Check your flights home — the weather is coming!

by Grant Martin on

With Christmas now behind us, many are starting to make the long journey home, maybe for a few more days of work in 2010 or for New Year’s Een preparations. Mother Nature, however, might have other plans.

Foul weather south of the Mason-Dison line has left swaths of fluffy white snow across patches of the south, California is still getting rained on and the works of a grand-scale noreaster are heading towards New Jersey and New York City — right in time for your flight to land on the 26th.

Prepare yourself, dear readers. If you need to standby on an early flight today, now might be a good time to make that $25 or $50 investment. And if you need to call your airline and rebook, we’ve dropped the customer service numbers below.

Safe travels from the staff at Gadling Labs

American Airlines: 800-433-7300
Delta Airlines: 800-221-1212
Continental Airlines: 800-300-1547
Southwest: 800-I-FLY-SWA
United: 800-864-8331
Virgin America: 877-359-8474

[image via Wikipedia Commons]

Photo of the Day (12.25.2010)

by Catherine Bodry on

Merry Christmas from the team here at Gadling! If you’re celebrating it, we hope you’re full of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.

If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, this photo is for you. Trees with gingerbread-house icing against a sunny winter sky: it’s a great day for a cross-country ski, or even a sleigh ride! Afterward, warm up with a cup of spiced wine or cider, or a hot chocolate. Thanks to our own darren.murph for inspiring a little holiday cheer.

Have any travel photos that impart cozy feelings? Upload them to Gadling’s Flickr pool, and we just might choose one for our Photo of the Day feature.

A December hike along the Lost Coast Trail

by Kraig Becker on

The Lost Coast Trail is a spectacular hike along northern California‘s Pacific Coast. The trail is roughtly 25 miles in length, running from Shelter Cove to Mattole Beach, and is only accessible by a few narrow, twisty roads. It is a rugged, lightly traveled route that alternates from Pacific beaches to mountain passes, with more than 8000 feet of elevation gain over the course of its length.

For many trekkers, the Lost Coast Trail is one of the top hikes in all of North America, and it was with that in mind that filmmaker Ryan Commons and three of his friends, set out to trek the challenging route over a seven day period earlier this month. The result is the great video below that captures the essense of the Lost Coast from it’s chilly beaches to its sprawling mountain ridges.

For remote hikes it is difficult to beat the Lost Coast Trail. As you can see from the video, it is aptly named and a worthy hike for any backpacker looking for solitude on their next adventure.

[Photo credit: Rick McCharles via Flickr]


The Lost Coast Trail from Ryan Commons on Vimeo.

Travel Photography: Krome Photos service edits pictures for you

by Amy Chen on

A funny thing happens to my travel photos after a trip. After uploading select pictures to Flickr or Picasa, my photos often languish unedited (and unseen) on my laptop. I tell myself that when I finally carve out some free time, I’ll go back and properly edit the rest of the pictures and create a photo book or scrapbook to remember my vacation.

Unfortunately, the photo folders keep multiplying and I never seem to find the time. Luckily, there’s now an affordable online service that can edit your photos for you: Krome Photos.

How It Works
Sign up for a free trial with 25 photo credits and 1GB of storage at www.kromephotos.com. Another special introductory offer gives you 100 photo credits for $2.50. See here for more pricing plans, including monthly subscriptions.

Download the Krome Photo Uploader to your desktop, and upload any photos that you want to be edited. Go off, live life, and about 24-36 hours later, you’ll get an e-mail notifying that your photos have received the “Krome Treatment,” or the talents of a personal photo editor who may improve your pictures with color correction, red-eye correction, cropping, or other tweaks.

You can accept or reject the photo enhancements; a photo credit is deducted from your account balance if you download or share an edited photo. Though it’s nice to have someone else’s perspective on your photography, if you don’t like how a certain photo is cropped or edited, you can easily undo the Krome Treatment. For each photo that you undo, a photo credit is refunded.

Need help deciding which edited photos to keep? You can click on a Before/After button to see the original picture and edited version side by side.As with iPhoto and Picasa, there are also tagging tools to help you organize your pictures.

You can e-mail a high-resolution edited copy to friends and family straight from the Krome Dashboard, which also has easy access to the requisite social-networking tools of Facebook and Shutterfly.

The Bottom Line
Though Krome Photos is not a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto, or other photo-editing programs, the photo-editing service is a time-saver and could be just the thing to motivate me to edit the rest of my photos myself. As for creating a photo book, that’s still on my to-do list.

Christmas with Jesse James

by Sean McLachlan on

Christmas can be a stressful time. In fact, statistics show that you’re more likely to have a heart attack on Christmas than any other day of the year. Hanging out with family too much can be hazardous to your health.

Some families, of course, are more hazardous than others. Most people don’t have the emotional baggage that Jesse James, Jr., did. He was the son of the famous outlaw but didn’t even know it until his dad was assassinated. He thought his name was Charlie Howard and his father was named Thomas.

Despite living under aliases, the James family couldn’t give Jesse Jr. or his sister Mary a normal upbringing. Junior’s earliest memory was of a gangmember shooting through the front door at a suspected prowler. They also moved a lot and were discouraged from playing with neighborhood children.

Junior was accustomed to his father going around heavily armed at all times. One Christmas while living in his father’s final home, which is now the Jesse James House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, Jesse decided to dress up like Santa Claus to surprise his children.

The outlaw came into the house dressed in a costume he had borrowed (not stolen) from a local church. Giving a cheery “ho ho ho” and bearing gifts and candy, he delighted his son and daughter. He asked if they had been good and Junior and Mary said they had. Santa then opened up the bag of goodies and the kids rummaged around inside. Junior felt a gun under the cloth and exclaimed that this wasn’t the real Saint Nick, but his father dressed up as Santa! Their mother then explained that Santa was very busy that year and Dad was helping him out.

So next time a family member embarrasses you at Christmas, at least be grateful they’re not packing heat.

For more stories of Jesse’s hijinks, check out my series: On the Trail of Jesse James.

[Photo courtesy Library of Congress]