Snowboarding through downtown Montreal isn’t exactly a common sight, but judging from the video below maybe it should be. This wonderful short film follows snowboarder Seb Toots as he starts at the top of Mt. Royal, a park located not far from the heart of the city, and glides down its slopes right onto the streets below. Along the way he shreds fresh powder, rides handrails and jumps a variety of obstacles. I don’t exactly expect urban snowboarding to become a full-fledged sport, but it sure looks like fun.
As the year comes to a close, here’s a look back on how the world rang in 2012. From Sydney to Cape Town, these impressive fireworks displays highlight some of the most famous cities and landmarks throughout the world – whether that be the London Eye or the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Tonight’s celebrations are sure to be just as impressive, so circle back to Gadling tomorrow for some photos from the start of 2013.
New Year’s Eve brings ball-dropping fun to thousands in New York’s Times Square and around the world via television and streaming video. New Year’s Day has its share of events too and marks the official end of 2012’s holiday season while opening the door to a unique chance to change ourselves, if only a little bit.
A brand new year is ahead of us. So, what will we do with it? Keep on doing what we have been doing? Start something new?
New Year’s resolutions commonly include strong initial efforts to live a healthier lifestyle by eating better and exercising more. It’s a time when household budgets are reviewed, long and short-term financial goals get a look and when travelers gaze ahead to what’s scheduled for 2013 and beyond.
No plans right now? A great way to help roll in the new year is by trying new and different things. That does not have to mean skydiving for the first time, a solo kayak adventure that pits us against nature or climbing a mountain. Something new and different, outside of our comfort zone, can be as close as a computer or just outside our back door.
Take a ride on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner
An easy way to get this whole “trying something different” ball rolling is by checking in with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner Dream Pass. Visiting the Dream Pass website, we first come to a 360-degree interactive experience on the flight deck. Continuing on to Boeing’s New Airplane website, we see the latest new airplane products and other innovations from Boeing.
Right about here would be a time to mention any one of a hundred new travel-related apps for our smartphones. Although there are plenty of them, that’s not our focus here. Not right now.
Walk outside
We can get very wrapped up in activities that require us to be inside without trying. Work, school, meetings, shopping, dining and other things we do are inside things. Walking outside, we might go in a different way to lunch, take a few minutes to consider the place we are at the moment and, if we really want to get into it, talk to a stranger. Go crazy; leave home with no phone or communication device, on purpose.What’s Important
It’s a recurring theme that comes out eventually whenever someone talks about travel. It may take a while to sort through the places we traveled to, highlighting iconic monuments, destinations and world-famous landmarks. But eventually, some of our most cherished travel memories come from interaction with people we meet along the way.
If you ask a native Torontonian how things are going in their town, you might receive an eye-roll and a laugh in response – the Canadian equivalent of a New Yorker’s “Oy, vey.” Things in Toronto are turbulent these days, to say the least.
For one thing, nobody is sure who the mayor will be in 2013, given the conviction of Mayor Rob Ford. Toronto neighborhoods are mulling whether they want to allow casino gambling. And, big chunks are falling off the Gardiner Expressway, the municipal freeway that runs parallel to Lake Ontario on Toronto’s eastern shore, leading to renewed calls to tear it down.
The sense of change goes beyond just politics and infrastructure. All over Toronto, neighborhood borders, once defined by ethnicity and income, are blurring. Long-time immigrants have decamped for the suburbs, as new residents and merchants with different backgrounds take advantage of location and lower rents.
These things might not be readily apparent to casual visitors. For them, Toronto has always been laid out in a sprawling “I.” Their well-trod path has begun just north of the lake on Front Street, stretching from the Rogers Centre (or Sky Dome, as many here still call it) and the CN Tower to the west, and to the east across Union Station to the Air Canada Centre and St. Lawrence Market.
Heading North, many visitors have plied Yonge Street, the clogged commercial district, or University, which is home to the Art Gallery of Ontario. The northern boundary, for many visitors, is Bloor, border on the tony Yorkville district, where upscale stores like Holt Renfrew and outlets of international brands are found.
But the Toronto neighborhoods where most savvy residents reside lie outside the I, in eastern and western stretches of streets like Queen, Dundas and College. And these are where the biggest changes are taking place.
“There’s a lot of hidden neighborhoods that you don’t see in Toronto on first visit, but you’ll see it if you come a few times and hang out a while,” says Shawn Micallef, the author of “Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto” and a senior editor and co-owner of the magazine Spacing.
%Gallery-174398%Micallef says there are two types in neighborhoods in Toronto – your own, and the places considered to be “destination neighborhoods.” He explains, “Your neighborhood is self contained and has everything you need.” Locals can go to their nearby stretch of shops and restaurants to eat and grab a coffee. But if they hear about new places, “they’ll travel there,” he says.
The home base versus destination identifier is changing faster than many Torontonians find to be comfortable. All over the city, neighborhoods that were settled for decades by a single group are now seeing new establishments owned by a younger, hipper crowd, some launched by locals, others by people from out of town.
One example is Leslieville, set about two miles east from downtown Toronto, with its main commercial district running along Queen Street East.
There’s been a community in place since the 1850s, and it got its name from George Leslie, who owned the Toronto Nurseries. Many of the people who lived in the solidly middle class neighborhood worked as gardeners, or in nearby brick factories. But it was always overshadowed by a much trendier (and some might say prettier) area nearby called The Beach, named for its parks along the lake.
“It was a nice, stable, unpresuming neighborhood between downtown and the Beach. Everybody talked about The Beach, the Beach, the Beach,” Micallef said.
The big change came in 2000, when a local tannery caught fire, burning for days and showering the neighborhood with ash. After the clean up, with industry gone, Leslieville began to gentrify. “I remember walking around in 2005, and there wasn’t a place to get a proper coffee. There were fast joint bars and the coffee places were coffee shops,” he says.
Now, old-fashioned corner stores with Drink Canada Dry signs are the exception. Leslieville, called “Toronto’s Brooklyn,” has become a jumble of espresso bars, bakeries, bike stores, cheese shops, retail and restaurants like Queen Margherita Pizza, which opened three years ago with a menu featuring wood-oven fired pizza.
Queen Margherita Pizza is on the farthest east end of Leslieville, overlooking one of Toronto’s car barns, home to the streetcars that ply the city. Drive just a little farther east on Queen, however, and the neighborhood fringes on Little India, another Toronto spot on the edge of change.
There are still plenty of merchants and eateries with Indian and Pakistani names and wares on Gerrard Street, the area’s main drag a few blocks away. In the summer, hundreds of diners jam into the outdoor tent at Lahore Tikka House, savoring butter chicken, spicy cauliflower and fresh made naan. Shops across the street sell kulfi, the frozen concoction that cools the tongue after a spicy meal.
But within eye sight of Lahore Tikka sits the sales office for a new condo development.
Its owners aren’t calling the neighborhood Little India. They’ve given it a new name: East Village Leslieville. And the development looks as cutting edge as anything found across the city, or in other parts of the world.
The arrival of new residents comes as many of the Indian and Pakistani families who lived in Little India have moved to the suburbs, leaving behind affordable, solid housing that appeals to the families that are starting to appear in new groceries and coffee shops.
Even the newcomers aren’t sitting still. The owners of Queen Margherita Pizza are expanding into another one of Toronto’s changing neighborhoods.
In a few months, they’ll be open on Dundas Street West, on the edge of Little Portugal, where the pattern of new espresso bars, moms with strollers, and young residents on bikes amid an old style enclave is repeating itself, once more, leading to a sense that it will be the next spot to emerge in the ever changing city.
Tom Stuker took the term “frequent flyer” to new heights this year, logging just over 1,000,000 miles in 2012 all on United, all in first class. The 59-year-old Chicago native and New Jersey resident says he’s flown a total of 13 million miles, much of that in his capacity as an independent consultant and sales trainer for automobile dealerships around the world.
This year, Stuker says that about half of his trips were for pleasure, but how much fun it is it to fly 20,000 miles per week and did he actually see anything or did he spend the entire year in transit simply to break this milestone?
I caught up with Tom via Skype from Lombok, Indonesia, on Friday to find out.
So we have just a few days left in 2012, how many miles will you have logged for the year?
I’m going to finish the year just over 1,050,000.
Did you fly mostly for business or pleasure- what was the point of all this travel?
Once I realized I had a truckload of miles, I thought, ‘I may as well try to get to a million.’ I didn’t want to end up with 938,000 when 1 million is such a sexy number, so towards the end of the year, I planned it out and made it there.
It was about 50/50 business and pleasure. I took a lot of the year off just to travel. I flew with my wife more than 200,000 miles just on long weekend trips, so that consumed a lot.
How many miles did you fly last year?
About 825,000, most of that was business, that’s why this year I decided to take more time off.
Why are you so loyal to United?
I’m very brand loyal, they’ve been very good to me and I’m very good to them.
How much did you spend buying all these airline tickets this year?
A lot. I never disclose exactly how much I paid for my tickets. I have a contracted rate with United. I fly predominantly all first class and I give away a lot of my miles to close friends and relatives.
So does United give you a special Batline to use to book flights?
I have a special Batline. I book everything on the phone – I’m old school. It’s a hotline for Global Service people.
It’s very expensive to fly first class, are you paying for first class tickets or do you pay for coach and they upgrade you?
I pay a negotiated rate for first class travel. They know me by name when I call United.
You have so many miles, shouldn’t you be able to redeem all your miles and travel for free?
I have – I’ve taken plenty of free trips. I took two free trips last week. I make sure all my relatives get miles when they need them. And I spend miles on other things too.
People are going to read this and wonder how well off you are. Are we talking Bill Gates or Mitt Romney territory or just comfortable?
I have just enough money to afford a good life of travel. I have two homes. I have a pretty good business. I work to live but I don’t live to work. I get a lot of criticism for traveling so much.
How so?
People say I have no home life. It couldn’t be any further from the truth. My two boys are grown. My wife and I, we both love to travel. We do everything together and we spend a lot of quality time together.
In order to hit more than 1,000,000 miles in a year, you’d have to average almost 3,000 miles in the air every day. How is that logistically possible?
I don’t know how I did it myself. Between time on planes, connections, transfers, booking travel, it comes to about 80 hours per week. How did it happen? I don’t know, the year flew by – no pun intended.
How many flights did you take?
I never added it all up. I had some time off at the beginning of this year and I said, ‘I’m going to fly 12 days straight.’ On January 12, I passed 100,000 miles, so I got off to a really strong start.
I did a lot of work in Australia though, and just going back and forth there is 20,000 miles right there. I got to Hawaii 4-5 times per year and we’ll leave on Friday night and come back on Sunday. That’s 10,000 miles.
You visit Hawaii from New York just for the weekend?
Two or two and a half days, yes.
And you’d spend only 3-4 days in Australia?
I’d get in on a Tuesday morning and leave Friday morning, so that’s three days.
What’s the longest you ever stayed in one place this year? Did you stay a full week anywhere at all?
I don’t think I’ve been at home for a full week in about 18 years. I’ve been married and divorced twice but it had nothing to do with all the flying.
But why not travel and stay in these places a bit longer? Go to Hawaii and stay for a week or two, explore, get comfortable there?
First of all, I’m ADD. I can’t pay attention too much. I lose focus. I get what I want from a destination and move on. Relaxing to me is weird. I’m not a lay-by-the-pool person. I relax by planning trips and communicating with people from all over the world on Skype and doing other things.
Some would argue that you traveled a lot but didn’t see much. How do you respond to that charge?
I would say, ‘look at my photo albums.’ My wife and I have flown 2.5 million miles together. I’ve been everywhere and done everything. I’ve done desert safaris, I’ve been to the top of the Burj Khalifha, I’ve been on the pyramids, I’ve done a safari in Africa, elephant trekking in Thailand, I walked the China Wall. OK, so I’ve never been to Antartica! So shoot me!
Let me guess – you haven’t been to Antarctica because United doesn’t fly there?
That’s one reason plus I’m not a cold weather person. I’ve been to every state, every Canadian province. I did four days in Rio – that was enough for me. I’ve been to every island in the Caribbean. All over South America. I did three or four days in Buenos Aires.
How do you pass the time on all these flights? Do you talk to neighbors, watch movies, work, read?
A combination of all those things. I’ve met so many amazing people flying in first class. I read magazines and newspapers until we get up in the air and then sometimes I try to get work done. I think my company was built on airplane cocktail napkins. I can’t watch movies because I’ve already seen every damn one of them.
I understand your going to be the star of a reality TV program?
It’s called “Car Lot Rescue.” It’s something like “Kitchen Nightmares” but at car dealerships. I go in there, find problems, address them like a bull in a china shop, get push back and solve their problems. That’s going to be on Spike and it debuts February 10.
What’s your least favorite destination?
I wasn’t too excited about Greece. The history is phenomenal but I found the people there to be a little on the rude side, which will offend all the Greeks who read this.
I’m surprised. Greece is one of my favorite places. Where were you?
Athens, Mykonos, Santorini. But there are rude people in New Jersey too, so New Jersey isn’t the friendliest place either. Australia and New Zealand are the friendliest places.
Speaking of rudeness, what kind of rude behavior have you seen on flights this year?
Even in first class, I’ve seen everything from people clipping their nails, polishing their nails, people who take their shoes and socks off. People who won’t put their seats up to let people get to the bathroom. People who will kick my chair because my seat is reclined.
What are your travel plans for 2013?
I’m going to London a couple times. Vegas. Phoenix. We’re taking a long weekend in Buenos Aires. And this is all just in January.
Why go all the way to Argentina just for the weekend?
I’ve been there before; I just want to revisit some places I haven’t been to. I want to go to a new tango place.
A British expat named Fred Finn claims to be the world’s most frequent flyer with 15 million lifetime miles. Do you want to take that title away from him?
He says he has 15 million miles and I’m not going to call him a liar. He gets paid for appearances as the world’s most frequent flier. I don’t mind being number two, with 13 million miles. I think he’s about 70, so he’s got a dozen years on me. God willing, if I live to 70, I’ll probably pass him but it’s not on my bucket list. I fly for one reason, to create memories, not miles.