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.