo! BuzzReflecting on Key West, Cuba and Whether Misfortune Makes for Great Travel Stories
by Tom Swick | 01.10.06 | 8:03 AM ET
More Top Travel Books
by Jim Benning | 01.10.06 | 12:36 AM ET
New Zealand Herald travel editor Jim Eagles offers his top 10 list of recently published travel books. It includes Michael Palin’s Himalaya, as well as Phaic Tan: Sunstroke on a Shoestring, which Eagles writes is “a delightful mick-take of the traditional guidebook.” The book, he notes, is “not quite as good as its predecessor, ‘Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry.’” We blogged and blogged again about “Molvania” in 2004. (Note: You might be asked to register and pay to read the article.)
JT Leroy: The Post-Outing Reaction
by Michael Yessis | 01.09.06 | 11:29 PM ET
The New York Times story exposing novelist and travel writer JT Leroy as a woman has stirred up a media brouhaha. New York Magazine issued a press release saying, hey, we had the scoop three months ago.
Las Vegas, Where Thousands of Taxis Still Aren’t Enough
by Jim Benning | 01.09.06 | 11:18 PM ET
I just stopped off in Las Vegas for a couple of nights en route home from a snowboarding road trip to Park City, Utah, and I couldn’t have picked a worse time. The gigantic Consumer Electronics Show just ended, and the city has been jammed for days. The crowding got so bad that the Nevada Taxicab Authority, which had already added 300 additional cabs for the trade show, had to hold an emergency meeting to add 300 more. And I still saw long, snaking cab lines in front of many hotels. It’s ugly.
Travel Tips from Semester at Sea Students
by Michael Yessis | 01.09.06 | 6:55 AM ET
The college students who joined the Semester at Sea really got around last year, studying aboard a floating classroom that visited 10 countries and sailed 24,036 miles around the world. Los Angeles Times staff writer Janet Eastman traveled with them, and she asked the students for their best travel advice. Her story in Sunday’s paper features 110 tips, including these:
Welcome Guest Blogger Thomas Swick
by Tom Swick | 01.09.06 | 6:53 AM ET
Regular World Hum readers will be familiar with South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick. We often link to his columns and stories; we’ve interviewed him; and we’ve enjoyed his two books, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler and Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland. His 2001 essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, Roads Not Taken, about the dismal state of travel writing in American newspapers, is a must-read for travel writers and editors alike. So when we decided to begin inviting some of our favorite travel writers to be guest bloggers in 2006, Swick’s name immediately came to mind. We’re delighted that he accepted our invitation to contribute all this week.
Pico Iyer, Tom Arnold and the Key West Literary Seminar
by Tom Swick | 01.09.06 | 5:57 AM ET
I’m in Key West; drove down Thursday from Fort Lauderdale for the Key West Literary Seminar on the Literature of Adventure, Travel and Discovery. In the evening Pico Iyer gave the opening address, speaking for 80 minutes without notes and almost without pauses to a packed and dazzled crowd of mostly older citizens. Sketched his story—born in England to Indian parents who then moved to California, currently living in rural Japan—and the themes of his writing—interchange of cultures, traveling for contradictions, travel as a dialogue between a person and a place, an interest in the romance rather than the clash of cultures, etc. Leaving I heard an elderly woman ask her friend, “Did he say he lives in royal Japan?”
Disasters, Terrorism Don’t Deter Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 01.08.06 | 10:48 PM ET
As we pointed out here and here, and as Liz Sinclair wrote here, travelers are a hard bunch to keep down. In The New York Times today, Thomas Crampton adds to the list of recent stories about travelers’ determination and fearlessness, supporting his point with a prediction by the World Travel and Tourism Council that travel will increase by nearly five percent in 2006.
JT Leroy Unmasked: He’s a She
by Michael Yessis | 01.08.06 | 5:20 PM ET
He/she is Savannah Knoop, according to a story by Warren St. John posted this afternoon on The New York Times Web site. St. John reports that Knoop plays Leroy in public, but the author of the works attributed to him/her is still unknown. “A photograph of Ms. Knoop at a 2003 opening for a clothing store in San Francisco was discovered online,” St. John writes. “Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a coming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.”
Liechtenstein
by Ben Keene | 01.06.06 | 8:57 AM ET
Area: 61.8 sq. mi. (160 sq. km)
Coordinates: 47 8 N 9 35 E
With water covering approximately 70.8 percent of its surface, the Earth is quite aqueous as planets go—a positive attribute given the importance of this liquid. So to find a country in the world with two others separating it from an ocean or an ocean-accessible sea, then, takes a bit of determination and a good map. In fact, two nations share the distinction of being doubly landlocked: Uzbekistan in Central Asia, and Liechtenstein in Europe. What’s more, although the tiny principality wedged between Switzerland and Austria is bounded by the Rhein River in the west, it lacks a single substantial body of water within its borders.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Update: Farewell to L.A.‘s Ambassador Hotel
by Michael Yessis | 01.06.06 | 7:24 AM ET
Only a small portion of the famed hotel still remains, and The Ambassador’s Last Stand has the latest photos of the demolition. Readers have also sent in a couple photos of the pantry where Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy in 1968.
Space Travel: Beyond the ‘Dweebs, Geeks and Dorks’
by Michael Yessis | 01.05.06 | 8:57 AM ET
Last week, for probably the first time in my life, I got excited by the prospect of U.S. government bureaucracy. The Federal Aviation Administration took a step toward developing rules for space tourism, issuing more than 120 pages of proposed guidelines for “space flight participants.” The initial set of regulations is set to go into effect in June, and to me it’s a sort of tipping point, cementing the reality that in just a few years any one of us may be able to blast off into the cosmos the same way we can fly Jet Blue to Vegas for the weekend. That’s an awesome thing, in the true sense of the word.
Where Do American Travel Writers Go When They Die?
by Jim Benning | 01.05.06 | 12:08 AM ET
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick recently penned a column reflecting on his 2005 travels. Among the highlights, he recalled his August visit to the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference in Corte Madera, California: “Everyone—faculty, students, bookstore staff—was so well-read, well-traveled, curious, friendly and passionate about the thing I love that I concluded that, if good Americans go to Paris when they die, good American travel writers go to Corte Madera.”
Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm: “The UK’s Premier Creationist Attraction”
by Jim Benning | 01.04.06 | 11:40 PM ET
That’s how James Russell describes the zoo farm in Somerset village that he visited with his son’s nursery group. The Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm was started in 1999 by Anthony and Christina Bush, farmers for 40 years, he writes. They wanted to demonstrate where food comes from and teach creation science.
