Month: August 2007

Categories
Blog Texas USA

Think globally, blog locally

                    Ranch sign (courtesy Ross@Texas at flickr's Creative Commons)

I usually cast a world-wide net for travel information, but just for fun today I thought I’d support my local bloggers and highlight some links from Texas-based blogs. 

Many of these are written by folks that I’ve gotten to know through the awesome Freelance Austin networking group.

**  Ever look at a hotel or restaurant bill when you travel, and start to feel that your family is suffering from a “taxing vacation?”  Personal finance writer Kay Bell at Don’t Mess With Taxes says you aren’t imagining those “gouge the tourists” add-ons.  It’s certainly more popular to raise a city’s hotel taxes than to raise revenue from residents.

**  Are you coming to our fair city for the Austin City Limits Music Festival next month?  British transplant writer and editor Julie Tereshchuk recommends a few downtown places to drop in for a bite and maybe a coffee.  Want more foodie tips from an Austin local?  I like author Brad Whittington’s blog about all sorts of eateries; Brad’s novels about Fred, Texas are a hoot.

**  The good folks at Texas Highways magazine have rolled out their own blog, full of good scoop on various hidden delights in the state.  I’m a proud contributor to the magazine myself; check out my articles on those famous Round Rock (TX) donuts and the fabulous honky-tonk action at the Old Coupland Inn and Dancehall.

**  I’m actually thinking about fall and winter holidays right about now, so I can nail down some early hotel reservations for travel with the kids.  Did you know that there’s a Victorian Christmas celebration every year in Galveston?  The Texas RV Travel blog isn’t just for RV-ers, and blogger Eileen has a post about Galveston’s Dickens on the Strand, with lots of stuff for children. 

**  Finally, to get your non-travel-related geek fix, I recommend TechBlog, written by my old friend Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle.  I followed his recent saga about buying his college-bound daughter a laptop. 

If you’re like me and starting to think about that topic (fortunately my teenager is just a high school sophomore) then take a look at these posts:  his spec requirements and daughter’s desire for a PC, the eventual capitulation to a Mac and why, and the ultra-dweeb-way-over-my-head-but-interesting discussion about going through Apple’s “Boot Camp” process to get Windows running on her Mac.

Do you have any favorite local bloggers to tell us about? 

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, blogging

Categories
Blog

Still hanging in there….

Just a quick note to say that I’m still alive and kicking out here, but a bit buried with some article deadlines and working to replace my dead laptop.

Since I’m now hogging the family desktop, I don’t have as much freedom to blog at any old random hour, but I’ll be back very soon (negotiations for a replacement laptop are in progress, thanks to PC Doctors here in Austin….thanks Jason and Dean!)

Do you have YOUR computer backed up yet?

Categories
Blog USA

We’re back but we’ve crashed

Final mileage total, TX to Chicago and back

There it is, folks.

3,061 miles round trip from our driveway in TX to Chicago and back.

The great Midwest Road Trip is finished and we’re glad to be home, but just in case we get too cocky about all the fun at the BlogHer conference and all the articles we have to write….the laptop crashed.

So, it’s off to call up some repair expertise now that I’ve experienced a major computer malfunction like my fellow travel writer Liz Lewis.

Yes, I had some items backed up and my email accounts and blogs are all net-based so I didn’t lose them, but I hadn’t backed up as thoroughly or regularly as I should have.

Learn from my mistake and get a big fat portable hard drive to back up your documents, photos and bookkeeping software!

Categories
Tips

Yeah or Nay? Family sections on Southwest Airlines

Mark Ashley blogs at Upgrade: Travel Better and he has a recent post asking readers for their opinion on the Southwest Airlines initiative to have family-only sections on some of their flights (those departing from San Antonio, Texas.)

Here are his poll results so far:

Is Southwest’s “family boarding” a great idea or a new travel annoyance?

Total Votes: 253    (Started: July 27, 2007) 

Full disclosure: I voted for #3, “A” boarding group and then families, but honestly, I hate the whole cattle call routine and probably should have voted for #1, “Eww.” 

I have become a big fan of checking in online and printing my own boarding pass, and I do prefer assigned seating. 

Family travel and flying is a hot topic these days (as usual, uber-guru and travel Mom Wendy Perrin has great tips on flying with a toddler — how not to get kicked off a plane.)

What are your thoughts?

Categories
Tips

Landmark-snarfing at Markeroni

Are you one of those people who pulls off of the highway to read historical markers?

Me, too.

That’s why I think you’ll like Markeroni, a site run by fellow wanderer (and motorcycle enthusiast) Linda Gentile. 

It’s a catalog of various historic landmarks in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, with entries by “landmark snarfers” who just like finding and logging those informative little signs and spots. 

You’d think that on a 3000-ish mile Midwest road trip like the one we’re on, I would have remembered to log in a few landmarks myself, but I guess my mental RAM is simply too full to remember to do that on top of blogging, photographs, research and driving.

Please, check out the site and make up for my organizational inadequacies by entering some of your favorite landmarks.

It’s free and fun.

Categories
USA

This is your brain on corn

                            See this cornfield? This is mostly what we've looked at for days. (Scarborough photo)

See this Missouri cornfield?  Or maybe it was an Illinois cornfield.  They are beginning to run together.

Now, put this picture on both sides of your vehicle, run the corn out to the horizon, and drive past it for, oh, days and days. 

Alternate occasionally with soybeans.

That is when you understand why this is “America’s Breadbasket” or whatever agricultural blurb you want to come up with.

                             Grain silos in Griggsville, IL (Scarborough photo)

Then see what your teen calls “the biggest freakin’ grain thingies” on the planet in Griggsville IL. 

Learn from a local guy that at harvest time, these humongous silos are all filled and a gazillion bushels of stuff are spread out on the ground behind the silos because there’s no room for it.

That is your brain on corn during a Midwest road trip.