Please enter your feedback
CloseThank You For Registering
We sent an official communication to your email address provided during your registration. Please check your email and follow the instructions.
You must be logged-in to do that!
Close
The holiday travel season just got a little bit better…if you’re flying
Delta, that is. Starting on Tuesday, November 24th, over 250 of Delta’s planes will have free WiFi, via the Internet service provider Gogo,
sponsored by eBay.
Our Berlin bike tour guide, George Wanjala (above), a Kenyan with a degree from Cornell, did not mince any words when he showed me and a pal around remaining sections of the Berlin Wall, on a 10-mile tour of a city once divided.
“We’d be dead if we were caught here before 1989,” said Wanjala, as we stood in Mauer Park (Wall Park), where today graffiti artists are free to paint a remaining strip of wall and karaoke contests are held nearby in what was once a “death strip.”
How times have changed.
Last night at the Paris Theater in New York City, Travel + Leisure’s editor-in-chief, Nancy Novogrod, introduced director Jason Reitman and his new movie, Up in the Air, starring George Clooney. The creator of some of the smartest films in recent years—Juno (2007) and Thank You for Smoking (2005)—gave special thanks to his father seated in the audience, Hollywood film producer-director Ivan Reitman, before the lights went down.
Based on the 2001 novel by Walter Kirn, one of the T+L’s contributing editors, Up in the Air is a film for travelers—and for the times. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, an Omaha-based axe-man for hire who spends 322+ days a year on the road doing the bidding of distressed companies, racking up frequent flier miles, and relishing his untethered life. “Make no mistake, moving is living,” he atones.
Behold, in all its glory: my idea of heaven on a plate. Stone crab season officially opened a couple of weeks ago, and I took that as the perfect excuse to head down to the Florida Keys for a blissful weekend of sun and serious seafood binging. Three jumbo claws from the Islamorada Fish Company market, plus a cold Corona or two, made the perfect warm-weather lunch—just the thing to break up a day of snoozing in a hammock and frolicking in the surf.
Stone crab meat is not only amazingly succulent and sweet, it’s also a sustainable food product. (Only one claw is harvested at a time from each crab, which is returned to the ocean to regenerate its claw.)
Like many Americans, I have three names. Stuart Clark Mitchell. I like all of them, but they’ve led to confusion my entire life.
First of all, they could all be first or last names. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called “Mitchell,” especially in situations where names on a roster are listed last name first. Secondly, my parents had the bright idea of calling me by my middle name (“Clark”). As a result, on the first day of every class in college, I had to explain that I was indeed “Stuart,” but “Clark” would be my preference. Then there’s the question of spelling—some, including a certain person on staff here at T+L, insist on making my name a little fancier by writing “Clarke,” even after years of correcting.
While all of this may seem trivial compared to keeping our country safe, the new TSA program, Secure Flight, which launches early next year, is bound to affect people like me.
In the past decade, ambitious high-speed rail projects have condensed Europe, reducing travel times–often by more than half–on principal routes like Madrid-Barcelona (was: 9 hours; now: 3) and London-Brussels (travel speed: 208 mph).
This December, a shiny new bullet train will begin plying the tracks between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The red-and-silver Sapsan–which emerged from years of halting talks between the Russian government and Germany-based Siemens company–will traverse the 400 miles between the cities in just three hours and 45 minutes, beating airline timetables by more than an hour. The name means "peregrine falcon."
There has been a bit of a fluster in the blogosphere in response to a video released yesterday by TMZ, showing Britney Spears passing through airport security at Los Angeles' LAX with a 7-Eleven Big Gulp in hand—and it wasn't confiscated by security, I might add.
The accusations were aplenty, most assuming the pop princess was granted special permission that allowed her to bypass common folk security regulations.
Though I haven’t seen any solid poll numbers, I’d wager that the vast majority of New Yorkers have never been to Roosevelt Island. Let alone the vast majority of tourists visiting the city. This spit of land, snugly situated in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, is probably best known as the backdrop of a climactic battle in the first Spider-Man movie, with the webbed wonder striving to rescue commuters trapped in the Roosevelt Island tram (Spidey and the Green Goblin also do battle in the island’s abandoned smallpox hospital).
But those who don’t live on the island (or don’t travel to play tennis on the nice indoor courts there) will soon have a very good reason to make the trek. Plans are moving ahead to build Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the island’s southern tip (currently off-limits to the public), adding a dramatic new public space to the city.
More and more pet owners in the U.S. are choosing to travel with their pets, and while the Travel Industry Association of America (TIAA) estimates that only 6% are doing so by plane, the numbers are on the rise. And airlines are stepping up their game offering everything from frequent flyer programs for furry friends to “pet-only” airlines. Here are some of the highlights:
Frequent Flyer Programs
Midwest Airlines is the only airline offering pets free trips through their Premier Pet Program. For every six paid one-way flights, pets earn a free round-trip ticket. The cost to fly your pet is $300 round trip below the cabin and $250 for in-cabin travel.
DUBAI—I've just arrived here for a conference, and everyone is talking about the city's new Metro, a futuristic elevated train that soars high above the desert floor as smoothly as a magic carpet over the Arabian sands.
Opened in September, the state-of-the-art system (the photo, left, was taken with my less-than-state-of-the-art phone camera) links Dubai airport with the Jebel Ali district on the far side of town, a distance of 31 miles. For much of its length, the line runs alongside busy busy busy Shaikh Zayed Road, one of the main thoroughfares. It's satisfying to be on one of the trains, clipping along at 55 mph, while below you Zayed Road is illuminated with thousands of brake lights as traffic crawls to a stop, which tends to happen more and more often these days.
The Dubai Metro is the longest automated driverless metro in the world—a source of pride in the United Arab Emirates but also a potential problem.
