Gadling’s 2011 New Year’s travel resolutions

by Laurel Miller on

It’s that time of year again. A time when we all make certain promises to ourselves, in an attempt to make our lives more organized, our bodies stronger or leaner. We vow to spend more time with loved ones, give back to others, or ditch that cubicle job. And some of us…well, we just want to keep on traveling, any way we can manage to finagle it.

In the spirit of New Year’s, I asked my fellow Gadling contributors about their travel resolutions for the coming year, and came up with some of my own. Our goals are all over the map (no pun intended), but a common theme emerged. Despite our love of exotic adventures, most of us want to spend more time exploring in our own backyard (that would be the United States). That, and invent musical underwear.

Leigh Caldwell

  • Go on my first cruise.
  • Spend a weekend somewhere without Internet access, and, if I survive that…
  • Celebrate the Fourth of July with my family in Banner Elk, North Carolina, home of the quintessential small-town Independence Day. There’s a three-legged race, a rubber ducky race down a mountain stream, and a parade filled with crepe paper, balloons, and every kid and dog in town.

McLean Robbins

  • Quit my “day job” so I can do this full-time.

[Photo credit: Flickr user nlmAdestiny]Laurel Miller

  • Get back in shape after a two-year battle with Oroya Fever (contracted in Ecuador), and climb a volcano in Bolivia.
  • Finally start exploring my adopted state of Washington, especially the Olympic Peninsula.
  • Visit India for the first time; see if it’s possible to subsist on street food without getting dysentery.
  • Learn to wear DEET at all times when traveling in countries that harbor nearly-impossible-to-diagnose diseases like Oroya Fever.

Sean MacLachlan

  • Get back to Ethiopia.
  • Explore Green Spain (the north part of the country).
  • Show my son a non-Western culture.
  • Invent an underwear stereo that plays cheap jazz music when subjected to a TSA patdown.


Mike Barish

  • Drive cross country.
  • See the Grand Canyon (finally).
  • Finally learn how not to overpack.
  • And, for the fifth year in a row, I resolve to learn how to play the keytar (2011 has got to be the year!).

Darren Murph

  • Bound and determined to visit my 50th state, Alaska.
  • Dead-set on relocating a childhood friend of mine back to North Carolina, and then taking him on a road trip of some sort.

Meg Nesterov

  • Visit more places where I know people.
  • Be in more travel pictures and get my husband out from behind the
  • camera occasionally.
  • Take at least one guidebook-free and paperless trip. Okay, maybe one map.
  • Take better notes. I might think I’ll always remember the name of that fun-looking restaurant or weird sign I want to translate, but it’s easy to forget when you’re taking in so many new things.
  • See more of Turkey while I still live here. I spend so much time traveling to nearby countries, I have to be sure to see the landscape of Cappadocia and eat the food in Gaziantep before I go back to the U.S..

Grant Martin, Editor-in-Chief

  • Travel a bit less and work a bit more [Sure, Grant!].

Annie Scott Riley

  • Travel less alone, and more with my husband.

Alex Robertson Textor

  • More open-jaw travel, flying into one destination and traveling by land to another before returning home. It’s my favorite way to see a new or familiar territory–gradually and without any backtracking. I need to do it more often.
  • More thematic consistency in my travels. Instead of scrambling to meet whatever assignment comes my way, I want my travels in the next year to be focused on a region or two, and on a number of overarching questions or issues. I’m still collecting ideas: Remote European mountain villages? Neglected second-tier cities? The Caucasus?
  • Northern Cyprus. Have been wanting to visit since I was a kid. 2011’s the year.

David Farley

  • To take back the name “Globetrotters” from the Harlem basketball team.
  • To introduce eggnog and lutefisk to southeast Asia.
  • To eat fewer vegetables.

[Photo credits: volcano, Laurel Miller; Grand Canyon, Flickr user Joe Y Jiang; Cappadocia, Flickr user Curious Expeditions; lutefisk, Flickr user Divine Harvester]

New photography book on food and travel profiles meals around the world

by Laurel Miller on

There are a few key things that unite mankind, one of which is the need to eat. Whether the act itself is one of indulgence or subsistence is largely a cultural and geographic, and not just economic, issue. It’s this dichotomy that forms the theme for a fascinating new addition to the food and travel book genre.

What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets is the work of photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith d’Aluisio. The duo traveled to 30 countries to profile 80 vastly different people and the “food that fuels them over the course of a single day.” Each profile features extreme examples of the subject’s diet and caloric intake, rather than a daily average, and provides a window into world foods we might not otherwise be aware of.

The authors also note on their website, “While we have been diligent about providing cultural context and geographic relevance in each of our stories, the people profiled represent only themselves and no one person, or even five, can represent an entire country. Please use this work to further your exploration and understanding of the world.”

Profiles include a Maasai herder in an extreme drought in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, a Bangladeshi seamstress, a Latvian beekeeper, a Minnesotan teen who works in a mall, a Mexican rancher, and a Tennessee man who is a candidate for obesity surgery.

You can see a slideshow of sixteen of the book’s subjects on Time’s website, here.

Blogger Dana Murph

by Dana Murph on

Introducing another new blogger at Gadling, Dana Murph…

Where was your photo taken?
Poipu Beach in Kauai, Hawaii! I leave a piece of my heart there when I’m away.

Where do you live now?
North Carolina, born and raised.

Favorite city/country/place?
My favorite city (so far!) is Tokyo. It’s a huge culture shock from what I’m accustomed to, but in a great way. The skyline is gorgeous, the people are incredibly kind and the food is awesome. The sunrises are second to none, too, and let’s not forget the warm Toto toilet seats.

The USA is definitely my favorite country — I’m sure being able to call it home has a lot to do with it. But I also love a good ole’ road trip, and America is probably the best place in the world for that. The roadway system here is incredible, and there’s so many remote locations that can be driven to with relative ease.

My favorite place is the Na Pali coast of Kauai, Hawaii. While there, I viewed it from boat, prop plane, and the Kalalau Trail, and I simply couldn’t get enough of it. I’m a self-proclaimed sucker for natural beauty, and it doesn’t get much more awe-inspiring than this!

The ideal vacation is…
Visiting remote destinations (or popular ones in the off-season). I’ve found myself smiling at a slew of typical tourist traps before, but given the option, I’d greatly prefer to stray from the beaten path. The setting of my ideal vacation? Beaches, a rainforest or two, mountains… basically Kauai.Most remote corner of the globe visited?
On a recent visit to Panama, my husband and I drove out to the end of the pavement on one of their unnamed roads, parked the car, and walked to a desolate beach known as Punta Chame. We stayed out there for a couple of hours, gawking at the expanse around us and looking through the haze to see Panama City in the distance. We put a mile or two under our feet there, and never ran into another soul. We even managed to find a few unbroken sand dollars and a stunning, fully intact conch shell. Needless to say, that’s fairly decent evidence that not too many people trek out to this point.

We also managed to leave the world behind on an unguided snowmobile trip through Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. During the winter, the bulk of the roads in the park are completely snowed over, and you can traverse the hills and valleys for miles with no sign of human impact. Of course, being able to get within a few feet of moose really helps to complete the fantasy.

Dream travel destination?
I’ve always dreamed of going to Bora Bora and staying in one of those glass-bottom bungalows over the ocean. In photos, the water seems so blue, so intensely clear — something about the ocean just makes me feel more alive than anywhere else. It’s a photographer’s paradise, for sure.

Connected or disconnected?
Don’t hate me, but I really prefer to stay connected, or at least have my GPS, internet, and smartphone within arm’s reach. If I want to disconnect, I just put a temporary mental mute on my email and phone calls. I’ve grown to love and appreciate the security of having a smartphone for translations, directions, restaurant reviews, and whatever else I need while exploring a new place.

Favorite guidebook series?
I know I keep mentioning Hawaii, but there’s just something magical about that place. And to experience that magic to the fullest, I’ve always used the “Revealed” series by by Andrew Doughty, regardless of island. Those books have never let me down, and they’ve definitely led me to a few places that I would’ve never found otherwise.

Scariest airline flown?
On a Delta flight cruising back into ATL in a thunderstorm, we hit a few air pockets that sent our stomachs flying. A few women and children nearby let out squeals, but other than that, I’ve been pretty fortunate to not have any remarkably bad experiences in the air. Knock on wood.

Next trip?
In January, I’m heading up to northern Montana with my hubby for a week of snowy fun. Snowblading (tiny skis, basically), adventuring in the Jeep, and the most exciting part: snowmobiling!

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.

Travel photographs: which reality would you rather see?

by Tom Johansmeyer on

I got a good chuckle out of a story on Business Insider yesterday, “Here’s Why You Should Never Trust the Photos Hotels Post Online.” The accompanying slide show offers shots of a dozen hotels side by side, so you can see what’s marketing hype and what is severe reality. In a way, it’s shocking, but cynics out there are likely to concede that they aren’t surprised by the stark contrast in the photos.

So, this creates a real problem for travel bloggers. We go out with the goal of producing solid content, and that includes making it visually appealing. On the other hand, not all of us (me, specifically) are terribly handy with a camera. The result is a tough choice: do I go with the beautiful and give a property the chance to put its best foot forward, or do I expose them to the horrible risk associated with my caffeine- and nicotine-induced shakes? I guess a third option is to mix in both and identify clearly who’s responsible for what, but that could look awkward, too.

I’m genuinely curious: what do you think? Do you value the aesthetically pleasing, knowing that it’s designed to be exactly that? Or, do you prefer the harsh truth, even if that truth is colored by a gap in photographic skills? Leave a comment below to let us know. Thanks!

[photo by e53 via Flickr]