10 Weird Things to Watch for in Holland

by Annie Scott on


Holland is a beautiful part of the Netherlands, but as you might expect, the seat of Amsterdam is a little bit kooky. On our recent trip there, we saw a myriad of weird and cool things we couldn’t help but photograph. Now, in case you should be heading there any time soon, we’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 Weird Things to Watch For in Holland. You won’t want to miss these Dutch quirks!
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For more weird Dutch stuff, check out:
The Most Beautiful Pizza Hut in the World
Crazy Dutch Souvenirs
Black Peet (Zwarte Piet)
Swans vs. Ducks

This trip was paid for by the Netherlands Board of Tourism, but the ideas and opinions expressed in the article above are 100% my own.

10 Ways to Give the Gift of Travel

by Annie Scott on

Does all the rushing around of the holiday season make you want to get away? You’re not the only one. In fact, it might just behoove you to give someone the gift of travel this year. There are more ways to do so than you think — and ways in all price ranges. Here are ten ideas:

10 Ways to Give the Gift of Travel

1. Airline miles. Airline gift cards are tricky; you sort of feel like a jerk for giving anything less than $100. However, if you have some spare miles floating around from those last few business trips, you can get them transferred to somebody else — and that’s a great gift. Check with whatever airline you fly most for their procedure. Alternatively, you can donate your airline miles to charity in someone’s name. Johnny Jet explains how here. ‘Tis the season.

2. Hotel gift cards. Almost all hotels, from the budget set to luxury boutique hotels and bed and breakfasts, offer gift cards. Some will allow you to purchase a number of nights and spa treatments, etc., and some just go by dollar amount. The easiest way to give this gift is of course to get it for free. Luxist is giving away Four Seasons gift cards through December 10 here.

3. Zipcar membership. Zipcar offers “an alternative to car rental and car ownership.” If your recipient is 21 years old or older, they have a valid driver’s license, and meet a few other criteria here, you can gift them with membership or a dollar amount, and totally claim you gave them a car. Zipcar has also set up a Get Zipcar site so that you can send a message to your parents that says “I’d like to come home for the holidays” or a silly message like “Happy BMW to me!” and encourage them to get you a car.
4. Food. It may not be as good as the real thing, but food is part of the essence of travel. If you know your friend is just dying to go to Paris, why not take them to the best local French restaurant to let them enjoy the Parisian cuisine? Alternatively, you could buy them a cookbook or, even more generously, make them a gift card good for one meal from the country of their choice cooked by you.

5. A guide to the city where they live. Sometimes, you don’t have to leave home to travel. Staycation! Most of us don’t go to our local tourist haunts very often (and for good reason), but guides to your own city can alert you to cool features you didn’t even know your town had. Series like City Walks can help you explore your local area in a whole new way.

6. City Pass. Know someone who’s already planning their next trip? Get them a City Pass. The price varies by city, but the pass will get them discounts as high as 50 percent on major attractions and enable them to skip ticket lines.

7. Boat trip. Almost every city has a body of water with boats on it, and you probably almost never ride them (unless you live in Staten Island). Museums are great, but nothing takes you away from your usual routine (literally) like getting out on the water. You may just be traveling up the river and back, but simply changing terrain can feel like a mini-vacation and give you a whole new perspective on a place.

8. Give something they have to travel to use. Examples: a tent, skis, fabulous swimwear, an enormous backpacker backpack. This is a good idea for someone who deserves a vacation but needs a little push.

9. Give language-learning software/books. Another way to inspire someone to travel is to get them excited about another language. You have to know someone pretty well to know that they’d like to learn a language (and which languages interest them), but a question like “If you could learn any language in the world, what would it be?” should get you all the information you need. If they seem excited, get them a simple book or go whole hog and get them Rosetta Stone’s TOTALe package. Once they start to learn the words, it won’t be long before they skip town.

10. Invite someone to your home. If you have out-of-town friends or family, one way to give them a travel gift that costs you nothing is to invite them, officially, to come visit your city and stay in your home. Even if you’ve known them for years, people can feel awkward about asking to stay with you instead of forking out the cash for a hotel. Make a pretty invitation good for a four-night stay (it’s a good idea to specify the length, so they don’t feel like they’re asking for too many nights or, conversely, overstay their welcome), and the likelihood of them coming to visit will greatly increase.

Happy shopping to you all, and happy holidays!

Photo of the Day (12.1.09)

by Stephen Greenwood on
Today’s Photo of the Day comes from Milwaukee based Flickr user koalaeatingtree. Taking great landscape shots is one thing, but capturing a perfectly timed moment in a beautiful location like this is remarkable.

The photo was taken in Naples, Florida – a city voted in 2009 as “one of the 10 pricey cities worth its high cost” by U.S News & World Report. For the techies out there, koalaeatingtree was able to capture the shot with a 30 second exposure on a 16mm lens.

Get out there! Chase storms, track down interesting people, and submit them to our Gadling Flickr Pool – we might just select it as our Photo of the Day!

Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Rock

by Mike Barish on

Yesterday, Annie posted a top ten list about why road trips suck. I was shocked and appalled, to say the least. After reading her piece and discussing it with folks on Twitter, I deduced that Annie didn’t really hate road trips. She hated long car rides. There’s a distinction and it’s an important one. Road trips make the journey the adventure. The act of being in the car, seeing the sights and not having to rush becomes your trip. The destination is secondary. Long car rides are just attempts at saving money or avoiding a confrontation with your fear of flying. They’re utilitarian and should not be confused with what you and I consider a true road trip. Road trips should be celebrated. To all of you whimsical travelers who have ever made a mix tape specifically for a road trip (and still nostalgically listen to it today as an iTunes playlist), this one’s for you. 1. Time Doesn’t Matter – Who cares when you get to the destination? You’re with your friends, you’re on vacation and you chose to drive for a reason. Enjoy the scenery. Moon the car next to you. Play License Plate Bingo. Cherish those moments in the car because they will breed the inside jokes that you repeat not just on that trip, but for the rest of your life. It’s not about killing time. That’s murder.

2. Pit Stops – Cracker Barrel. Waffle House. Truck stop diners. Gas station convenience stores. These are a road tripper’s oases. All foods are viable options on the road. I’ve seen vegetarians eat meat and justify it with the “I was on a road trip” excuse. Relish that fast food burger. Enjoy a side of pancakes with your omelet (Perkins, I’m looking at you). Buy chips and cookies and candy that you would never think to eat at home and bring them back to the car to eat on the road. You’re on a road trip. You can eat anything you want!

3. Instant Gratification – Ever been excited to go on a trip only to sit at the airport for five hours? Ever had a vacation delayed because you missed a flight? Road trips can’t be delayed. Traffic? Who cares (see #1)? Are you in the car? Congratulations, your vacation has started.

4. Look at That! – If you’re sitting on a plane, you’re only scenery options are the tiny screen in front of you or, if the person in front of you has reclined, some dandruff and a bald spot. Not exactly riveting entertainment. On a road trip, you never know what you’re going to see next. It could be an amusing sign, a classic car or even a sheep herder who needs to play through. Keep your camera handy because road trips are human safaris!

5. Pranks – Sure, at some point the laughter will die down and your car will become a moving nap box. This is the perfect time to mess whoever passed out. Draw a penis on his face. Scream at the top of your lungs and swerve to trick her into thinking you’re about to be in an accident. Call his mother and tell her he’s dead. OK, that last one may go a bit too far but you catch my drift.

6. Music – Road trips need soundtracks. Mix tapes may have given way to MP3 players, but the effect is the same: sing-alongs! If everyone on the trip brings their iPod, you’ll have music for days. And, if they die (or you get sick of listening to your friends Backstreet Boys “classic mix”), the radio is a viable and underrated option. Radio gets a bad rap, but listening to local stations is a road trip tradition. Blast that country music in the South, listen to some bizarre Christian talk show or find the Top 40 station that every town has and harmonize with Rihanna. Because Rihanna is awesome.

7. Detours – Have you ever asked your pilot to make an unscheduled stop along the way? The FAA frowns on that. But if you’re road tripping and see something like, oh, I don’t know, a hedge maze, you can make an executive decision to get lost in some shrubbery. There are countless amazing destinations just waiting to be stumbled upon. The world’s largest ball of twine is going to call out to you some day. Will you answer?

8. Souvenirs – Road trips generate the best makeshift souvenirs. A menu from a dilapidated diner can easily be slipped into a purse and added to a scrapbook later. Trucker hats from rest stops with innuendo-filled names make great keepsakes (I own a Kum & Go hat that a friend purchased for me on a road trip). One man’s schlock is another man’s memento.

9. Friends Both New & Old – Who needs hotels when you can stay with friends? Road trips are a great excuse to call up old friends to ask if you can stay the night when you pass through town. Or, if people are willing, to stay with friends of friends who are willing to put you up. If you announce on Twitter or Facebook that you need a place to stay en route, you’ll be surprised who volunteers their couch or air mattress. We’re only strangers until we say hello.

10. Bonding – The older you get, the harder it is to spend real quality time with the people you care about. Work will demand more of your attention. Family will become a bigger priority. And the time you have to share with friends will diminish. A road trip is a great opportunity to really be ourselves, relive old glories and create new memories that will sustain us through those dull days at the office. Road trips heighten emotions. Jokes are funnier. Laughs are heartier. And the farts stink more if you lock the windows.

Road trips are less about the destination than the journey. It’s cliché, I know. But if all you cared about was getting from Point A to Point B, you wouldn’t call it a road trip. You’d call it driving. A road trip is its own special category of travel. Enjoy each and every moment of it. And then avoid your tripmates for a few weeks when you get home. You’ll be sick of them by then.

Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Suck

by Annie Scott on

Whether you’re trying to save money or shrink your vacation’s carbon footprint, you probably know, deep down, that road trips suck. There are definitely good things about the open road; the unexpected detours, the wind in your hair (or exhaust in your face, eyes) … but for the most part, sitting in traffic in a closed vehicle for untold hours with people you may or may not normally tolerate for long stretches would probably be one of Dante’s rings of Inferno, had he thought of it. Road trips suck. Just in time for Thanksgiving, let’s go ahead and talk about it. It might make you feel better.

Top Ten Reasons that Road Trips Suck

1. Time. Driving takes forever. You’re cramped up in this tiny little space (especially if someone’s behind you and demanding leg room of any kind), and even if you speed, you will probably only end up shaving like fifteen minutes off of your trip — that’s if you don’t get arrested. A flight from New York to LA is about 6 hours and 45 minutes. The drive? According to Mapquest, it’s 42 hours and 45 minutes from Times Square to Laurel Canyon and Sunset Boulevard. And you can never have those 42 hours and 45 minutes back.

2. The whole car has to pull over if one person has to “go.” It’s not fair. The whole trip has to stop because someone had a Mountain Dew. Rest stops have gotten better over the years, but it’s inevitable that you will end up at the one with townies who look like they want to bash your head against the condom dispenser and “Beware Cat Burglar” on the back of the restroom stalls.

3. It wrecks the car. Road trips may stress you out. Well, they also put stress on your car. The miles depreciate its resale value one by one. Your vehicle could also break down, leaving you stranded and having to fly or rent, or worse yet, you could just be stuck knowing that “my car has never run the same since that road trip.” A lot of people will tell you to make sure to get your car serviced before your trip. Ever been to an auto body shop that can’t find something wrong? Me neither. There goes whatever cash you were saving by not flying.
4. Sleepiness. When you’re driving alone late at night, it’s not uncommon (and very dangerous) to get a case of the nods. Worse still is when you have a car full of people with you — and they’re all asleep.

5. Carsickness. If you’re not the driver, you’re bored. That’s just how it is after a couple of hours. Unfortunately, if you’re part of the 80 percent of the population that gets motion sickness (at some point, according to Healthline), just about everything that might be fun to do in a small, enclosed space, like read, play a videogame, or do a puzzle, will make you violently ill. Especially if you’re running on low-budget diner food.

6. Radio fail. However many miles it takes you to get sick of your iPod, that’s about how many miles it probably takes for you to be completely free of all familiar radio stations. Then, you have to scan and scan for something even remotely listenable, and whatever decent signal you do manage to pick up is gone within half an hour to an hour. If you bring a book on tape, you’re similarly doomed because if you’re alone, your mind will wander or you’ll get distracted by navigating. If you’re with others, someone will start talking, or, as before, they’ll all be lulled to sleep, and you’ll be stuck rewinding constantly.

7. Traffic. God forbid you should try and take a vacation the same day as other people, because not only will the airports be dire, but the traffic will be literally catastrophic — and by “catastrophic,” I mean that the stop and go will result in accidents. And it might be your unlucky day. Where I’m from in Minnesota, we have an old saying: “There are two seasons: ‘winter’ and ‘road construction,'” meaning that the traffic is just always bad. Which leads us to …

8. Road rage. Road construction and inclement weather both require people to drive slowly, which can turn even the calmest mind into a raging bear. It’s like sitting in the longest line in the world, and you have no control over when you’ll be out of it. People lose it.

9. The hotels along the way. Road trips longer than ten hours (longer for you hard-core trekkers) generally require you to stay a night somewhere. The trouble is that no one wants to deal with the traffic (or upcharge) of venturing into a city when the whole point is to “make good time” (i.e. sleep and get back on the road). Whether you plan your night in the boondocks in advance or just pull over at any decent-looking motel, the result is about the same, and it’s not pretty. Keep in mind, the remote is the filthiest thing …

10. “Hell is other people.” Jean-Paul Sarte said it best (in French) in his classic play, No Exit: “Hell is other people.” His play features three people in a room with no way out. They discuss their lives, decide they hate each other, decide they forgive each other, then hate each other again, and so on and so forth with no forseeable end. What could be worse? Put them in a car.
Other than that, road trips are fine.