Black Friday, the kickoff to the holiday shopping season, is best known for doorbuster deals and irresistible sales on gifts. Deals on hotels, airfare, tours and cruises may have little to do with gift-giving and more with tempting shoppers to indulge in their own wanderlust, but increasingly, travel bargains are part of the promotions around…
Forget phrase books or even Google Translate. New translation devices are getting closer to replicating the fantasy of the Babel fish, which in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” sits in one’s ear and instantly translates any foreign language into the user’s own. The WT2 Plus Ear to Ear AI Translator Earbuds from Timekettle are…
On a cool spring day, in the bewitching crystalline light for which New Mexico is famous, I stood in the middle of the Acoma Sky City and looked out into the ocean of desert at an island of pale red and dun colored rock called Enchanted Mesa. My tour guide, Marissa Chino, a young Acoma…
The 52 Places Traveler Olkhon Island, in Russia’s Lake Baikal, has herds of wild horses, a shamanistic religion and no paved roads. The 52 Places Traveler found his spirit animal there. Nov. 5, 2019 ImageLake Baikal and Olkhon Island are sacred places to the indigenous Buryat people, and the totems of their shamanistic Buddhist faith…
Sometimes, when sleep eludes me in the dark hour before dawn, I make my way to the Pont de la Tournelle, the 400-foot bridge that links the Île Saint-Louis to Paris’s Left Bank. I plant myself at its midpoint, face west and wait. Before me is the skeletal back of Notre-Dame, shrouded in darkness. I…
It was a warm August evening in Evanston, Ill., just north of Chicago, when the Wienermobile rolled out the red carpet for a sleepover. Actually, the carpet was green, and not so much carpet as artificial turf. Inside the Wienermobile, the meat brand Oscar Mayer’s signature marketing machine, there was a pullout bed and a…
When you are flying budget economy on a legacy carrier, the in-flight experience isn’t much different from regular economy (though your odds of getting the middle seat skyrocket). But on an ultra-low-cost carrier — such as Allegiant, Frontier, Ryanair or Spirit — you pay for food and drink, plus any bags beyond a personal item,…
For most people, long weekends usually run from Friday to Sunday, a surge that often means higher travel costs. But what if we tinkered with the timing to reset the weekend as Saturday to Monday? Would we save money? Depending on where you go and stay, the answer is yes, from somewhat to substantially. The…
On Nov. 9, 1989, the East German government made a surprising announcement: It was easing up travel restrictions on its citizens. East Berliners flocked to the nearest border crossings at the Berlin Wall, especially at Checkpoint Charlie, the famed crossing between the divided Berlins. Not long after that, Berliners from the east and west began…
When Frederick Law Olmsted stepped off a ship in Liverpool in 1850, he was a gentleman farmer on Staten Island and intellectual, eager to embark on a walking tour of England. When he left, he had the makings of perhaps the greatest American landscape architect of all time. Several years later, he would take an…