Video of the Day: Portlandia demonstrates the stresses of housesitting

by Mike Barish on

The new IFC show Portlandia takes the quirkiness of the Pacific Northwest city and magnifies it. However, the inspiration for this sketch is as real as the trees are big in Oregon. Anyone who has ever had a housesitting gig knows that people can be insanely neurotic about their homes when they’re going to be away for a while. They’ll show you how to turn on the lights, how to properly sit on the couch and which plates should never be used for food. It’s enough to make you never want to travel yourself lest you become one of those crazy people who worries senselessly about your own home.

If you have a great travel video that you think we might enjoy, share the link in a comment below. We could feature it as our next Video of the Day!

[Via Gawker]

Video of the Week (4.23.10)

by Kent Wien on

Today’s video of the week is a time lapse of a flight from Dallas to New York on an MD-80 from Andrew Wonder. Andrew created it using an iPhone and the $3 iTimeLapsePro application. You may have to be discreet about it, and you’ll definitely want the phone in airplane mode, but the results are well worth the effort.

Nice work, Andrew.

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.

Video of the Week (4.16.10)

by Kent Wien on

When you think of zip lines, you might associate them with the thrill of sailing through a rain forest in an exotic location (especially if you caught Jeremy Kressmann’s video taken from a zip line in Laos).

But this week, San Francisco has had a zip line installed near the Ferry Building to promote, of all things, tourism to British Columbia in order to bring more people to the site of the 2010 Olympics.

If you want to give it a try, you’ll have to be quick. The last day to get your free ride down a zip line is this Sunday, April 18th.

So how did we discover this? Was it a press release from Tourism BC?

Not at all. We stumbled across it when we came up with this choice for our Video of the Week from Rick Greenberg.

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.

Video of the Week (4.9.10)

by Kent Wien on

This week we have a video from AvWeb, an aviation news site, of an insightful interview with Jeffrey Skiles, the humble co-pilot of the USAirways flight 1549 that ditched in the Hudson. Jeffrey says he’d do it all again if he had the chance to go back in time, but that there’s still one moment in a flight that still gives him a startle. But let’s hear about it from him:

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.

Video of the week (4.2.10)

by Kent Wien on

Today’s video of the week comes from TheAlohaRobert on YouTube. Called simply Hawaii Time Lapse in HD, it’s a mesmerizing look at the beautiful Hawaiian landscape. But I was most impressed with the active cloud formations that often travel in different directions in the same scene. It’s proof of the changing winds aloft at different altitudes that pilots try to take advantage of.

Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.