A bad travel guide for midlife crises
Travel publisher Lonely Planet just sent me an email with a subject line that promised “The top 10 places to have a midlife crisis”—an enticing come-on for a huge load of inexperienced posturing, a smoky glance from a virgin. The travel article (which was, oddly, two years old when it appeared in my mailbox)...
Hello, Mauritius, our 100th country
We’re still a very new website—just 9 months and a few weeks—but our scrawny tentacles are stretching slowly around the globe. We are very pleased to announce that the island nation of Mauritius just became our 100th country. Well, strictly speaking, it’s not our country. It’s a country from which someone visited us. But we...
Tramps: how travel is like sex
The desire to travel is like the desire for sex. When you aren’t doing it, it seems like the most attractive thing imaginable. If you can’t fulfill your desire for travel—because, let’s say, you are working—it can grow into a mild obsession. Like sex. You start buying travel magazines. You visit travel websites then wipe...
Trips your children won’t recommend
Runestone checked in yesterday with a link to Greenland’s official web site (which just won a Webby Award, which is considered the Oscar of the internet). As a travel destination, we had slotted Greenland pretty far down the list, between Somalia and Cancun. Now we’re less sure. We thought of the island as a frozen...
Why aren’t more old people leaving America?
There’s a lot of loose talk about people retiring outside the United States. It’s not as romantic a conversation as one might think, because the underlying premise is that most Americans don’t have the resources they’ll need to retire comfortably in the country they’ve helped to build. Say you have only $1,177 a month to...
A guide to the paths less travelled
So much of our attention is diverted to the marquee destinations, and understandably so. It’s fun to read about diving in Bonaire or skiing Whistler, and we can convince ourselves that we’re actually gathering useful information. Something that will help us plan that next outing. No, I’m not wasting time looking at this video of...
Glamping sites trending more toward glam than camping
If you are confused about luxury camping (also called glamorous camping or, awkwardly, glamping), you are not alone. Some of these places, like the “romantic” English shepherds’ huts found on goglamping.net, look like slightly-more-claustrophobic-than-normal ice-fishing shacks. But there seems to be a trend toward more upscale hospitality, where guests are coddled with opulent...
British couple lacks the stamina to cruise for a full 40 years
You could spend what remains of your life collecting stories about engaging people who have chucked over their rat-race lives, bought a sailboat, and cruised the world for a year or a decade or longer. That’s because a lot of people actually do this. There are communities of cruisers, in boats of varying degrees of...
Sunday hash: February 26, 2012
Odd lots and bolt ends from the past week: As pointed out in an earlier post, research demonstrates that “exercising with an interactive computer game improves brain function among the elderly.” Now comes news that you might not need the exercise part of that: a study by North Carolina State University...
Rabbit hole for cyclists
The internet is a rabbit hole, which is its blessing and its curse. You stumble across a link, and fall headlong into a world you never knew existed. A new reality opens up; hours disappear. It can begin with a simple Google Alert that points to an article in...
Saturday stew: December 10, 2011
Yes, we are debuting a new feature: an assortment, a stew, a bouillabaisse of delectable items that we’ve collected over the week . In another example of bad timing—or perhaps hesitancy—we’re launching it a day late. But we’ll do better later. Meanwhile, enjoy: Winter routes: In the summer, we’re inclined to...
Camping out in someone else’s garden: fake, irredeemably lame travel trend for boomers
Last month we reported on the rise of glamping—a conflation of “glamorous” and “camping” that makes us wince every time we write it. We were skeptical. Even dismissive. But then we looked at a few web sites and thought about it, and decided it might be a very acceptable way to...
