Tag: iPod

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Product Reviews Tips

Finding travel podcasts: am I a tech knucklehead?

Internet Cat (lolcat courtesy tonyalmeida)It’s sort of embarrassing how the Podcasts have invaded our home like This Week in Travel and Rolf Potts Deviate.

Sainted Husband got a Shuffle when an in-law upgraded, we got our teen daughter a Nano for her birthday, then I pouted so much that I got one for Mother’s Day.

Although I use mine extensively to keep from losing my mind during today’s abysmal air travel experience, I have yet to download travel-related podcasts like audio tours.

Since I’m heading back to Chicago for my favorite blogging conference,  I decided to experiment, and check out a download or two on my iPod.

I’m new at this, so I went super-basic….I Googled “Chicago travel podcast.”

Promising returns included The Amateur Traveler Chicago podcast, featuring Mark Peacock from Travel Commons to talk about the city. However, when I did my thing at “click here to download,” my laptop booted up the QuickTime player (which I thought was only for movies.)

The audio played just fine from the box on my laptop screen, but how to put the blasted thing onto my own iPod had me flummoxed (and I like to think I’m not a total tech idiot.) Right click, fiddle, poke….nothing.

So, I went on a hunt on the Amateur Traveler site for a tab labeled something like, “What To Do If You’re All Messed Up And Can’t Download Stuff Without Getting a Giant Blue Q.”

When I tried “Subscribe in iTunes,” my iTunes software booted up and I landed on the Amateur Traveler Podcast page in the iTunes Store, where I could download to my heart’s content.

Well, alrighty then.

The same thing happened when I tried to download the Indie Travel Podcast’s Planning a Road Trip episode; I got The Blue Q.  When I punched the site’s widget labeled “Free Video and Podcast in iTunes,” I landed in the Indie Travel Podcast iTunes store, no problem.

Now, you’d think I’d take a hint and stay in the iTunes store and use their Search box to locate travel podcasts. I tried that, but I don’t have confidence that I can actually find relevant material there, because when I searched for “Chicago travel podcast” directly in iTunes search, nothing came up from Amateur Traveler.

[Insert one of my salty Navy expletives here.]

So, readers, where do YOU go for quality travel-related podcasts and audio tours (and what’s with the danged Blue Q?)

Categories
Tips

Listen up! iPod and audio travel guides and tours

An iPod toddler (courtesy GoonSquadSarah at Flickr CC)Are your kids like mine – often with some sort of headphone or earbud plugged into their aural sockets?  Take advantage of that tendency by looking for available iPod/audio guides and tours when you travel.  Kids can keep looking plugged-in and “cool” but may actually learn something on your trip.

As a parent, of course, your job is to never seem too “Squeeee!” happy when they occasionally admit that something is informative or educational.

Where do you find these tours?

First, if you use iPods, do a search in the iTunes store; Apple recognizes the value of their audio tour podcasts although the iTunes Search function is not particularly good.

There are many well-established general travel podcasts (think of them as little radio shows) from Indie Travel Podcast (latest topics as of this writing include Christchurch, New Zealand and Tasmania) the Amateur Traveler (latest episodes are about the Republic of Georgia, London and Easter Island) Frommers.com and Rick Steves who covers Europe.  An iTunes search for Disney informational podcasts returns a bunch of options too; just make sure they’re fairly recent since things can change quickly at the parks.

You can also find location-specific offerings on iTunes like LAWithKids for Los Angeles and audio/video podcast offerings from VisitLondon.com.

Some companies focus specifically on audio offerings – AudioSnacks, for example, has a big section for audio tours, and the company SoundWalk has some very unique walking tours that place special emphasis on New York City, although they do have a few other cities as well. The media company ARTineraries has professionally-produced tours of mostly Italian historic sites.  LearnOutLoud has a kid’s audio section, too.

The UK’s Guardian, always a good source of worldwide travel information, has a small selection of free audio tours called Sounds of the City (Athens, Rome, Nice, Marseille, Valencia and Granada) plus an eclectic collection of very personalized audio travel guides, featuring people like musician Franz Ferdinand taking you on a tour of his hometown of Glasgow.

Some travel guide companies also produce audio – I like the DK (Dorling-Kindersley) Eyewitness guides for their clean layout and liberal use of photos and graphics, so I was pleased to find that they also have a few DK Travel podcasts.

Finding these things is a classic Google search problem, but I’ve had best results when I query search engines about tours for a specific location.  As I always advise, start with the tourism board/Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) for the place you’re going to visit.  For example, the Chicago Office of Tourism has free downloadable guides including Chicago for Kids and a blues tour narrated by Buddy Guy.  Even smaller towns may have them; Astoria and Warrenton, Oregon have audio tours guided by locals and sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce.

Don’t forget that most museums have had audio tours for a long time, including big places like Chicago’s Field Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, plus smaller ones like the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, which has tours in English and Spanish.

Let us know in the comments if you have any favorites!

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Tips

2 must-have items for air travel

Whenever I get on a plane lately, the experience provides perfect material for a blog post.

Here is the latest lesson….two items I could not have done without on today’s journey from Austin to Kansas City for the Travel Media Showcase conference.

1.   The 800 telephone number to directly contact the airline. Have it written down AND pre-programmed into your cell phone. Here is why:

  • My original morning flight on Northwest Airlines was already flashing “Delayed” when I arrived at the airport a little after 6 am. Not a good sign, especially since I had a tight plane change/turnaround in Minneapolis (yes, don’t get me started on the absurdity of flying to Minneapolis from Austin in order to get to Kansas City – die, airline hub & spoke!)
  • I went to the gate area to see what was up. No desk attendant from Northwest, no notice on the electronic board indicating a revised departure time.
  • I sat there like a sheep along with everyone else till the scheduled departure time came and went, with NOTHING heard from the airline.  I then whipped out my cell phone, called Northwest’s 800 number and was promptly and politely rebooked onto a Continental Airlines flight leaving just 30 minutes later (and getting me to KC 40 minutes earlier than the original arrival time.)
  • I did a happy dance, grabbed my trusty rolling carryon suitcase — here’s another example of why you should never check luggage these days if you can help it — and I scampered to my new gate.
  • Don’t be a sheep! I learned from calling the 800 number that the plane had a mechanically-related delay of 6 hours; who knows when someone would have come around to tell us that.

2.  Carry a small portable digital music player. Here’s why:

  • Your sanity.  My iPod blocked out having to listen to a yammering TV show at the gate while I waited for Northwest to ignore me (see above.)
  • Your sanity.  My iPod blocked out the screaming child who was running madly around in the Kansas City airport, ignoring his mother and jumping on the luggage carousel. Not my child, and he couldn’t set my teeth on edge, either.
  • Your sanity.  My iPod blocked out the women who blabbed on her cell phone for nearly 40 minutes as I awaited ground transport in KC.
  • Did I say, “your sanity?”  Air travel is crummy enough these days; having pleasant sounds of your own choosing makes life quite tolerable.
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Philosophy

Your savior on long car trips

Yes, we buckled under and got a backseat DVD player in our minivan….so shoot me for not playing the License Plate Game and other more creative car games, but boy does a movie keep the squabbling siblings quiet!

The only problem is that too many hours of looking at a small moving screen in a gently moving vehicle gets at least one of my kids mildly carsick.

Here’s another idea that I found on the tech site Mashable to keep your little darlings occupied — downloadable audio books from AudibleKids.

From the Mashable post:

“The new site, called AudibleKids, has about 4,000 titles from 75+ publishers available at the time of the launch, with exclusive stories from the likes of R.L. Stine (who didn’t love Goosebumps?)”

If your kids are part of the iPod army, you’re all set.

If not, no worries; other mp3 players are compatible and you can also burn to a CD through iTunes or stream from a computer.

Ease on down the road….

Categories
Tips

Hey, iPod Family, Tours for You.

Do your kids (or you) always have those little white iPod headphones plugged into your ears? Does your family think that humanly-guided tours are dorky?

Here’s some salvation; an article in the Christian Science Monitor today about MP3/audio tours that you can download and listen to as you stroll around, being an un-tourist.  The two samples include Boston’s Italian-flavored North End.

Links to various audio companies are provided.  I see this taking off in a big way as the libraries of destination tours grow and expand. 

All’s fair in roping the kids into learning something when they travel.