kottke.org posts about travel
A list of unconventional but useful tips for visitors to NYC.
Do a bunch of local New York things: Hang out in Central Park, Explore Brooklyn, wear black, enjoy the free WiFi in Bryant Park (use the bathroom there — nice). Attend a lecture at the 92nd ST Y, go to Chinatown in Queens. Buy junk at a street fair, and eat street meat (don’t ask). Have a cigar at the Grand Havana Room (members only). Catch an author speak at a Barnes & Noble (use the bathroom while you are there).
Eventually I hope to write up my How To Be A Pedestrian In NYC guide, a companion to my rules for the NYC subway, only a bit more helpful and less ranty.
[I’m sure this is nothing new and has been amply documented elsewhere but I’m in rant mode, not research mode, so here we go.] We’re going to London soon so my wife calls up AT&T to make sure our iPhones will work in the UK. We already knew all about the ridiculous prices they charge for international data roaming (viewing a 3-minute video on YouTube would cost about $40!), so turning that feature off for the duration is not going to be a problem. After unlocking the phones for international access, the woman informed Meg of two other tidbits of mobile phone company idiocy:
1. If my iPhone is on in the UK and the phone rings but I don’t answer, the call goes to voicemail. As it should. But somehow, I get charged for that call at $1.29/minute *and* perhaps an additional call from my phone to the US, also billed at $1.29/minute. Individual voicemails are limited to 2 minutes, but if I get 10 2-minute voicemails over the course of a couple days, I’m charged $25 for not answering my phone. And then I have to listen to all the voicemails…that’s another $25. Insane and inane.
2. But it gets even more unbelievable! Then the woman tells Meg that when the iPhone is hooked up to a computer via USB, you shouldn’t download the photos from the phone to the computer because you’ll incur international data roaming charges and further that the only way to deal with this is to wait to sync your photos when you get back to the US. W! T! F! How is that even possible? This sounds like complete bullshit to me. The iPhone somehow calls AT&T to ask permission to d/l photos? Verifies the EXIF data? Informs the US government what you’ve been taking pictures of…some kind of distributed self-surveillance system? Is this really the case or was this woman just really confused about what she was reading off of her script?
Doug Dyment reveals his secrets to packing light for trips.
Dyment has two big tricks for packing a bag correctly: Don’t let any space go unused, and wrap your clothes in bundles.
“If you’re packing a pair of running shoes, say, don’t forget there’s a lot of space inside those shoes that you can use to pack stuff,” he says.
When it comes to clothing, Dyment says travelers who fold items individually, put them in a stack and force them in the suitcase are making a huge mistake.
More info here, including a diagram of how to bundle wrap your clothes to save space.
The “open-skies” agreement goes into effect at the end of this month, which means that airlines based in the US and Europe can fly into and out of any two airports in each area.
The new pact is expected to be game-changing for Europe-bound travel. More routes are expected to open, and prices could fall thanks to the new competition. The agreement is also likely to encourage European carriers to compete more aggressively with one another across the Continent. Lufthansa, the German airline, for example, could set up a hub in Paris; or Air France could set up a hub in Frankfurt.
The article also states that Ireland-based Ryanair wants to offer fares to/from secondary markets in the US and Europe as low as $16. !!!
Here are all the places I visited last year…much less travel than in previous years. Having a baby will do that to your schedule. For a few months there, I don’t think I left a 20-block radius of Manhattan.
New York City, NY*
Rochester, VT
Anguilla
Boston, MA*
Orange, MA*
Waitsfield, VT*
San Francisco, CA
McMinnville, OR
Portland, OR
One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Here are my lists from 2005 and 2006.
The NY Times list of the 53 places to go in 2008.
Update: Greg notes something about the list that I noticed as well:
I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we’re supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the “reason” to go is the opening at long last of that destination’s first “luxury” accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel.
Posting will be pretty light (or nonexistent) today. We had a grueling day of travel yesterday that’s not over just yet (I’m going back out to JFK this morning to retrieve some tardy baggage). A quick thanks to Joel for minding the site while I was gone.
Update: Back from JFK. I have deodorant again!
“Travel is the starting point of learning social science.” — Tyler Cowen
Twelve tips for travelling across the United States by train. “12. Train Love. I wish you the best of luck in finding a soulmate via subsidized government transportation.”
10 mph, the documentary about two guys travelling across the US on a Segway, comes out on DVD on May 29 (buy at Amazon).
Timelapse of a boat going through the Panama Canal. How the boat moves reminds me of Doom or Quake. This couple’s vacation write-up includes a trip through the canal. “The never to be forgotten trip lasted ten hours and cost Princess Cruise Lines more than $150,000 in tolls.”
This article on commuting is from last week’s New Yorker, but I read it while commuting — my commute is a relatively short 15 minutes door-to-door — so it took until today to finish it. Anyway, well worth the read…in some ways, the long commute is one of the USA’s defining characteristics. People like Judy Rossi, who commutes 6.5 hours a day, are increasing in number. “[Rossi’s] alarm goes off at 4:30 A.M. She’s out of the house by six-fifteen and at her desk at nine-thirty. She gets home each evening at around eight-forty-five. The first thing Rossi said to me, when we met during her lunch break one day, was ‘I am not insane.’”
In 1998, Barry Stiefel took off from work on Friday at 5pm and was back at his desk a little more than a week later on Monday at 8am, having visited every US state in the interim (48 by car, Hawaii and Alaska by air). I love the map…except for the jog to San Francisco, it looks pretty optimized.
We’re leaving tomorrow for a trip of the relaxing sort, so I went to the bookstore this morning to collect some reading material. I had decided not to read anything that felt too much like work or that I had to think about. What I needed was fiction like television: passive but engaging. Having procured a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the B section, I wandered over to the Rs. Robbins. Roth. Rowlandson. Salinger. Hmm. No luck in the Teen section either. Finally I hit paydirt in the Kids section: the 1085 pages of the first three years of Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts.
Perfect.
So, I’ll see you in a week. Posting will be light until then, but feel free to enjoy some random posts from the last 9 years of kottke.org, peruse the Best Links of 2006 list again, look at some of my photos from Anguilla in 2004, dream of NYC in the snow (will it ever again?), imagine if Manhattan visited other US cities, or visit the many fine sites in the sidebar of the front page. I’ll send you a postcard when I get back.
America the Overfull, Paul Theroux’s New Year’s musing on an America with twice as many people as when he grew up. “We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.” (thx, youngna)
Diagram that shows what it takes to move 15,000 people/hour using different modes of transportation (car, bus, light rail, etc.). A fast train with one track going each way (using a space 8 meters wide) moves as many people as a freeway with 7 lanes in each direction (51 meters wide).
Last year I listed all the places I visited during the course of the year. My friend Zach already posted his 2006 list, so following his lead, here’s mine:
Waitsfield, VT*
New York City, NY*
Boston, MA*
Albany, NY
Austin, TX
Tulum, Mexico
Valladolid, Mexico
Chicago, IL
Orange, MA
Napa, CA
Minneapolis, MN
Cameron, WI
Linz, Austria
Salzburg, Austria
Innsbruck, Austria
Zurich, Switzerland
Camden, ME
Rochester, VT
One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Less travel than last year, thank goodness. Where’s your list?
TSA travel tip: cheesecake is not a gel. “So, as you’re traveling for the holidays, if you should feel the urge to surprise a loved one with a piece of cheesecake or some other gelatinous food product and are questioned by the TSA, make sure you remind them about the ‘LaGuardia Cheesecake Precedent of October 2006’ and claim your right to bring that cheesecake on the plane with you.” Consider this a companion piece to the security theater article from earlier in the week.
The inept security theater at the airport. “For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.”
David Pogue and Boing Boing have been ensnared by the airplane-on-a-treadmill problem we debated here last February. The airplane still takes off. :)
On a recent visit to New York, writer Will Self walked the 20 miles from JFK to his hotel in Manhattan…and this was after walking 26 miles to Heathrow to catch the plane to JFK. “There were not many pedestrians out at 11:30 in the morning, and dressed all in black and snapping pictures with a digital camera, Mr. Self was a sight sufficiently exotic that he was tailed for a while by a black S.U.V.”
In P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s character takes advantage of a Healthy Choice promotion for frequent flier miles, buying 1000s of miles and lots of pudding for just a few dollars. This aspect of Sandler’s character was based on a caper well-known within the frequent flier community when David Phillips purchased over 1.2 million frequent flyer miles for just under $2400, which has allowed him and his family to fly to over 20 countries for free.
Now the big thing is cheese. This weekend I was handed an opened wheel of processed cheeses by a friend. He said that his brother-in-law had caught wind of a frequent flyer promotion whereby you get 500 miles for each purchase of this cheese wheel and had purchased 75,000 miles for ~$300, which also means he’s got more opened cheese wheels than he knows what to do with. The frequent flyer forums and blogs are already on the case. These forums are actually pretty fascinating…there’s a lot of free/cheap travel to be had for those with a little time on their hands. This fellow claims to have taken advantage of airline pricing errors to fly 16 flights this year for a total cost of $77.57.
Driving on the Interstate through the metropolitan tri-state area during a 1.5 hour downpour is like playing 700 continuous laps of Baby Park against 7 other players. I’m beat. (ps. It’s a simile anyway.)
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More