Intelligent Travel

Wired Woman Wanderlust: Top Travel Blogs

In this edition of Wired Wanderlust, assistant website editor Mary Beth LaRue introduces us to three fabulous female-penned travel blogs.

Tired of seven-day workweeks, BlackBerry handhelds, and impending burnout, three twenty-something New Yorkers who call themselves The Lost Girls left their media jobs in the winter of 2005 to travel the world. Their 35,000-mile (56,000-kilometer) journey around the globe begins in South America and crawls eastward through Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia—photographing and writing at every stop on the way. Our pick of their posts: a stop in Huacachina, a desert oasis town on Peru's southern coast, for sand dune surfing.

What We Hear from Hiroshima

English teacher and Japanese resident, Jessie Szalay, spends her holiday breaks touring Japan, then—lucky for us—sends IT her dispatches. Her latest destination? Hiroshima and its outlying towns:

Hiroshima has become one of Japan's leading tourist destinations, as people from around the world flock to the Peace Memorial Park to remember the more than 140,000 people who were killed by the atomic bomb in 1945. A visit to the park and museum is a life-altering experience—something everyone should see, something everyone does see. Escape the crowds and head for the nearby sites that were luring travelers long before the bomb was dropped.

This Week's Bloggers

Emily King, Traveler's assistant to the editor, hopes Punxsatawney Phil doesn't see his shadow this week; she is ready for cherry blossoms. Researcher Jessie Johnston, on the other hand, hopes the little guy does catch a glimpse, so there will still be pink on the trees when she gets to Japan in April.

Boomerang IT

Having recently lost a camera while traveling, IT (namely Emily) is especially intrigued with BoomerangIt, a lost-and-found service that relies on a secure Internet database and numbered labels to facilitate the return of lost items to their rightful owners. The process is simple. After affixing one of BoomerangIt's "tamper-resistant" ID labels ($9.95 for the least expensive package) to a "valuable item" (defined on the website as anything from a cell phone to a chainsaw), the owner enters the item's label number as well as a description of the item into BoomerangIt's database. If and when the owner loses her, say, digital camera and if and when a Good Samaritan finds said camera, the finder can contact BoomerangIt via the toll-free number and/or Web address on the label. Since the website is readable in six different languages, if the owner loses her camera in, say, Germany, the Deutsch-speaking finder can easily report the missing item.

Beside the price of the initial investment (labels), the owner must also pay a $10 return fee, plus all shipping and handling costs, if their lost or stolen item is returned. As a reward to the finder, BoomerangIt sends them a pack of free labels. While the site doesn't offer any statistical evidence proving the success of their method, they do claim that "BoomerangIt is also a theft deterrent, as studies indicate that thieves are less likely to steal marked property due to resale difficulties." With this, IT was convinced, and has decorated a cell phone and camera with the labels we received for free (swag alert!) along with a press release.

Greek Out: Off-Season Island Hopping

Inspired by her summer working at Traveler, Meghan VanDeventer decided she absolutely had to study abroad and see more of the world before graduating college in May. Last-minute though it was, she pulled some strings, packed her bags, and hopped a plane to London to spend the fall in search of adventure abroad. Recently, she kicked up her feet, put down her textbook (ok, her pint) and took a ten-day trip to Greece. Continuing with last week's off-season theme, we present her chronicle here (click the hyperlinks to see Meghan's photos):

I Need a VocationVacation

We here at IT love our jobs, but are vaguely aware that not all people feel the same way about their places of employment. Three years ago, Brian Kurth founded a company to help those in nightmare jobs (or even just not-exactly-fantasy jobs) try out the careers of their dreams. VocationVacations allows customers to spend their vacation shadowing a "mentor" in their dream field, combining travel with a little grown-up dress-up. And a contest this month will allow one person to try out the service for free.

VocationVacations can be as short as a day (the norm seems to be two or three), and cost upward of $349. The list of 100-plus current offerings starts with actor, alpaca farmer and animal therapist, moves through bootmaker, clock restorer, and meteorologist to finish up with wine sommelier and yoga studio owner. As yet it is not possible to shadow a zookeeper, but the company says this opportunity will be coming soon. Current destinations range across 33 states and a peek at the website's "Dream Job Search Finder" suggests the U.K. will soon be an option (at the moment no mentors come up when you run a U.K. search).

Unvanquished Mississippi

Before she left to visit her family in Oxford, Mississippi, IT asked Katie Howell to apply the Traveler eye to her own hometown and write a blog entry for us about literary Mississippi (try saying that five times fast):

Oxford has always been rich in literary tradition and the adopted home to aspiring writers, so I decided to forgo the Civil War and Civil Rights attractions around town and limit my sightseeing to literary landmarks. Our most famous son, William Faulkner, was born about 35 miles (56 kilometers) away in New Albany, Mississippi, but spent the majority of his adult life in Oxford. So I began my literary tour at his home, Rowan Oak, located just off the University of Mississippi's campus and the town's square. There, I wandered the grounds and walked up the cedar-lined front pathway, remembering a ghost story I'd been told as a child about a girl who'd flung herself from the second-story balcony because of an ill-fated love affair with a Union soldier. Her ghost is said to roam the estate. Inside the recently restored house, which the Unvanquished author bought in 1930 and lived in off and on until his death in 1962, I saw Faulkner's boots, his typewriter and, most unusual, the outline of his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Fable penciled on the wall of the study in the back corner of the house.

Weekend Sherpa

Since we can't always rely on Andy Isaacson and Laurel Kellner to send us their NorCal tips, we subscribe to Weekend Sherpa, a free weekly e-mail newsletter giving "insiders' recommendations on the best outdoor pursuits exclusive to Northern California" (and written in part by one of Traveler's contributing editors, Andrew Nelson). Delivered to our e-mail inbox each Thursday, the newsletter suggests how we should spend our weekend. Sometimes it sends us (virtually, of course) hiking up local peaks like Mt. Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo, navigating untrampled ski trails in Tahoe, or overnighting in yurts near the ocean in Big Sur. Weekend Sherpa lists easy, inexpensive ways to spend your weekends—the perfect source for people (read: most of us) that don't have time during the weekdays to research Saturday's activities. If you'd rather not subscribe to the free newsletter—though we suggest you do—you can visit Sherpa's well-designed website, which offers access to their archives and allows you to search getaways by activity (bike, hike, water) or location (San Francisco, East Bay, Peninsula). While IT thanks Sherpa for such a great product, we must ask: When will D.C. get its own edition?

Winter Wonderland

Snow in southwestern Pennsylvania has been scarce so far this winter, but that didn't stop senior editor Norie Quintos and her sons from enjoying a late December visit to the Laurel Highlands:

Okay, so it wasn't as white and wintry as I would've liked, but the optimistic, hard-working folks at Seven Springs Mountain Resort were assiduously making snow and determined vacationers were skiing on it. We opted for the far-less-technical snow tubing down ice-slick runs—get there before 10 a.m., as tickets ($11 per person for a two-hour time slot) can sell out.

Feeding the Rich to Feed the Poor

You already know IT likes to eat. You also know that we like to do so on the cheap, if possible. And while we certainly enjoyed saving on delicious meals during Washington's just-passed Restaurant Week, we're fascinated by a new way to feel good about dining out that has taken hold in one of our favorite eating cities: Montreal.

Since the end of July, Montreal's Robin des Bois restaurant (named for Sherwood Forest's most well-known resident) has been doing good deeds by serving good food. The restaurant's goal is to donate all of its proceeds to charity, and in order to keep that amount as high as possible, almost none of their workers receive payment. The chefs (led by former Toqué! denizen Myriam Pelletier) and managers are paid, but all serving, bussing, prepping and cleaning is done by the 1,500 volunteers (some of them celebrities) who have registered and signed up for shifts on the restaurant's website.

IT Hits the Beach

IT's friend and on-call beach expert  Laurel Kellner took an off-season jaunt to the Virginia coast, and came back with sand between her toes and tips on the brain:

Waking up in Virginia Beach during the off-season you realize this: It's one of the best times to enjoy the place. Tourists? Few to none. Room rates? We found as low as $49 (plus tax) at the Best Western just a few blocks from the boardwalk. A spectacular sunrise over the sea enticed us to enjoy the morning merits of more than two miles of flat sandy beach—perfect for strolling and scoping surfers riding the early waves.

This Week's Bloggers

Now that they have a new year's worth of annual leave to schedule, Traveler's assistant to the editor Emily King is fantasizing about following a camel train through Mauritanian desert, while researcher Jessie Johnston has her sights set on Kobe, Japan.

Introducing AirTroductions

In a conversation over the holidays, Jessie's father told her about an online service he'd read about that allowed air travelers to connect with people booked on the same flights; sort of Match.com meets the Mile-High Club. Hoping he was providing her with blog fodder rather than not-so-subtly hinting about her deficient love life, your intrepid blogger trolled the internet and found AirTroductions. The site is set up like dating and social networking sites, allowing members to create profiles and then search for other users who have seats booked on the same flights. Registration is free, but there is a $5 fee per itinerary to contact other members. If you hit it off online, you can contact the airline and request to be seated together (the site provides tactical suggestions). Even those skeptical of the romantic possibilities of air travel might want to give it a look; AirTroductions explicitly markets itself as a way of making both personal (not necessarily romantic) and business networking connections.

Topflight Memorial

Even though our offices are only a few blocks from the White House, IT often forgets it lives in such a tourist mecca. On a recent Saturday—with help from her sight-seeking family—Emily King ventured past the Potomac to visit the newest addition to D.C.'s myriad of monuments (now one of her favorites): the United States Air Force Memorial:

For months (since mid-October when it opened), I've been intrigued by the memorial—specifically, the three stainless steel spires you see when crossing the Memorial Bridge or driving south on Interstate 395. From afar, the spires look like thin moon crescents—or, as I've heard them better described, jet streams. And while they certainly merit a look from the distance, up close—at the base of the memorial—they elicit a sort of magical, even dizzying awe as you gaze up at their massive curvature.

Civilization as We Know IT

Like most Canadians, IT (half-Canuck, after all) has had issues with Air Canada in the past (a New Year's Eve spent alone in the Best Western Toronto Airport West was a particular low point in the relationship). That said, we have always been huge fans of the airline's enRoute magazine, in which, for example, we were first introduced to sudoku years before the current craze. One of our favorite features of the magazine was the longstanding Civilization Index department, which scored 24 of the world's great cities on five different criteria meant to determine their level of sophistication. Cities were originally analyzed in pairs, then placed on the continuum of all cities rated to date. The final ranking was published two years ago, but IT hadn't even been conceived yet (we barely knew the word blog), so, in the spirit of better late than never , we thought we'd share this beloved time waster with you.

Amtrak to the Rescue

We love it when chief researcher Marilyn Terrell shares her family's travel tales and tips. This week, she gives the scoop on unaccompanied minors on Amtrak:

Have you ever had a week when your friends abandon you and refuse to sit with you at lunch? Well, our sixth-grader James recently had a week like that, and my husband and I were trying to think of something that would cheer him up when his big sister Emma (who lives in New York) called with the perfect solution: She had scored two awesome seats to the Giants-Eagles game that Sunday afternoon in the Meadowlands, and asked if James would like to go. The problem was getting him to New York and back. His older siblings had flown alone when they were nine and ten, but further away than New York. A train made more sense from D.C., but they have multiple stops with people getting on and off, and there are no flight attendants; who would keep an eye on him?

Train Trance: Zug's Psychedelic Bahnhof

If you take a train to Zug, a lovely Swiss town that's become a ritzy suburb of Zurich, it's best to arrive at night. Although you'll miss the view of Lake Zug and the mountain (the Zugerberg), you'll be able to appreciate the subtly shifting light installation in their recently redesigned train station. Built mostly of glass, the five-story bahnhof starts off glowing blue, then almost imperceptibly turns purple, then pink, then sunset orange, then red, then slowly back to pink, purple, and midnight blue, all in the space of two and a half minutes.  An American artist named James Turrell designed the permanent light show, which contrasts strikingly with the traditional Swiss architecture of the town. When Traveler's chief researcher Marilyn Terrell was there this fall, several photographers had set up cameras on tripods to catch the changing lights, so she was surprised to find not a single YouTube video of this phenomenon. She contacted Zug Tourism and the Swiss Railways, but although they had still shots, they had no video.  Still shots can't capture the effect, so she asked her brother who lives in Zug with his family to shoot a short video, which he graciously provided here: an Inside Traveler exclusive! (Warning: not much happens between 0:40 and 1:40. Take a minute to meditate.)

Shake IT, Baby

IT digs the Bard . So we drooled a little on our doublet when we heard about the Kennedy Center's six-month-long Shakespeare in Washington festival (though we do wish they'd come up with a catchier name…Shakespeare is Capital?). The fest kicks off on Saturday (this year's bona fide twelfth night) with a free reading of Will's eponymous play in the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall, directed by the Shakespeare Theatre Company's artistic director. From that point on, more than a hundred performances and exhibits will proliferate throughout the D.C. area including offerings by local outfits like Woolly Mammoth, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. More exotic presenters during the course of the event include the Kirov ballet and opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and jazz doyenne Dame Cleo Laine. For a non-traditional take on the exploits of everybody's favorite Danish prince, we recommend the Tiny Ninja Theater's interpretation starring plastic vending machine figurines, the Studio Theatre's production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Hamlet's trial, as presided over by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. If your ears don't perk up at either iambic pentameter or the dulcet tunes of Cole Porter, perhaps you will find the accompanying exhibits at the National Building Museum and various other local galleries more to your liking. And if none of this floats your boat…why on earth did you read this far? You must have a crush on us or something.

United We Fail

IT co-founder Jessie Johnston had a rough time getting to London for her vacation over Thanksgiving, thanks primarily to United Airlines' poor customer service. It took her a while to put the trauma down in words, but she finally has. Here's her story:

I arrive at Dulles Airport at 4:00 p.m., for a flight departing an hour and 37 minutes later. I had actually tried to be earlier, but the vagaries of the D.C. Metro had resulted in my missing the shuttle I'd planned to catch by about 30 seconds, so I arrive a half hour later than planned. Turns out this is only the first of many mishaps.