Long Flight Love: How To Stay Awake

by Chris Owen on

So maybe catching up on sleep during a long flight from New York to London is your idea of a big win in the air. Perhaps you would rather not hear the crying baby, see the questionable cuisine in coach or smell the odd aromas that might linger around the aircraft cabin. For you, there are plenty of tips, suggestions and methods for falling asleep on a long flight.

However, those of us who actually like to fly, can’t get enough time in the air and look forward to the flying experience, instead seek great ways to stay awake and enjoy every blissful minute of flight. Here are a few great tips for staying awake on a long flight.

Sleep as much as you can the night before- Banking a little sleep several days or a week before the long flight will help. “Recent sleep research indicates that ‘banking sleep’ beforehand can improve performance after subsequent sleep restriction or total deprivation,” says Zeo, a leading sleep management company in the U.S.

Do things that you like to do- Watch action movies with engaging plots or play favorite video games. Better yet, deny yourself video game playtime for a few days before flying, just so you will rabidly appreciate every single minute of play. Note: Mile High Club activities, while perhaps energizing, are not recommended.

Engage in scintillating conversation- There’s nothing like a good talk between new friends met on the plane. Plus, if that flight takes you to Ireland, you’ll be all set to grab a pint and “meet up with kinfolk and townsfolk alike to engage in lively conversation after a few rounds,” says NetPlaces.Consider flying a social occasion- Like boarding a cruise ship in the olden days, friends should come to see us off at the airport. Waving goodbye from the jetway perks up emotions and there is nothing wrong with a little jealousy on their part, or pride on our part. Once on the plane, make a point of being pleasant to your neighbors. Though some may follow the advice of Wanderfly‘s “Ways To Keep Your Neighbor From Talking Your Ear Off,” which promotes wearing headphones and pretending to be deaf or crazy, others will find that engaging in exciting conversation will keep sleep far away.

Get the names of friendly crew members- Sure, their main reason for living is to keep us safe in the air, but they can do it nicely. Write down their names and send an email or tweet off to their land-based bosses. Note: Do not use this tip when flying Skymark Airlines, the Japanese low-cost airline that, according to Asia Sentinel, specifically says passengers should not expect flight attendants to help with luggage, listen to complaints or even be minimally polite.

Just Say Yes to coffee and caffeinated drinks- Coffee and soda are a good start. Two to four cups of coffee a day get us 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine, which should be fine for most people, says the Mayo Clinic. Caffeine-rich products like Upshot are better with 80 milligrams, in addition to Red Fin Energy Shot‘s 100-milligram drink. 357 Magnum Energy Shot brings a hefty 125 milligrams, and 5150 Juice reigns supreme with 500 milligrams of caffeine. “While we don’t condone over-the-top caffeine use, we are big proponents of smart spending,” warns MainStreet, offering a look at 20 drinks with the highest caffeine content per ounce.

Not recommended: Going outside to stretch your legs or putting on a bunch of clothes that make you look fat, then doing belly slams or laughing incessantly, as suggested by WikiHow in “25 Tips On How To Stay Awake At A Sleepover.”




[Flickr photo by S.H. Photography]

How We Tolerate Travel: A Weekend Trip By The Numbers

by Grant Martin on

I’ve been working on a theory for a little while now about why some habitual travelers continue their journeys, and I’m starting to think that it’s got to do with the level of anguish involved in being on the road – or rather, our tolerance for it. Hipmunk uses a style of this data on their search engine called “agony,” which is a measure of suffering incurred by lower leg room, higher baggage fees and a variety of other variables that can make airline travel miserable. That level of duress can be applied to other experiences as well.

To apply this to experiential travel, it’s first useful to think about the influences presented to any person in motion. While external influences like class of service, traffic and weather affect every passenger, internal factors such as purpose (i.e., business, leisure, wedding or funeral), health and state of mind can vary by each person. Add up the external influences in parallel then multiply that number by each person’s perspective, say, their Coefficient of Travel Tolerance (COTT), and one can produce a relative comparison between each experience.

So someone with a low coefficient of travel tolerance (i.e., someone with a high tolerance for difficult travel) could handle a journey in a chicken bus just as well as someone with a high coefficient (i.e., someone who hates leaving home) could handle a flight in international first class.

Wanting to quantify part of this theory with actual data, I ran an experiment on my weekend trip home for a wedding this past June. The itinerary I concocted was complex but not difficult: leave work on Friday, take the train home to visit my parents in West Michigan that evening and then pick up the train again the next morning for a wedding in Ann Arbor. On Sunday I would take the last flight out of Detroit to return quickly back to my home in Chicago.

I broke down the journey into several categories and separated my time out in groups of five minutes. Travel, whether by car, bus, bicycle, airplane or train was one section, while leisure, work, wedding, eating, sleeping and “other” filled out the rest. A few sections overlapped; for example, the meal consumed on the Amtrak train between Chicago and Niles counted as both travel and eating time (category: meals, dinner, prepared).

Breaking down the data by category at the end of the trip, I found that 25.33% of my time was spent traveling, 28.97% was sleeping, and 9.26% was spent eating and working respectively. Of my time in transit, 44.1% was spent on trains, 23.8% was spent in a car and 18.5% was on foot, while 7.3% of my time was in an airplane, 4.7% was on bicycle and 1.6% was on a bus. Of those in a car, 36% was spent in my father’s Mazda MPV 6 while 55% was spent in my friend Aaron’s BMW 3.28xi. At the wedding, 8.9% of my time was spent in the bouncy castle.

For me, that 25.33% of time in transit for a weekend visiting family and friends was entirely worth my investment. I held a few meetings with colleagues, worked on the train, watched the news with my parents and told stories with Aaron and his wife.

Others might find that 25.33% too high to justify the trip. Whether it’s work or family commitments, high stress levels, reality television or budgetary, for many, a short weekend spent traveling the world is often not worth the destination.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are plenty of people who would be comfortable spending most of their weekend on the road. Mileage runners, people who book and fly itineraries solely for the valuable miles, often fly across the country or the ocean just to spend an hour in the airport and return home. Those travel ratios can be as high as 90%.

Now combine that time on the road with one’s Coefficient of Travel Tolerance. My journey worked well because I have a high tolerance and only needed to spend 25% of my time on the road. The mileage runner works because he’s got a really high tolerance despite being on the road almost exclusively. Our will to travel dictates how complex our itineraries become.

As it is right now, my tolerance is high because I languish in the art of travel and in the problem solving in getting from point A to B. I enjoy staring out the airplane window, people watching and drinking coffee from train station cafes. I’m happy on the road, and will continue to be for the near future. Ask me again after I have kids.

Moscow On The Hudson: The Pains Of Getting A Russian Visa

by David Farley on
Standing in front of the bus door at Sheretmetyevo airport in Moscow, I steepled my hands at a young woman and begged her to pay my bus fare. I had no rubles and was dangerously close to missing my connecting flight to Minsk. There was supposed to be a free Aeroflot shuttle but it never materialized. This city bus was my only chance of getting to the next terminal. Based on what cab drivers wanted to take me there – $50 – the terminal was in Siberia, or so it seemed.

It was my first time in Russia and it was not a good start. But it was hard enough just getting here. After an intriguing piece about the troubles of getting a Russian visa at the embassy in Washington, D.C., was recently published in the Washington Post travel section, it made me consider my own pursuit to get one. My experience wasn’t as bad as writer Ayako Doi’s. But for me, having gone through various visa applications a dozen or so times, this was by far the worst.

It was an ominous sign that seconds after hitting “purchase” on the Aeroflot website for a JFK-Moscow-Minsk flight, a big red warning appeared on my laptop screen informing me my credit card had been declined. When I called the bank, they said they just automatically decline relatively large purchases made to Russian companies.

When I called Aeroflot to rebook, Dmitri, the amiable representative on the other end of the line, informed me that I’d needed a transit visa. I was going to have to apply for and buy a $131 visa just to change planes in Moscow on my way to Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

I have to confess, this was partly my fault. When I did searches for how one flies from New York to Minsk, I could have flown Czech Airlines through Prague, Finnair through Helsinki, and Lufthansa through Frankfurt. (There were no options to go through Milan, by the way.) The cheapest option was to fly through Moscow. I wasn’t paying for the flight – a magazine that was sending me to Minsk to write a feature article, was. I figured they’d appreciate that I was going for the more affordable option. But really, flying Aeroflot, an airline my aviation-savvy friends warned me not to take, had benefits for me, too: it was part of Skyteam, which I’d accrued so many miles on I’d occasionally get special perks like upgrades and such.

I double-checked on the Russian embassy’s website, which said I did not need a transit visa. So I counter-checked on the website of the New York-based Russian consulate’s website. It said I did need a transit visa. I rang the embassy but it was impossible to get a human. I called the consulate and got the same result. The ghost of Kafka, I thought, is residing in Russia – or at least at their embassies abroad. I could have chanced it and gone without one. But fearing I’d show up at the passport control at the airport in Moscow and be turned back because my passport lacked a transit visa, I decided the safe thing to do would be to point myself to the Russian consulate on New York’s Upper East Side.

When I turned up at the consulate E. 91st St., it looked a teamsters meeting – or something one might really see in Russia. Thick-necked guys in flat caps and drab clothing scattered around the steps to the consulate door while pickled rotund men and ancient babushka-clad women, their bodies as stout as a beer can, mingled in line. The front door was postered in signs, all of which were written in Cyrillic. Everyone but me, it appeared, was a native Russian speaker. Well, everyone but me and the woman who got out of a black town car and walked up to the front of the door. When I started talking to her a little later on, I learned she was supermodel and famed tantrum thrower Naomi Campbell’s assistant. I scanned her from head to toe and then head again looking for cellphone-shaped bruises. There weren’t any – at least none that were visible.

But before I could ask about Ms. Campbell’s upcoming trip to Russia, there was rumbling behind the door of the consulate. The crowd of 75 or so people went silent for a second. As the door swung open, what had been a line became a mob of people. Everyone rushed the door. Holding pieces of paper above their heads and screaming in Russian, the cacophonous crowd was rollicking, demanding the man at the door let them in. He randomly pulled people out of the crowd – those yelling the loudest, it seemed – and I, the non-Russian, stood back on the sidewalk, watching it from afar and thinking I was never going to get in there.

It was really Moscow on the Hudson. Embassies and consulates do have a way of becoming microcosms of the countries they represent. The Americans, I’ve been told, like to sit visa applicants down and have a little chat with them about why they want to visit America. A lot of people leave the embassy with a bad taste in their mouths, I’ve been told. Both the Vietnamese and Belorussian consulates in New York are very Spartan. In the latter, there was just a skinny old man hen-pecking on an old typewriter. Of course, there are services you can pay for that will ease the headache. But that’s not always an easy solution. At first to get my visa for Myanmar, I paid $95 to CIBT. Only to find out – after they submitted my passport to the embassy in Washington, D.C. – that residing in New York was “out of [their] jurisdiction.” They refused to refund me the money. Even after I complained and complained.

One of the purposes of a country installing a visa requirement is to evaluate who is coming into their country. Another is totally political (see the fight between the USA and Brazil). And yet another is to make money. I’m not sure what Russia’s motivations for insisting Americans and citizens of other countries attain a visa (or even a transit visa) but it would probably inspire a lot more travel (and money spending) if they could somehow make it less disorganized.

A couple hours after the doors of the Russian consulate in New York finally opened, and after pushing and shoving and some elbowing, I got inside. It took approximately 97 seconds for me to hand over my application and passport.

I did barely make my flight to Minsk. On the way back I sucked it up and paid $20 for a cab to the next terminal. I had so much time that I was able to relax for a couple hours. I ate a salad at a restaurant – my first vegetables in a week and a half – and paid for it with my debit card. By the time I got back home to New York, my bank account had been cleaned out by some savvy Russian hacker.

A week after returning from the trip, I submitted my expenses to the magazine. My editor emailed the next day to say that, after doing some research, I didn’t, after all, need a transit visa.

Well, at least next time I have to go to Russia, which I hope won’t be when I have a lot of money in my bank to siphon out (likely I won’t; I’m a travel writer), I’ll now know what to expect.

What’s your worst visa-applying experience?

The Soo Locks Of Sault Ste. Marie

by Kraig Becker on

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is an often overlooked travel destination. Sandwiched between three of the Great Lakes, the U.P. is a remote and rugged wilderness that features hundreds of miles of trail, incredibly dense forests and more solitude than anyone could ever ask for. Outdoor enthusiasts will love the options for hiking, camping and backpacking, while other visitors will enjoy the scenic beauty and laid back lifestyle.

That vast expanse of wilderness is occasionally broken up by quaint and inviting Midwestern towns populated by friendly and accommodating people. The largest of those towns is Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced Soo-Saint-Marie), which is located on the southern banks of the St. Mary’s River on the eastern side of the Peninsula, just a stone’s throw away from Canada.

You wouldn’t know it while passing through the sleepy little town but Sault Ste. Marie (Pop. 15,000) is home to the busiest lock system in the entire world. Completed in 1855, the Soo Locks connect Lake Superior and Lake Huron, allowing ships to safely traverse the 21-foot drop that separates those two bodies of water. Each year more than 10,000 vessels pass through the locks, despite the fact that they are closed between January and March, and in 2008 alone, the locks saw more than 80 million tons of cargo come and go.The Great Lakes have served as shipping lanes for centuries and the Soo Locks are vitally important in keeping that traffic flowing today. As such, most of the ships that pass through Sault Ste. Marie are freighters, barges and tugboats. Some of those vessels are capable of steaming straight out of the Lakes and directly into the ocean itself, delivering as much as 72,000 tons of cargo to the rest of the world. It is not unusual for the locks to see the occasional tall sailing ships, cruise lines or even military vessels too.

During the summer travel months the Soo Locks are amongst the most popular tourist destinations in all of Michigan. Visitors actually come from around the world to take in the sights of a large ocean-going vessel passing through Sault Ste. Marie. The transfer process between the two lakes is a fascinating one and watching the locks in operation is a unique experience. That process can be observed from a lovely park that sits alongside the locks, which is the perfect place for spotting the large ships as they approach. Better yet, visitors can actually pass through the Soo Locks themselves by booking a local boat tour.

The Soo Locks Visitor Center is also a great place to learn more about the locks while visiting Sault Ste. Marie. The center provides a contextual history of how and why these modern wonders were built while also offering a large observation deck for watching the ships “lock through.”

When you’re finished enjoying the locks, be sure to spend a little time exploring Sault Ste. Marie as well. As Michigan’s oldest city, it has plenty of unique aspects to discover. And whatever you do, don’t leave town without trying the fudge!

Fitness A Popular Travel Option Says Survey, Cruise Lines

by Chris Owen on

Fitness centers have been a standard amenity at hotels, resorts and on cruise ships for quite some time. Used or not, those facilities boast some of the latest equipment along with programs designed to maintain physical fitness on the road. Results of a new survey suggest a growing variety of reasons to work out while traveling, something cruise lines know all too well.

“Among those that exercise on vacation, 31% say their primary motivation is to maintain their fitness regimen,” says Travel Daily News reporting results of a TripAdvisor survey of 1,400 travelers. “A further 28% do so in order to avoid gaining weight, while the third most popular reason for exercising on holiday is to capitalize on having more free time to work out (14%).”

That’s no news to cruise lines that remain focused on adding healthy travel and fitness options. In an ongoing effort to move away from endless buffets where lifting a fork might be the only exercise their passengers engage in, things are changing. It’s those last two reasons, “avoiding weight gain” and “using free time,” that have cruise lines scrambling to add the latest features to ships.Carnival Breeze, the latest ship from Carnival Cruise Lines, features a SportSquare Sky Fitness Center with two ropes courses, a multi-purpose sports court for basketball, volleyball and soccer, a two-level mini-golf course, in addition to all the latest fitness equipment.

Passengers on Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas can jog their morning mile against 360-degree ocean views from the ship’s Sport Deck running track. The line’s fleet-wide Vitality at Sea Spa and Fitness neighborhood supports a healthy lifestyle, combining the latest in aesthetic skin treatments, traditional spa services and workout programs. Last year, Royal Caribbean invited guests to participate in the line’s first “Royal 5K St Maarten run,” now an annual event.

Under construction now for a June 2013 debut, Princess Cruises latest ship, Royal Princess will have features that directly reflect an increased interest in fitness by cruise passengers.

“Many of our passengers are very active on vacation,” said Jan Swartz, executive vice president for Princess Cruises. “These new facilities will offer them state-of-the-art equipment and cutting-edge classes to keep up – or even step up – their fitness routines at sea.”

To make that happen, Princess Cruises is adding a private aerobics studio that will host a selection of fitness classes, including TRX Suspension Training, MyRide indoor cycling, a Body Sculpt Boot Camp and Chi Ball Yoga.

Like other lines, Princess is also adding a top-deck sports court called Princess Sports Central, offering a collection of court games, lawn activities (they will have grass growing there), basketball, tennis, volleyball, badminton and a batting cage. Golfers will find a driving range facility, and a simulated laser shooting range offers a new onboard activity.

“While most Americans will spend at least some of their vacation relaxing, many now balance their fun with fitness, as TripAdvisor’s survey shows that a significant number of travelers also prioritize personal health on their trips,” said Brooke Ferencsik, director of communications at TripAdvisor.

Responding to the call, fitness experts are focusing on short, easy workouts designed with the traveler in mind, with or without fitness facilities available like this TRX suspension trainer that fits in a suitcase and provides a total-body workout:




[Photo: Princess Cruises]