Tours
I know that as an editor at a travel magazine I really should have more refined tastes. But secretly, I’ve always wanted to ride a Segway around a city. Whenever happy tourists have whizzed past me in D.C. or San Francisco, I’ve been a little jealous, but my travel companions are generally of the type who would rather walk barefoot on burning asphalt than be caught dead on the funny-looking two-wheeled contraptions.
This spring, visitors to Las Vegas can run away and join the Cirque (but not for peanuts). For $260, a select few will get a small-group pre-show backstage tour to either O (at the Bellagio) or The Beatles’ Love (at the Mirage). You’ll also receive an Insider Access VIP lanyard, special reserved seats for the show, and front-of-line privileges in the concession line and at the hotels’ nightclubs after the show.
On the fence about taking the tour? Here’s a Life.com photo gallery of the backstage scene at a Cirque du Soleil show—acrobats rehearsing a tricky move, clowns at rest, outlandish-costume repair—that gives you an inkling of how thrilling it could be to witness in person. (Get this: during each performance of The Beatles’ Love, the 68 performers go through 331 multi-piece costumes and 110 wigs! Kind of puts getting two kids ready for school into perspective.)
Period piece fanatics (myself included) are lining up for director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s critically acclaimed “Jane Eyre” movie, starring Mia Wasikowska as the indomitable Jane and Michael Fassbender as her changeable Mr. Rochester.
Though the brooding, Gothic romance will undoubtedly set hearts aflutter (The ball gowns! The carriages! The Fassbender!), the third member of this much-adapted love triangle will yet again take a back seat to drama onscreen: Northern England’s rolling, wind-swept moors—an indelible inspiration behind Charlotte Brontë’s original Jane Eyre, published in 1847, and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. If you’re looking to get a better view of the moors than the sweeping camera pan will give you, Wayfarers’s Brontë Trail is just the thing.
For many of us, the words, “tour bus” call to mind certain iconic images: sticky, screaming children, headache-inducing camera flashes, a colorfully dressed man on a unnecessary megaphone and, yes, even a fanny pack or two. Banish those images from memory—that was your grandmother’s tour bus.
Meet "The Ride" (above): a revolutionary, $1.3 million take on the classic tour bus, which was on display in Time Square, Manhattan this morning as a prelude to its maiden voyage in September. Suped up with 49 stadium seats, an IMAX theater-worth of audio equipment and 40 video screens, The Ride certainly has the wattage to separate itself from the competition. But it’s what’s going on off the bus that’s really grabbed our attention.
As both an active runner and someone who enjoys travel, I speak from experience when I say: it can be really hard to stay true to my routine when I'm away from home. (To date, I have only successfully maintained a semi-normal running schedule once while traveling. Don't judge me.) Between late nights, full days, and the desire to take in as much as possible in a short period of time, sometimes it's just not possible. (And fine, I admit: sometime I'd just rather sleep a little later than get up for a run. There, I said it.)
That being said, I was intrigued when a colleague passed along information about a different type of tour now being offered in the great City of Light: a running tour.
That's right. A running tour. This is some serious travel time management, and I love it. (Not to mention, anyone who knows me knows that when I travel, I'm very much a "do as the locals do" type. So what better way to tour a city than as a resident jogger would?)
A travel agency in Finland is offering guided tours of the remote Lapland region—but for teddy bears only. No people allowed. But that’s okay. After all, it’s the bears that are coming out of hibernation, not you. Does your stuffed bruin seem a bit moody lately? Maybe what that sleepy Smokey needs is a change of pace, to be off on his own, in a land of ice and snow and pine trees and pickled herring. And Teddy Tours Lapland is standing by to help your plush Grizzly get that new perspective on life.
