Category Archives: Tips & Resources

Download a classic short story every week

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

From The Detourist tweets, some resources

A frequently updated list of the most important #art #fairs in the world.

For those who don’t like gambling with Priceline: the new Tingo hotel booker watches for rate reductions after you book.

Social media apps from The Tech-Savvy Traveler.

An insider’s guide to Los Angeles’ beaches.

The Cultural Traveler is a guide to cultural & heritage tourism that exists in print.

Eater is getting to be an essential stop whether on the road or at home.

Auto Europe offers car rental tips.

Awesome contemporary art, quirky anthropological gems, & one of New England’s overlooked houses: the 50 Coolest Museums.

With the Bump Pay app, you can pay & be paid instantly when divvying up a check (iPhone only).

Like Starbucks’ phone app? Now use PayPal’s free new Tabbedout app (iPhone/Android) to view & pay your bar/food tab.

Resource: Links to travel-oriented websites

Although it’s a bit UK-heavy, The 50 Best Travel Websites by Rhiannon Batten will help you “[b]ag the prime seat on your flight, find a local who’ll cook you dinner, save cash on car hire…” and generally make life on the road easier.

See, also: 50 Travel Sites You’ve Probably Never Heard Of by Brooke Dowd.




Resource: “Best of the Road” focuses on small towns and back roads of America

Rand McNally and USA TODAY‘s “Best of the Road” invites travelers to review stops on America’s highways and byways, especially  small towns and points of interest in and between. The site includes photos and reviews, regional and themed road trips, and blogs with travel tips and news, U.S. destinations, and stories from the road.

Visitors to the site are introduced to nominees for Best Small Towns in America, and get to vote on Most Beautiful, Most Patriotic, Friendliest, Most Fun, and Best Small Town for Food. Blogs, photos, reviews and videos help in planning road trips to destinations that catch one’s fancy.

Here, from the Best of the Road website, is how to get on board:

  • READ reviews and blogs for travel tips, popular places, local insight, and traveler favorites.
  • WRITE about your favorite towns and places and UPLOAD photos from your travels
  • VOTE for your favorite towns to become Road Rally stops in one of the five categories and for your favorite places to be featured on Best of the Road
  • FOLLOW the annual Road Rally on our blog, facebook, and twitter
  • GET THE FREE APP on your iPhone to view road trips, videos and reviews from wherever you are.
  • ENTER to participate as a road rally team. Keep an eye on our blog for details.
  • EMBARK on scenic, regional, and themed Road Trips
  • SHARE your experiences on Best of the Road and social media to grow the community

An essay contest called “America the Beautiful” invites kids 7-12 to write about a place in the U.S. that inspires them. Prizes include a $10,000 scholarship, a NOOK Tablet, and a trip to Washington D.C.

Website: Best of the Road

Happy Hour: Haute cuisine, faible budget

When in a new town, one of the surest ways to eat well without breaking the bank is to dine at happy hour. Although typically happy “hour” falls between 4 pm and 7 pm, competition and a troubled economy have inspired a surprising number of eateries, including some of the best, to expand the discounts “until 10 pm,” “until closing,” or even “all day.”  A little searching for “happy hour” on the internet will usually turn up plenty of choices.

Offerings vary, though, and it often pays to call ahead to double check hours and menus (some happy hours are every day, some Sunday-Thursday, a few one or two days a week). Speaking generally, happy hour choices are limited: the bar Happy Hourmenu and selections from the list of dinner appetizers, plus a couple of wines and well drinks  — expect to pay half the regular prices or a little more, although occasionally you will run across a place discounting its entire menu, usually at prices similar to the difference between lunch and dinner for the same item.  Many locales offer breaks only on alcohol, another reason to call ahead. And, believe it not, there are still a few spots with free food during happy hour, an amenity that was commonplace once upon a time ( see, Free Happy Hour Food in LA, Denver and the Bay Area; Splash Ultra Lounge and Burger Bar and Sissy K’s in Boston; free tapas at Il Moro in West Los Angeles, as long as you order a drink — call ahead: these things change).

Typical sources for happy hour recommendations include foodie social media sites (Urbanspoon; Yelp!); urban guides (Where magazine; Citysearch; Metromix); local periodicals (New York magazine; LA Weekly; Miami New Times; TimeOut);  and specialized portals (GoTime; Daily Happy Hours; Happy-Hour.com; and for international links HappyHour.net).

GoTime (“37,889 happy hours nationwide … and counting”) offers a handy mobile app that uses a smartphone’s gps to find the nearest restaurants and bars currently hosting happy hours.

The Everywhereist: The Detourist’s favorite travel blog

“Yes,” says Geraldine DeRuiter about The Everywhereist,  “it’s a travel blog.” But that hardly does it justice. Geraldine DeRuiter writes The Everywhereist DeRuiter is a clever, insightful and opinionated writer, and whether she is carrying on about obnoxious airplane passengers, the Seattle Gum Wall and the Most. Complicated. Shower. Ever. or splurging at Rome’s Hotel Raphael, overdosing on New York cupcakes (a descent into madness) and encountering L.A.’s Coolest Mailman, she is never less than entertaining. Bonus: guest bloggers.

The site: The Everywhereist

quote unquote

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Packing: Tips on making travel easier, safer, and more stress-free

If you’re tired of being mistaken for the Joads when you travel, you already suspect that traveling lighter would be traveling better. And yet, as this exhaustive site demonstrates, there’s a lot more to the art and science of traveling light than jamming as much as possible into one humungous handbag.

OneBag.com, a frequently updated reference guide to “going pretty much anywhere, for an indefinite length of time, with no more than a single carry-on-sized bag,” has a wealth of practical, field-tested advice for over-burdened travelers.

As author Doug Dyment writes, of  “all the travel skills you might acquire, learning to travel light is the one most likely to result in enjoyable, productive, stress-free travel experiences.” Less luggage means fewer opportunities theft, damage,  mis-routing or How NOT to pack your luggagefinding out the hard way that you have been the unsuspecting mule for drugs or contraband goods.

Carrying only one bag can be a real money-saver, too. You can use public transit more easily, cut back on tithing cabbies, bellhops and baggage handlers, and avoid the increasingly exorbitant airline luggage fees.

And with lighter traveling comes more flexibility:

Less stuff means greater mobility, which gives you more travel options. With no checked luggage to limit your choices, you can more easily deal with delayed transportation and missed connections (you can even switch to earlier flights when space is available). You needn’t arrive at airports as early, and you will be among the first to leave, while others wait for baggage delivery and long inspection queues. You can board trains, trams, and coaches with alacrity. You won’t feel compelled to take the first hotel room offered: you can comfortably walk down the street should the ambiance be unsuitable or the price unreasonable. You can sell your airplane seat (by volunteering to be “bumped”) on full flights. You can even travel as an air courier.

Among many useful pages on OneBag.com highlights include Using A Packing List,  a detailed analysis of every individual item on Dyment’s personal packing list, a checklist of things to take care of prior to leaving on a trip, contact information for suppliers of harder-to-find items he mentions, a short list of recommended books on related topics,  links to some carefully-chosen sites that OneBag enthusiasts are likely to find interesting, Dyment’s own compilation of travel industry links to airlines, hotels  and automobile rentals, plus the best metasearch engines, handy lists of country/airport/airline codes, and tools for checking real-time flight status, airport delay conditions, and aircraft seating arrangements.

Dyment keeps track of content changes here, and site updates can be followed also via Facebook, Twitter or RSS feed.

For travelers, OneBag.com may be the single most useful destination on the internet.

Site: OneBag.com

See, also: Packing Light Without Being A Minimalist

Hospitality Industry: “Let’s talk about hotels”

“Let’s talk about hotels” is the cut line for the blog where Guillaume Thevenot reports on topics associated with hotels, b&bs, and travel-related businesses. GuillaumeThevenot of Hotel BlogsHotel Blogs provides links to travel professionals, services and websites, plus tips on social media marketing for the hospitality industry. A regular feature is Q&As with CEOs of companies like Hotel Tonight, a company that offers same-day hotel bookings on iPhones, online marketing consultant for hotels e-conceptory, and menumodo, a hosted content management tool for creating, updating and distributing restaurant menus.

Site: Hotel Blogs

Airfares: You’ve got to start somewhere

Getting the best fares usually means visiting several often-overlapping sites, including those of the airlines servicing the route you’re researching, to see who is reporting the lowest fares. As a place to begin, The Detourist usually starts its searches with Airfarewatchdog, an automated fare-comparison site that offers easy access to information about specific routes, destinations and sales.

One section, Top 50 Fares, tracks special, usually time-sensitive deals. This morning, for example, the top offers range from $18 round trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (LAX-LAS) on Spirit, the flying bus line (actually, this is an unfair comparison, since buses are roomier, now usually provide wireless access, and have no hidden charges) to $158 r/t flight between Baltimore and Austin (BWI-AUS) on Continental, American, Delta and United. As always, watch for surprise fees.

Airfarewatchdog, part of the company that owns BookingBuddy, OneTime, SmarterTravel and the flash-sale travel site Sniqueaway, was created by George Hobica, a travel journalist specializing in consumer issues.

Site: Airfarewatchdog.com

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