Travel

Today we drank in new tastes, sights and sounds…and began with an early morning train ride from Waterloo Station in North Wellington up to the Wairarapa district, a foodies paradise dotted with artisan craftspeople who create great tasting wines, olive oils, jams, fruits, and chocolates. The 90-minute train ride took […]

Logan and Brown are the two last names of a pair of famous chefs known far and wide in Wellington, a city of about 180,000 where arts, culture and especially food are at the top of their game. The pair opened in a converted former bank building on Cuba Street, […]

One common refrain heard time and time again is, ‘well see you again, we’ve gotta get together again, let’s make plans to do this again’ but how many times do you really do that? The complication of geography, meeting great people in faraway countries makes you know full well you’ll […]

We’re en route to Wellington and are waiting at Auckland’s new and improved domestic terminal. After the 13 hour flight, it was nice to get out into the air, and we followed the blue trail from the international terminal over here to domestic departures.  Outside we passed some lovely spring […]

We are off, tomorrow at 6 am, flying to Los Angeles and then tomorrow night, to Auckland and then Wellington New Zealand. It has been a day of packing and trying to remember everything, and accepting that things won’t get done but will upon our return on Dec 3. One […]

I ordered a burger at the Outback Steakhouse in Orlando. A meal voucher had spat out of the Delta self check-in when my flight was delayed, and I took it to this temple of gastronomy to see what I could get. In tiny print down at the bottom, my server […]

Up on stage at Phocuswright yesterday, dozens of travel start-ups vied for our attention, and like the Greek chorus offstage, we bloggers tapped away making comments and asking questions on Twitter. I found myself focusing on the main question of ‘what’s actually new here?’ when so many of the present […]

After a long line of technical booking solutions and web analytics providers at the Phocuswright conference,I was glad to hear about a less technical travel topic…luggage. Luggagetag.com allows the customer to design a luggage tag using nice looking photos, graphics, unique fonts and even family photos. Like the programs that […]

I’m excited to again be at Phocuswright, where I’ll meet up with dozens of friends I’ve made in the on-line travel business and catch up with bloggers and other people who make this business so exciting. I walked up to the security desk at Bradley and got a surprise as […]

Art Tatum is a childhood memory, his piano playing was always a part of my dad’s very important music collection. Music experts consider Tatum to be the most admired jazz pianist who ever lived. In yesterday’s WSJ, Terry Teachout discussed just what it is that makes someone memorable, famous and […]

The Cherry Award provides a $200,000 prize to whomever is judged to be America’s best college professor. The WSJ last night ran a story about three candidates for this award, sponsored by Baylor College. It focuses on the really important part of teaching in college which has been overshadowed by […]

John Bemelmans Marciano tracked down the people whose names stand behind words in the English language. His new book is called Anonyponymous, meaning that nobody ever heard of them despite the fact that things and places are named after them. NPR had a story about the book this morning. Take […]