My brother once had his passport stolen in Turkey and was forced to spend the next month in the country before he was handed a new passport and could leave. He ended up having the time of his life and making lifelong friends, but that’s beside the point. A lost or stolen passport can cause a lot of stress. Just ask my wife who lost her passport on a train behind communist lines in the old East Germany. She was booted off the train and, unlike my brother, did not make any lifelong friends. Now entering the travel world is accessMYID.com, a new website that stores all pertinent travel information like a copy of that passport, travel visas, health insurance cards, and necessary prescriptions. Much like my beloved Carbonite backs up my hard drive, this website will store all travel info for a yearly fee that’s as low as twenty bucks a year. That seems like a low price to pay to offset a potential heart attack.

 

Over the years, I’ve given travel advice to friends, family, neighbors, editors, strangers, you name it. Once people know you’re a travel writer, the questions quickly follow. And believe me, I’m happy to point folks in the right direction. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. But I was stunned and delighted to get the following email:

Hello Steve, hope you don’t mind me contacting you. I am a US Army soldier currently serving in Iraq, and hope to be home in 2 months after being gone for 8. I would love to take my very hard working wife (also active duty US Army) and 3 young daughters (7,4,2) on a warm beach vacation somewhat near our suburban Maryland home. I read your great review, and the only caveat is that my wife has a security clearance that makes it difficult to plan travel out of the US on short notice. I was thinking the US VI or possibly Puerto Rico and wondered what you thought. We have taken one cruise, Disney out of Canaveral and absolutely loved it. We all love water and beaches, so thought that something all-inclusive in a warm destination that didn’t require passports would be ideal. We lived in Hawaii for 3 years before the children, and even though my wife thinks the 12 hour flight is doable, I think something in our local area w/ less flight time would be better. Thanks so much.

To which I responded:

Thanks for being in touch!  I’m happy to be of assistance. I would scratch Hawaii—too far a trek for the 2 and 4-year old. And let’s be real. Do you really want to go to Hawaii with the kids? I love St. John in the USVI. See if you can a good rate at the Westin, http://www.westinresortstjohn.com. Do you know of any military discounts at hotels? That might help. Disney Cruises are always a safe bet for your kids. So is Royal Caribbean. But make sure your wife can get off at the Caribbean islands. Otherwise it’s not worth it. Also, don’t blow off Florida. If you’re thinking about taking your vacation in April, Florida is warm that time of year. I love Sanibel Island, outside of Fort Myers. Another favorite trip when our kids were your age was San Diego. You can hit Legoland, the San Diego Zoo, maybe even cruise up to Anaheim to go to Disneyland, and hit the beaches in Coronado and Pacific Beach.

He liked my San Diego idea and I was happy to help. So much so that I’m offering free travel advice to any military personnel going on leave!
 

There was a time when Kim Mance was behind the scenes, working as a travel columnist for Marie Claire magazine. But ever since she launched her Galavanting travel show on the web in 2008, she’s been front and center, bringing us around the world as host.  Together with her fashion-conscious cohort Maren Hogan, they venture everywhere from Roatan, Honduras, to Hokkaido Island in Japan, trying the food, sampling the clubs, and, most enjoyable, experiencing the adventure. In Costa Rica, they go rappelling down a waterfall and in an upcoming webisode on Colorado, you can find Kim ice climbing. “I thought I was going to hit myself in the head with the ice pick. But thankfully those crampons are more stable than you think they’ll be,” Manse says with a chuckle. The show has been a surprise hit on the web, with Manse currently in talks to bring Galavanting to one of the networks. Take a glance at Manse hiking deep in the rainforest of Costa Rica and you quickly understand why viewers find the active lifestyle so appealing.

 

Combine marionettes with live music composed by the Kronos Quartet and you get a smaller-than-life reenactment of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition. Called 69 Degrees South: The Shackleton Project, the play is created by the puppet theater company, Phantom Limb, and will be shown at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts on Saturday, March 13 at 8 pm. It will attempt to recreate the true story of Shackleton and his brave men trapped in an ice floe for 497 days, a remarkable story of survival that lends itself well to an intriguing night with puppets.
 

If you still haven’t signed up for a Twitter account, we have a great reason to join.  Acacia Africa is featuring a “Wild Tweep” competition, where one lucky winner will walk away with a 6-day African Insight overland safari. Simply fill out the Q&A and confirm that you can give them 20 minutes of your time for a live “tweet up” on Acacia Africa’s twitter page (Friday, February 26th, from 1 to 1:20pm London time). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to answer questions on South Africa and tell us why you can’t get enough of the Rainbow Nation. Completed Q&As should be emailed to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Entries are being accepted until February 12th.
 

I just received this promo from the Netherlands Board of Tourism. Starting a week from today, February 4th, you can click on www.holland.com and enter to win such prizes as a monthly delivery of fresh tulips for a year, a Dutch bicycle, an iconic piece of Dutch furniture, even a diamond made in Amsterdam. The biggest prize is two round trip, KLM business class tickets to Amsterdam, given to the person who sends in the most creative photograph under the heading “Just be. In Holland.” While there, take that Dutch bicycle on the country’s increasingly popular biking and barge trips. The beauty of these bike trips is that unlike a typical inn-to-inn biking trip, you don’t have to pack your bags every morning to check in at the new night’s lodging. The barge follows you along the route, so you’ll be staying in the same berth the entire trip.
 

One of my favorite inns in New England, the Wildflower Inn, is perched atop glorious Darling Hill Road in Lyndonville, Vermont, with expansive views of meadows, mountains, and rivers. I’ve brought the children here a handful of times and we’ve always had an unforgettable stay as we sled, downhill and cross-country skied, took horse-drawn sleigh rides, and pet the sheep, cows, and resident donkeys in the big barn. Now the inn is doing their best to get families outdoors by hosting a season long contest called Project Snowman 2010. Simply build a snowman and send the photo to the inn and you could win a 7-night stay, dining, skiing at nearby Burke Mountain, and more prizes. Owners Jim and Mary O’Reilly hope to get shots of 10,000 snow or sandmen sent from across America.

I’m taking a 2-week hiatus to enjoy time with my family and ski Stowe this upcoming week. Wishing you a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous 2010!
 

I didn’t think much of TripAdvisor when I first met the website’s founder, Steve Kaufer, in a coffee shop in Newton, Massachusetts, in 2003. A highly successful dot.com entrepreneur, Kaufer had already sold his first company for many millions and could have retired. Instead, he devoted himself to the world of travel, a world he seemed to know very little about. I met with Kaufer twice to try to sell him on the idea to use local travel experts for the most popular destinations on TripAdvisor—Las Vegas, Orlando, New York. He didn’t listen me, opened up the website to the public, and became far richer while I’m still plugging away for free on this blog. He knew something inherent in the human race. People love to bitch or rave about their vacation. But are these rantings a useful source to book your next vacation? Not really.

There’s always been an underlying problem with the public critiquing a destination or hotel, which is primarily what TripAdvisor focuses on. Very few people have any basis of comparison. Unlike one of my favorite food websites, Chowhound, where locals chime in on their favorite restaurants in say, Boston or Queens, locals don’t know the hotels in their own city. That mattress at the Fairmont Copley in Boston could be old as Paul Revere and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea. But ask me about the top restaurants in the city and I’ll happily delve into a long diatribe.

So what we’re left with are the reviews of people who have visited a hotel for the first time in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They give us their five cents worth, but have no way to compare that hotel with the one next door and the one next door to that. This is the sole reason I still rely on guidebooks and travel writers who specialize in Jamaica. They’ve seen every hotel in the country and can easily tell me which ones are the best and which ones are the worst. Most importantly, good travel writers would tell me to steer clear of Montego Bay, where you’re constantly harassed by Jamaicans who want to sell you pot, coffee, carvings, whatever.  A good travel writer would tell you to head to the far more peaceful hamlet of Port Antonio or the long stretch of beach in Negril.

Therein lies the underlying problem with the majority of travel websites like TripAdvisor. They assume you already know where to go and can then look through their list of hotels for the right one. But unless you’re a travel writer, travel consultant, or avid traveler, you wouldn’t know that the main isle of Tahiti in French Polynesia is congested and citified, a far cry from the exquisite beauty of Bora Bora and Raitea. That you can drive off-road on safari in Masai Mara and get close-up shots of those sleeping lions, unlike Serengeti where you have to stay on the main road. That many of the Caribbean isles have been reduced to generic cruise ship hubs, devoid of any local culture. That the island of Folegrandros is the real Greece few will write about, sending you to Santorini instead. You have to do your research, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

 

I returned my rental car to the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport yesterday, only to be charged $250 more than I originally thought I was paying. Evidently, I was billed daily for all insurance charges even though I declined everything. Looking over my original contract, I noticed that the additional charges were there as well but I was in a rush to leave the airport and didn’t make sure the price was correct. Luckily, I initialed all the insurance charges I declined and was refunded the extra expense. But always double check all papers at the airport. This includes baggage, especially with these new self check-in computers. The woman at the counter once put a tag on my luggage to go to Berlin instead of Boston. The guy behind me was going to Berlin and that was his luggage tag. So look down at your bag and make sure it has the correct three letter airport symbol before rushing off to your gate.

By the way, I found the cheapest rental car rates at the DFW Airport through Priceline.com. I ended up going with National at $21 a day for a PT Cruiser.
 

A friend recently sent me a story where students in a study found travel writing to be the most glamorous job on the planet. More than directing films or being a rock star. Say what? Yes, it can be fun to be on the road laughing at mishaps and downing food not usually found at my local market, but most of my life I’m working from the third floor of my suburban house, wondering when the next yellow warbler or red-tailed hawk is going to fly by. Writing is a solitary business, staring at a computer screen waiting patiently for the words to arrive. To overcome that dire sense of loneliness, I’ve always listened to music. New age and jazz bodes well for writers, especially me who doesn’t want to hear singers spouting their lines while I’m writing lines. Paul Winter and Paul Hardcastle are two of my favorites, but lately I’ve been plugged into Pandora, the music genome that streams tunes based on your favorite artists. Frankly, I’m such a Pandora addict at this point that I don’t know what I’d do without it. Try the Paul Hardcastle station with added variety by Chris Botti and Grover Washington. Oh yeah. Now I’m ready to attack that blank screen!