Tour Guides
Come June, author, blogger, and all-around sweet tooth David Lebovitz is heading to Rome to hunt down the best gelato in town—if not the world. For anyone interested in joining him, the author of the ice cream bible The Perfect Scoop will lead an Out of Context three-hour guided tour to the eternal city’s best gelato and granita ($86/person).
When I was a little kid in Los Angeles, my dad would take our family of 7 on long Sunday drives. Once he drove us over a desert pass to a ranch Hollywood had used for old Westerns and where he'd heard there were pony rides. When we pulled off onto the dusty road, it became clear that the decrepit ranch was no longer open for tours.
Dad blithely drove into the movie-set town, wooden sidewalks and Western building facades attached to the fronts of battered house trailers. He made a U-turn and drove back through. "John," my mother hissed, "Hippies!" A few very scruffy men had ventured out onto the sidewalks and more faces appeared in windows, watching our Ford wagon hightail it back to the highway. Months later, from news coverage of the Sharon Tate murder trial, my parents realized that those hippies out at the Spahn Movie Ranch had been the Manson Family. Thus, my first (and only, to date) true-crime road trip adventure.
It only launched in testing stages on June 25th, but Google’s new “City Tours” application—in which your Google Map offers multi-day itineraries in destinations around the globe—has the potential to become something great. But right now it’s mostly useless.
Fifteen years after South Africa ushered in democracy, nothing embodies the promise, excitement, and contradictions of the country quite like Johannesburg. Most travelers, however, barely scratch the surface of the city. Passing through on their way to safari lodges and game reserves elsewhere in the country, they find time for a trip to the Apartheid Museum, a tour of Soweto, dinner in one of the lovely northern suburbs, and then they’re back at the airport to catch a flight out.
I’ll spare you the proselytizing that I’ve been delivering to friends ever since returning from a four-day trip there in March (“You must stay longer than just one night!”), and cut to the chase: if you want a deeper understanding of this complicated, fascinating city, you must call Robin Binckes, tour guide extraordinaire.
View
Website Terms and Conditions
and
Privacy Statement
of American Express Publishing Corporation. Users of this site agree to be bound by the terms
of the American Express Publishing Corporation Website Terms and Conditions. Copyright © 1997 - 2012 American Express Publishing Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
