Posts tagged #travel

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Wandermap – Your hiking routes online Wandermap is one of the largest collections of hike routes on the web. Hike routes can be mapped or uploaded from GPS devices. December 26, 2021 at 01:57PM

Another way to get a cell phone while traveling.

Another way to get a cell phone while traveling.

If you don't want to do the whole cruise or road trip thing, you need a train.

How to travel by train or ferry from the UK into Europe & worldwide... Train times, fares, how to buy tickets, advice & information.

I admit I am always a little bit offended when I hear that a friend of mine (François?) chooses Aruba as a vacation destination. And it happens pretty regularly. Oh I always say that the two islands are very similar, but the truth is that I’ve spent very little time in Aruba, so… Anyway, for those of you who want to explore this delicate topic more deeply I present to you:

Aruba versus Curacao: Caribbean Showdown – Curaçao Chronicle:

At first glance Aruba and Curacao seem very similar. They’re both Dutch islands, they are about 75 miles apart from each other off of the coast of Venezuela and they even have most of the same cultural influences. But believe me; the two islands couldn’t be more different. These differences aren’t a bad thing; it’s just that some travelers will prefer one over the other depending on the type of vacation experience they’re looking for.

We were on vacation in Greece and Turkey a few weeks ago and I noticed many TripAdvisor Certificate of this or that, hanging in windows of random shops on remote islands (and big cities) and I got to thinking, are these for real? Is there a simple way to get a counterfiet certificate? It’s just a piece of paper and I somehow doubt that TripAdvisor in Massachusetts USA is aware that “The Citadel” shop on Santanelli is sporting a fake certificate.

[p.s: Searching for “get me tripadvisor certificate of excellence” produced these high res images ready for editing and printingat your neighborhood color print shop. ]

Last year we went with National Geographic to the Galapagos islands for an amazing journey of discovery. The Galapagos are a set of islands, part of Ecuador, that I had heard about all my life, but never thought of as somewhere I could actually visit. Well, you can. We could. It was a wonderful trip. Here is an article about that trip to the Galapagos was written for the Sidney Morning Herald by one of our co-travelers.

http://images.travelpod.com/bin/tripwow/flash/tripwow.swf Galapagos Slideshow: Pito’s trip to Galapagos Islands was created with TripAdvisor TripWow!

We are thinking of planning a trip to Costa Rica. Part of the trip is to get from Tabacon to Monteverde, which I gather is a very popular tourist route, being between two of the most scenic parts of the country.

We are trying to gather information about that drive. Is it realistically 3 hours? Or is it more like 6 hours?

Part of my research uses Google maps, right? Have you seen the Google maps 3D driving simulation thing? It’s amazing!

Follow this link to the Google Mapspage, and then locate the 3D button in the white margin on the left next to the directions. Click the button and BE AMAZED!!

I was supposed to fly from San Fransisco to Boston today. Monday (2 days ago) I got an email from JetBlue saying, more or less: “Sorry to tell you, but your flight has been canceled. Please call 1-800-xxx to make a new reservation or get a refund.” No explanation of why. I was taken aback, but I guess it happens all the time. After spending 30 minutes on hold, I was able to make new plans which had me leaving a day early (yesterday.) Back safe and sound now. To JetBlue’s credit for the moment, they are waving all change fees and more importantly, any fare differences. From their web site it seems like the flight was canceled due to ‘weather.’ While indeed tonight at 10pm we’re supposed to be in the middle of a blizzard here in Boston, on Monday, when they canceled, the weather today was predicted to ok. I guess they have better weather forecasters than the weather channel!

I am traveling on my usually favorite Airline; and of course everyone knows that they are suffering, right? And yes, the flight to L.A. is ridiculously inexpensive. But still, let’s say these raised my eyebrows:

When I checked in, I looked at the seat assignment chart and there were no free seats (I wanted to switch to an aisle seat.) Over the P.A. they said, more than once, that the plane was totally totally full. Yet when the doors closed, there were at least 8 empty seats visible to me from where I was sitting, including two whole rows. Don’t they have, like, computers, to keep track of who is on the plane and how many seats it has? They don’t serve food on the plane anymore. O...

My friend Amy just recently arrived from an incredible trip through Asia. If you are curious, check out Amy’s blog: “My travels in Southern Laos were indeed more successful in terms of being able to get out and see things than my time in the capital. I took an overnight bus with beds down to Pakse. This sounds like a really nice way to travel but as we found our beds, the only other westerner on the bus and I realized that these twin size mattresses were for two people, not one. We asked to be put together but there were no changes allowed so we spent the evening sleeping with strangers. This is not a recommended bus experience but we a...

Aleksey (my colleague on BlogBridge) is planning to move from the Ukraine to Australia. Here’s a fairly fascinating account of the experience of proving that he knows enough English to be permitted to Australia. Check out this post from noizZze to read about his interesting adventure: “IELTS test is an indispensable part of the process as we have to prove our language abilities along with technical skills and other stuff when applying to the Skilled Immigration Visa. According to the requirements, I need a pretty high score (somewhere around 7 of 10) and Kate’s needs to be at least 5. One interesting fact th...

I just returned from RailsConf, a conference all about Ruby on Rails. Many bloggers have written about it so I won’t summarize it further. In the coming days I will be posting on various of my discoveries and contacts made. For today though I want to just direct your attention to the picture on the left. After the conference (which was in Portland Oregon) we drove to Seattle and spent one full day in ...

I’m in Portland Oregon for a few days for a conference, and this may be an unfair sample, but I was amazed to see how many more people seem to be smoking cigarettes – on the street, in restaurants, etc – than what I am used to in Boston. Only one data point, but notable. I wonder why.

This, from American Airlines: “Your trip is eligible for check-in now. Save time at the airport and check-in on AA.com® any time from now up to one hour prior to your departure. To use our new instant check-in feature, simply click the button below and print your boarding pass. Save this email and use your personal check-in button for quick and easy check-in for your return flight.”

Anyone have any idea what possible benefit I get for checking in online? I don’t think any of these

Save Time? How? I still have to go show my Id before getting my boarding pass don’t I?

Checked bags? Still have to go to the counter as usual, don’t I?

Checking in online seems cool, but why???

I recently was on a trip with United Airlines. It’s a long story, but basically the short form is that the pilot didn’t show up, our flight was about 2 hours late, and I was going to miss the connection, also on United. A bunch of us were in the same boat (or plane) and so there was quite a buzz in the gate area, upon which a lawyer who knew something about air travel said, “Make sure you mention Rule 240”. Huh?

Rule 240 is like a magic code word. When you use it with airline personel they know exactly what you mean and they seem to act on it (a little bit scared of it, even.) Rule 240 states that, if you miss a connection and it’s the airlines fault (i.e. pilot doesn’t show up, but not a s...

I just returned from a very brief visit to Madrid (4 days) and came back enamored of the city. Madrid is beautiful and vibrant, always busy with people that seem to be having constant good time. People seem to be eating constantly and yet no one is fat 🙂 And the weather is fine! It seems (see AP photo to the left) that I didn’t experience everything that was going on this weekend though 🙂

Lately, for some crazy reason, I’ve found myself, multiple times, in Toronto, Canada, and Willemstad Curaçao. My Sprint phone doesn’t work in either place. As luck would have it, my Sprint contract is about to expire and so I am trying to figure out whether I should change carriers. If you are in the same boat, here are some very handy links that I came across:

T-Mobile International Cell Phone Service Information Verizon International Cell Phone Service Information Cingular Wireless International Cell Phone Service Information Sprint International Cell Phone Service Information

From reading these, T-Mobile seems to be the right choice for me and where I live. Do you use T-Mobile? How do you like it?

I’ve been a member of Costco for years. Yeah, you always buy more stuff there than you intended, but it’s so much fun! I uncovered today that Costco also has great discounts for travel, rental cars in particular. If you are not part of a big corporate program, call Costco Travel, ask for your rental car company, and you get connected to their ‘Costco Desk’ (is it a real desk?). Anyway, the point is I got a real nice discount over what the default Hertz web siteprice or Kayak deal was. Just a LifeHack for you.

This is the Seaquarium beach area. It’s very beautiful as you can see. Click on the photo if you dare. It’s huge but impressive.

Check out this post from Crave RSS:

(Credit: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa)

What I really should be saying about this, just to tick off fellow Craver Mike Yamamoto, is that I wish this underwater restaurant were in the Antarctic Ocean, so that I could go and see some penguins swim by. Alas, I don’t know how …

(from: Dine with the fishes at Hilton Maldives’ underwater restaurant)

North Panorama Arch

Originally uploaded by Pito.

Look at that picture. In the bottom right of the image, very small, you can see Pito and Chris. Yeah, Arches is amazing. I am not sure exactly how many arches they have but there are lots and lots, and some are really huge.

I can’t go into the details here (even to the extent that I understand them, which I don’t) about how the arches are formed, but perhaps wikipedia can shed some light?

Anyway, Arches is very near Canyonlands National Park and both are spectacular, but quite different. They are both near the town of Moab which has some interesting stories to tell too.

Definitely worth a visit!

Technorati Tags: arches

Continuing my series about my recent trip through 5 National Parks, here’s Capitol Reef. This is a little known National Park in Utah.

Interesting cocktail party tidbit (if what the rangers tell us can be believed): in the “old days” the explorers, trappers, and homesteaders tended to use nautical metaphors for land masses, and when they encountered a geographic feature which blocked their passage, stopped their progress, they would refer to it as a “reef....

Bryce Canyon National Park As promised here is the first of the collection of posts inspired on my recent trip. All I can say is “Utah is an amazing place.” This is one of my favorite pictures taken at Bryce. It looks otherworldly to me… If you check out Flickr you can see the other pictures that I took while out there. I actually took over 400 so this was my first attempt at identifying the 100 best. Still sorting. Anyway, as you can see from the ...

If you’re looking for a really wonderful place to stay while in Bar Harbor, you should check out the Bass Cottage Inn! Here’s a review:

“Had he recognized my name when I registered? Did he know I was there to review his inn? Why else would he be so welcoming? It turns out my suspicions were misguided; the man simply loves his job.” (from “A welcoming inn by the bustle of Bar Harbor”)

I just returned from a trip in the American Southwest, starting in St. George Utah, to Bryce Canyon National Park, Capitol Reef Park, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park and ending in Mesa Verde National Park. A spectacular trip. I am now back, invigorated and ready for action.

http://wikimapia.org/s/#y=38324420&x=-110401611&z=7&l=0&m=a

One of the funny things that happen when I am away is that I get ideas for new blog posts which I can’t actually post. So here’s the backlog that I hope to unleash on you in the coming days and weeks:

Why do I blog, anyway?

...

Check out this picture! Yeah I thought it w...

FlightStats – Worldwide flight status / tracker with historical performance data

Comprehensive airport and flight information: delays, actual times, estimated times, scores etc.

(tags: travel flight airtravel)

â__We Are Who We Believe Ourselves to Beâ__: Curaçao Jazz and the Expression of Identity by Nanette de Jong

Interesting article about Curacaoan identity

(tags: curacao identity)

Ingredients for Web 2.0 Success

(tags: funny)

Hurricane? What Hurricane?

Here’s a really fun article in the Washington Post about Curacao…

(tags: curacao Travel interesting)

You probably already follow TechCrunch but if you don’t take a look at Flyspy, a very clever new idea for adding very useful information to booking flights online.

“The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.” (from “Flyspy Brings The New Web To Airline Ticketing“)

Very cool!

Technorati Tags: onlinetravel

Here’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about how to get travel information in your your home page, like My Yahoo and others. This all hinges on RSS of course, which means you can bring your travel information into BlogBridge and other aggregators.

“Recently, these sites began allowing consumers to populate their home pages with similar information they’d find in e-mail newsletters, with two added benefits: all the relevant information from multiple sites appears on one page, instead of multiple e-mails, a...

Did you know that Curacao is the 7th favorite place that travelers from Boston consider when they are looking for nude beaches in the Caribean? Miami is the first, Aruba the second.

This important bulletin brought to you by Kayak Buzz, a neat web-2.0-kayak-mashup-with-google that I just came across. You can look at the URL above to see how it’s formed. The funny thing is that the nude beach search isn’t available unless you include the magic, secret “&ac=nude” clause.

You should check out Kayak, it’s a really good travel search site that automates what you know you are already doing – which is to visit all the other travel sites with the same itinerary to see who has the best deal at this moment.

Technorati Tags: travel

For a while now I’ve been fascinated with my Flickr SmartFeed of the Maldives. The pictures are one more beautiful than the next. Maybe this betrays my Caribbean heritage, but this one just blows me away.

Technorati Tags: flickr

On a lark, I used my frequent flyer miles to fly First Class on American Airlines today, heading out to the O’Reily ETech Conference. I hadn’t done it in quite a while.

It felt so ‘eighties’ to me – faux luxury dining in a tin can at 40,000 feet:

“Mr. Salas, would you like a drink before take-off? Mr. Salas, what would you like for dinner tonight? Spinach and Cheese Pasta or Chicken Kiev?” …I am handed a heated towlette to wipe my weary brow… *“

Mr. Salas, is there anything I can do for you? Mr. Salas, what would you like to drink before dinner?”*

…I get a nice bowl of mixed nuts, heated! And my diet-coke… …Dinner is served. Linnen napkin, nice salad with capers and vinnigraite…

“Mr Salas, white or red wine with dinner? Mr Salas, is there anything else I can do for you? Mr. Salas can I take that for you?”

It’s just a little bit too subservient for my taste. But at least the legroom is excellent, even though the silverware was plastic.

Several people asked me about what the security situation in Spain felt like. I have to admit it did give me pause to be going to Spain little more than a month after the terrorist attack on the trains in Madrid. In fact our travel plans included several long train rides. I checked with friends who live in Spain, and also looked at the various State Department notices, and all in all decided that the risk wouldn’t be major. I did expect to see a major security presence — you know, soldiers with machine guns in the airports, etc. But otherwise I wasn’t especially worried, but curious what we’d find. I remember how shell shocked we were in the U.S. two months after 9/11. Well, here’s the surpr...

In the accompanying photo you can see one of the ubiquitous TV screens sprinkled all around the Spanish subway system. They display up-to-the-minute information about arrivals and departures, in real-time, also ads and other commercial announcements. Very useful!

But wait, look closely: This is a Windows based application, if you can believe it! There’s a big fat Windows error message displayed in the middle of the screen! If you look really closely, you can tell it’s in Spanish!

So as not to leave you hanging, I just want to report that we are back and had a great time in Spain. We went from Granada to Sevilla to Madrid, by plane and rail in 8 days. Spain is a very interesting and fun country.

Geeking out from an Internet Cafe in Granada, Spain. We´re here for a short vacation, and we have a little time to kill this afternoon so I thought I´d quickly post an update for those of you who know (or care) that we are away. Granada is a nice little town in Southern Spain, with a Moorish or Middle Eastern influence. We spent hours yesterday wandering around the Alhambra, which was great, although we are paying with our feet today… Tomorrow we leave for a few days in Sevilla. See you there.