When leisure travel is your business, playing hooky is your job.
Family adventure travel planning, insider travel tips and riffs on thoughtful truancy.
Family adventure travel planning, insider travel tips and riffs on thoughtful truancy.
My View From the Grassy Knoll
I just found a gem of a museum that shoots you straight back to 1963.
Called the Sixth Floor Museum, it's on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository--where, on Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald stood when he shot JFK.
The museum is about more than the history of one fateful day; it’s total immersion into a time that is no more, set in in the exact spot where it came to an end. And the personality that permeates the museum is not the dead President, but his widow, even more stunning in tragedy than she had been in the gilded days of Camelot. Read more ...
Up next: Machu Picchu!
The girls and I are off to learn about Lima and the Incas.
Click here to follow our adventures--if I can get internet access!
I loved "The Monkey Wrench Gang." And now, guess where I find myself going on vacation?
Lake Powell, created by the dam that symbolized the forces they fought. This is where they wrought their mad, wonderful mayhem.
It's an uncomfortable feeling to go on such an energy-profligate vacation--driving a houseboat and towing a motorboat through the waters that covered Glen Canyon after the dam was completed in 1963.
It took 17 years to fill the lake, I'm told.
So here we go! Read more ...
New Frontiers in Professional Truancy
Day Three in my new job as … cruise editor!
Here's a snapshot from my morning run along the waterfront in Seattle before heading off to "work."
"Aren't you afraid you'll gain weight?" asked a friend after hearing about the new job. (The average weight gain on a one-week cruise is five to 10 pounds).
That's one reason I run.
My First River Cruise!
I'm aboard Avalon Waterways' Visionary on its christening cruise through Dutch waterways. I've always wanted to try river cruises because they're so destination-centric.
They go from city center to city center, meaning you have not just all day, but a lot of the night night, to do all the exploring your want! But you only have to pack and unpack once. So this week, I'm seeing if the reality matches the vision. Read more …
Thunderstorms at O'Hare shut it down for hours and when our flight finally took off after midnight, lightning flashes surrounded us. Even as I was saying Hail Marys through the bumps, I had to admire the silent beauty of the lightning backlighting piles of clouds or occasionally forking through them.
Earlier, while waiting In the crowded terminal and listening to a quick-witted JetBlue ticket agent try to put a positive spin on his ongoing explanations for the continued delays, I had wondered what draws people to the often-beleaguered aviation industry; scenes like this must make it worth it. Read more …
Finding Ty'n y Mynyndd
My great-grandfather, Owain Thomas Hughes, left the family farm in Anglesey, in the north of Wales, nearly 150 years ago to start a new life in America.
My two daughters, my mother and I went back to Wales to see if that farm, Ty'n y Mynyndd, was still there.
And it was. Read more ...
My great-grandfather, Owain Thomas Hughes, left the family farm in Anglesey, in the north of Wales, nearly 150 years ago to start a new life in America.
My two daughters, my mother and I went back to Wales to see if that farm, Ty'n y Mynyndd, was still there.
And it was. Read more ...
Genealogical Journey
March 5 -- Planning this "family roots" trip means that we're all learning more about my great grandfather, Owain Thomas Hughes, and about Wales itself. I've got his date of birth--and his mother's name, Ellen. That name, Ellen, or versions of it, keeps surfacing throughout the generations of my family.
And from the old guidebooks and maps we've found in family archives, Owain Thomas and Ellen got to see each other again. Read more …
Feb. 29 -- I'm going back to my family's roots in Wales. My mother, my two daughters and I leave in two weeks to vist the farm my great grandfather, Owain Thomas Hughes, left nearly 150 years ago.
I see his mother saying good bye to her only child, standing on the doorstep of their farmhouse, Ty'n y Mynydd, views of Snowdownia in the background. What can she have felt, watching him start the first leg of a journey to a land she'd never seen, not knowing what her chances of ever seeing him again would be? Read more …
Feb. 6 -- I take my youngest to our synagogue's Junior Congregation. And funnily enough, the day's reading is all about why it's important to jump--especially when it scares you.
Read more ...
Blair Ryan Rice having a "Nachshon Moment" at Telluride
Jan. 31 -- One of the perks of my day job is the way I, a travel tech editor, occasionally get wined and dined the way destination editors do. And when I do get wined and dined, I try to make sure it's by the French. Wine. Cheese. Truffles. I speak no French, but the French speak my language.
That means last fall I, I got to know a little more about some wines I'd met on a great vacation long ago…Read more
Jan. 23 -- Imagine this. You're in Facebook, you see a friend you'd like to visit, you open an app, type in the friend's name and presto! There's your route all picked out for you! Could be by train or plane, take the routing you pick and then click to book it.
Pretty simple, huh? Well, a company you never heard of unless you're in the travel business, has an app like that out there! It's not ready for market yet … Read more
Airline Ticket Refundable?
Dec. 13 -- That word "non-refundable" when it comes to buying an airline ticket makes me freeze -- even if it's just a $79 ticket!
But, guess what, with half a dozen airlines that non-refundable ticket is actually fully refundable for 24 hours! And early next year, new rules are going to require all airlines offer that option.
For the moment, however, Continental, Delta and U.S. Airways give you 24 hours to change your mind--you have to pay, but you can get your money back if you change your mine in 24 hours. American lets you hold your ticket for 24 hours before you pay.
And sometimes 24 hours is all you need to firm up plans.
Just before Thanksgiving, my mother decided to fly out to join us for Thanksgiving. I grabbed a flight on American, which lets you hold a ticket for 24 hours before paying, while we worked through the details. By the time I actually booked it, the fare had gone from $450 to $650 or $700. But I'd locked in that $450.
I've booked non-refundable tickets with Continental, Delta and US Airways and canceled them or changed them (US Airways actually let me change a ticket for my husband 30 hours after I'd booked it. Technically, I couldn't do it. But their customer service person somehow swung an exception for me).
Frontier Airlines also gives you a grace period for changing your mind and better yet, lets you do a fee-free itinerary change whenever you want with its Classic and Classic Plus fares (which also include two free checked bags, free or low-cost upgrades to roomier seats and free DirecTV).
Continental's Farelock will let you book and hold a fare for seven days while you make up your mind. There's a fee for it and it's only available on some routes, not all. But it's a great idea--if we use it, maybe they'll expand it!
Early next year, new Department of Transportation regulations will mandate that all airlines provide this 24-hour change-your-mind window. A few airlines oppose it, but in the meantime, you know you've got this option for the next time 24 hours might be all the time you need to make a decision about that not-necessarily-non-refundable airline ticket.
Nov. 30 -- We all know that when it comes to playing hooky, Europeans are unmatched (although they call it "taking a holiday.") And most of us know that Americans do far worse. But did you know that the Japanese and Asia in general takes even less vacation time than we do? And of the two countries with the most vacation unfriendly bosses, one is Italy? That's what Expedia's 2011 Vacation Deprivation Study found out. Read more …
American's Bankruptcy
Nov. 29 -- American was the sole network carrier to stay out of bankruptcy--until today, that is--and that was both its pride and its problem, says aviation analyst Michael Boyd. But he and other industry insiders agree: American's bankruptcy will not affect consumers or AAdvantage members. Read more …
Nov. 29 -- American was the sole network carrier to stay out of bankruptcy--until today, that is--and that was both its pride and its problem, says aviation analyst Michael Boyd. But he and other industry insiders agree: American's bankruptcy will not affect consumers or AAdvantage members. Read more …
Thirty-Six Hours to Play Hooky
Both kids are off--one for the whole semester, the other for an overnight class trip. Husband is about to leave on a business trip. My only responsibility for the next 36 hours--well, 31, to be exact--me!
What I am doing? Besides my job, of course (oh, that! It's so easy when you take your family out of the equation). Read more …
Both kids are off--one for the whole semester, the other for an overnight class trip. Husband is about to leave on a business trip. My only responsibility for the next 36 hours--well, 31, to be exact--me!
What I am doing? Besides my job, of course (oh, that! It's so easy when you take your family out of the equation). Read more …
CST #2071045-50