Travel + Leisure’s “100 Greatest Trips” ($20) offers offbeat itineraries in otherwise familiar places. In New York City, go shopping in Harlem at Atmos, the Japanese sneaker store, and N, a designer emporium. In Mexico, follow the tequila trail in Jalisco, where the agave plant used to make the drink is grown. And in London, take the tube to the London Bridge stop and eat your way around Borough Market, where you can grab a venison burger at Westcountry Venison and a house ale at Brew Wharf.
In Belgium, go shopping for vintage diamonds at Adelin or watch the jewel cutters and setters at Diamondland. Tour Versailles by bicycle, or take an unusual road trip through the Midwest to see great architecture, like the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion in Ohio; the Des Moines Public Library in Iowa, described as “a low-slung building clad in a perforated-copper skin,” and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s soaring white Santiago Calatrava addition.
“The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World” by Edward Hasbrouck (Avalon Travel, $22), an updated fourth edition, is described by the author in his preface as a “how-to handbook of advice and tips for independent, on-your-own travel ... especially suitable for anyone planning - or dreaming about - the big trip: ‘gap year,’ ‘wander year’ or ‘trip of a lifetime’ around the world.”
The book offers information on everything from budgeting to luggage to health issues to air travel. It can even help you make the decision to get up and go, arguing that world travel will enhance your career, be good for your children and cost less than you might think.
Lonely Planet’s “Bluelist: The Best in Travel 2008” ($23) is a planner, an inspiration and ultimately, a conversation, since fans can visit http://www.lonelyplanet.com/bluelist to submit their own lists of must-see places. The book includes a section on events around the world by month, like the mimosa festival in January in Montenegro and the snow rodeo in Essex, Mont., in March. A
“Golist” of places includes profiles of Mumbai, India; Chengdu, China; Cordoba, Argentina, and in the U.S., Miami, Colorado and Glacier National Park.
A special chapter on “Travel Islam” explores cultures and countries of the Muslim world, from camel-racing in the United Arab Emirates, to the 14th-century Alhambra in Spain, to Dahab, a diving and windsurfing town on the Red Sea in Egypt. “Bluelist” also offers a list of “bests” - from “best-value destinations” like Nicaragua and Laos to “best brews” - beer headquarters from Pottsville, Pa. (Yuengling) to the Mussel Inn, New Zealand’s “remotest boutique microbrewery.”
World’s Largest Menorah
NEW YORK — What organizers say is the world’s largest menorah will be lit every night during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, beginning Dec. 4, at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, near Central Park.
The menorah, sponsored by the Lubavitch Youth Organization, stands 32 feet tall. The lighting of the gigantic candelabra will take place at 5:30 p.m. each night through Dec. 11, except for the Friday-Saturday Sabbath observance, when the lightings will take place at 3:40 p.m. on (Friday) Dec. 7 and 8:30 p.m. on (Saturday) Dec. 8.
The menorah is lit with oil lamps protected from the wind by specially designed glass chimneys. A cherry-picker crane provided by the Con Edison electric utility will lift the lamplighters up to kindle the flames.
If you’re elsewhere during the holiday and you’d like to take part in a Hanukkah celebration, check out http://www.chabad.org/hanukkahevents, which lists menorah-lightings in 486 cities in 27 countries. The holiday events, sponsored by Chabad-Lubavitch, a Jewish outreach organization, are open to the public.
Rental Car Woes
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. (AP) — Customer satisfaction with airport car rentals has declined, according to an annual survey by J.D. Power and Associates.
Now in its 12th yea return process,
reservation process and shuttle bus or van.
The survey uses a 1,000-point scale, and found that overall satisfaction dropped from 767 points in 2006 to 750 points in 2007.
Jim Gaz, senior director of travel and entertainment at J.D. Power, said in a statement that “the decline in customer satisfaction with rental cars is indicative of a general decline in performance throughout the travel industry in 2007 from airports to airlines to hotels.”
He noted that in addition to rising fuel prices and decreased availability of new rental vehicles, “customer satisfaction may also be influenced by the snowball effect from frustrations consumers are facing with the entire travel experience.”
The survey brought good news for one rental car company, however: Enterprise ranked highest in customer satisfaction among rental car companies for a fourth consecutive year, followed by Hertz and National.
The study also found that the waiting time for picking up rental cars - an average of 22 minutes - is longer than other parts of the travel experience, including getting a boarding pass and checking baggage, which air travelers surveyed by J.D. Power have reported at 13 minutes on average; and going through airport security, reported at an average 15 minutes.
But J.D. Power also noted that new technology could improve satisfaction in the future, as rental companies institute new online booking tools, electronic toll collection services, hourly rental rates, GPS navigation systems and other automated conveniences.
The 2007 Rental Car Satisfaction Study is based on 5,859 evaluations from business and leisure travelers who rented a vehicle at an airport location between September 2006 and September 2007. Details at http://www.JDPower.com.
New Michelin Guides
TOKYO (AP) — Michelin has come out with its very first guides to fine dining in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Tokyo, but if you’re an aficionado of haute cuisine as defined by Michelin, you’ll be getting on the next plane to Japan.
Michelin’s inspectors are notoriously stingy with their praise, but eight restaurants in Tokyo, including two sushi eateries, got three stars. In contrast, Michelin anointed just one Vegas restaurant -- Joel Robuchon’s at the MGM Grand - worthy of the highest three-star rating, while no restaurant in Los Angeles earned more than two.
All in all, Michelin awarded a total of 191 stars to 150 restaurants in Tokyo — more stars than in any other city in the world, including Paris. Paris has a total of 65 stars for all of its restaurants, but can still claim to have the most three-star or top-rated restaurants, with 10.
Michelin also crowned 82-year-old Jiro Ono of Sukiyabashi Jiro sushi restaurant in central Tokyo as the world’s oldest three-star chef.
“Tokyo is a shining star in the world of cuisine,” Michelin Guides Director Jean-Luc Naret said at a news conference. He declared Tokyo “the world leader in gourmet dining.”
Robuchon, who has restaurants all over the world, received his first three-star Michelin rating in 1981 in Paris.
Three Las Vegas restaurants earned two stars — Alex, Guy Savoy and Picasso -- and 12 restaurants earned one star.
In Los Angeles, two stars were awarded to three restaurants: Wolfgang Puck’s Spago and the Japanese restaurant Urasawa, both in Beverly Hills, and Melisse in Santa Monica. Fifteen restaurants in Los Angeles were awarded one Michelin star, including Providence, Sona, Water Grill, Ortolan, Patina, Ritz-Carlton Huntington Dining Room, Mori Sushi, La Botte and Joe’s.
According to the guide, three stars denotes “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey,” and a two-star restaurant serves “excellent cuisine, worth a detour.” But just being listed in the guide, even with no stars, is considered an honor.
Michelin started as a tire company, and its first guide, published in 1900, was created to give drivers information about where to service cars and find accommodations and food. The company branched out from its European base in 2005 with a guide to New York City, followed by one for San Francisco.
The new Tokyo guide was Michelin’s first outside Europe and the United States.
Also this fall, ViaMichelin, a subsidiary of the Michelin group, launched a portable GPS navigation system, the X-970, integrated with information on thousands of attractions from Michelin’s Green Guides to the U.S. and Canada. You can also send content from ViaMichelin.com to the X-970 unit.
L.A.’s ‘Noir’ Tours
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bus tours that drive past movie stars’ homes are a standard tourist attraction in Los Angeles, but if a drive-by glimpse of a gated mansion isn’t your thing, here are a couple of other tour options in L.A. - one about art, and one about literature.
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is offering free docent-guided tours of the artwork in the city’s Metro Rail system. The unusual tours will teach you about the city’s history, its public transportation system and the diverse artwork decorating public spaces in 62 stations.
The tours are offered the first Saturday and Sunday of each month, and each roundtrip two-hour tour visits different stations. No reservations are required. For the first Saturday tours, meet promptly at 10 a.m. at the street level entrance to the Hollywood/Highland Station on Hollywood Boulevard. For the first Sunday tours, meet promptly at 10 a.m. at the information booth inside the entrance to Union Station at 900 Alameda St. in downtown Los Angeles. For details or a free printed Metro Art Guide, visit http://www.metro.net/art or call 213-922-2738.
For fans of noir crime-writing, the Esotouric company is offering a series of tours showcasing various authors whose works were set in Los Angeles. The bad news is, two tours hosted by writer James Ellroy himself, on Dec. 22 and 29, have sold out, but the series also includes tours focusing on two other writers’ works.
On Dec. 15, a tour called “The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare” will explore the settings for Cain’s best-known works, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity.” On Dec. 8, a tour called “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In A Lonely Place” looks at Chandler’s favorite haunts in Hollywood and downtown L.A., including locations from books and films and places where the young writer lived and worked. Details at http://www.esotouric.com. Both tours are $55.
Field & Stream ‘Best’
NEW YORK (AP) — Get warm, fish rich, travel cheap.
That’s the advice from Field & Stream magazine, which names 10 destinations where you can go fishing this winter and escape the cold without busting your budget.
Seven of the 10 destinations offer average January high temperatures of 60 degrees or above, with some well into the 80s, the magazine said. The three spots with lower temperatures - Bull Shoals State Park, in Arkansas; San Juan River, in New Mexico; and Lake Amistad, Texas - are worth the chill, according to the magazine, because of the quality of winter fishing.
Some of the destinations, like north-central Florida’s Ocala National Forest, even offer free camping, the magazine said. Grand Isle, La., also has camping, for $12, while Everglades National Park offers camping for a $2 fee - or you can splurge for an $85-a-night room at a lodge like the Ivey House in Everglades City.
Also recommended by the magazine are fishing expeditions in Aransas Pass, Texas (with camping at nearby Mustang Island State Park); and Castaic Lake and Lake Casitas, in California.
Two sites outside the U.S. on the magazine’s list are Long Island in the Bahamas and East Cape Baja, Mexico.
Details at http://www.FieldandStream.com.
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New resorts, air service, cruise news in Dominican Republic
NEW YORK (AP) — JetBlue will offer nonstop service from Kennedy International Airport in New York to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic beginning Jan. 10, and two new luxury resorts are also under construction on the Caribbean island.
The Ritz-Carlton plans to build a 220-room luxury property, opening in 2010, in the Cap Cana community near Punta Cana, while the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts will build its first property at Casa de Campo, to open in the winter of 2009. The Caribbean’s first Maxim Bungalows are scheduled to open in Cofresi Beach in January, with units ranging in size from studios to two-bedroom suites. Additional Maxim Bungalows are scheduled to open in Juan Dolio in late spring of next year.
Santo Domingo’s Sans Souci Port is reopening, with Royal Caribbean’s Legend of the Seas inaugurating the renovated port on Dec. 16. The port will eventually include four separate ship terminals with docking areas; a shopping mall and duty-free shopping area; a beach club; two 900-room hotels and convention center; and a luxury condominium development. The project is scheduled to be completed by 2010.
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Guggenheim staying gray after commissioners nix yellow
NEW YORK (AP) — City preservation officials turned down a proposal to paint the exterior of the Guggenheim Museum in the yellowish hue originally selected by its designer, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Since 1992, the landmark museum on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue has been light gray, and it will remain that way when an ongoing renovation is completed next year, thanks to a 7-2 vote by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Officials at the museum had no intention of changing the color, but at least two groups had lobbied for a return to the color that was on its walls between its opening in 1959 and the first of several facelifts four years later. Since 1963, the museum has been various shades of off-white.
Two commissioners, Pablo Vengoechea and Stephen Byrns, opposed the museum’s plan to keep the status quo, saying they thought Wright would have preferred a warmer color.
Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, agreed that Wright’s palette may have been different but said that gray is the color that has been most closely associated with the building over the decades and any big change now might seem radical.
The Guggenheim is undergoing extensive renovations to repair cracks in the building’s structure. The work is expected to be completed by spring 2008.
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China’s famed eastern resort city of Hangzhou orders cull of rampaging wild pigs
BEIJING (AP) — The eastern Chinese resort city of Hangzhou has ordered a cull of wild pigs blamed for scaring tourists and invading residential areas, official media here reported.
Residents say they have noticed a marked increase in pig activity around the city’s protected West Lake tourism district in recent years, possibly as a result of hunting and habitat loss in other areas, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Hunting teams have been recruited on the city’s outskirts and police authorized to gun down pigs, which are most active at night, the report said.
Wild pig sightings in the downtown are “getting more common and are no longer treated as news,” Xinhua said, citing a resident of the city just west of Shanghai.
Hangzhou, a former imperial capital famed for its scenery, has long been a top domestic tourism draw and is now attracting growing numbers of foreign visitors.
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Canadians expected to help heat up Arizona’s economy
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — For those hoping that Arizona’s suddenly sputtering economy could stay as warm as its seemingly endless summer, help is on the way from colder climes.
Like Canada.
Tourism officials expect to see a continued growing influx of Canadian visitors during the waning weeks of autumn and across the winter, possibly stronger than ever because their money is worth more this year than the U.S. dollar for the first time in the past 30 years.
The Canadian dollar was trading at $1.01 at one point in late November, or 63 percent more than the all-time low 61.79 cents it was valued at in January 2002.
“We expect more Canadians this year,” said Bob Ingram, executive director of the Yuma Visitors Bureau. “We are optimistic about it.”
Metropolitan Yuma’s population of 180,000 has swelled the past few winters to about 300,000, with snowbirds flocking in from across the West Coast and from the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.
Last year, 496,300 Canadians spent time in Arizona, up 17.4 percent from 423,000 in 2005, and nearly double the 255,000 Canadians who visited the state in 2002.
Mexico and Canada continue to provide the most visitors to Arizona, followed by Britain, Germany, other European countries and Japan.
Many Europeans come to experience the Arizona summer, while viewing the Grand Canyon is the top priority for a large number of Japanese.
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