The United Nations World Tourism Organization announced last week that Spain overtook the United States as the second-most visited destination in the world (France remains number one) in 2017. The U.S. welcomed 72.9 million foreign visitors last year — down about four percent from the previous year’s 75.9 million.

Heading east on I-40 toward Gallup. Bob Dylan‘s great bluesy new album, Tempest, on repeat. Nobody cops licks & embraces cliches with more gusto & abandon than Bob Dylan.

The band’s hot. The stories’re gripping. 50 years and counting. Amazing.


You can get Tempest by Bob Dylan at Amazon.

Taxation without representation

Since tourists don’t vote in places they don’t live, it’s customary for local governments to gouge visitors with excessive and arbitrary travel taxes and fees tacked on to hotel rooms, airport, railroad and interstate bus transactions, car rentals, etc., at venues like airports, lodgings,
and so on, where local voters are less apt to go. A particularly egregious example: taxi ride fares in Las Vegas, a sprawling western city where most locals drive their own cars and parking fees are minimal to non-existent to attract gamblers.

You’ll want to think twice before taking a Vegas cab. Turning on the meter costs $3.50 — before you’ve traveled an inch. At the end of the ride, a tip is added with no obvious way to remove or change it. If you choose to use Visa/MasterCard or Amex, there’s a $3 fee to swipe the card. A short trip — from the Venetian to Caesar’s, say, about a half mile — can set you back $15.

Is that $3 swipe fee even legal? (In California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas, at least, it would be against the law; what’s up, Nevada?) Doesn’t charging the fee amount to offering a cash discount? Visa rules don’t allow retailers to charge cardholders a checkout fee for using their cards; probably neither do the agreements of other credit card issuers. Even if, in tight times, a business felt it needed to make up the sums paid to the credit card card companies, these amount to about 3% of the cost of a transaction not, as in the case at hand, a usurious 20%!

Beach, Rosa del viento eco-hotel, Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

We read on buses (and trains and planes and subways*), so Bogotá is taking the logical next step in putting books where we use them.

* The Underground New York Public Library is a virtual gallery featuring the reading-riders of the NYC subways. The New York Public Library, the real one not the virtual one, maintains its smallest branch in the Metropolitan Transit Authority located down a flight of stairs, just outside the turnstile entrance to the No. 6 train on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 50th Street.

Hearing the news that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland that sparked JM Barrie to create Peter Pan, is to be turned into a center for children’s literature got Emily Temple thinking about all the real-life places that have animated works of literature.


Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The rest of the story: 10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics by Emily Temple (Flavorwire 2011-08-06).

As an aside: it would be fun, wouldn’t it, to plan a summer trip to Durham, Maine (the inspiration for Salem’s Lot) and to locales such as the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel), around Stephen King Country: The Illustrated Guide to the Sites and Sights That Inspired the Modern Master of Horror by George W. Beahm. Available from Amazon

(Photo: John Gabree)

Denver, Colorado

"Continental social food," the slogan of TAG restaurant in Denver, could hardly be more apt. With menu items that extend from sushi tacos with guacamole through meat loaf friended by bokchoy and kimchi, grilled lamb with Bambino watermelon, and Kobe sliders with irresistible duck fat fries, to salmon served in the company of spring ramps, shiitakes, English peas, cured wild boar, Meyer lemon confit and umami butter, comfort food has never been so edgy.

TAG’s barkeeps follow the same fresh, seasonal path trod in the kitchen by chef and owner Troy Guard. Some classics like daiguiris and stingers are delivered straight, but most, like the Kumquat-Jalapeño Mojito, receive a TAG twist. Also, since many of the bar's concoctions depend on seasonal ingredients, every visit is likely to be greeted with a surprise, and not one not limited to mixed drinks: the Bazi Shot is an energy swallow packing 12 vitamins and 68 minerals, and there's house-made ginger ale and a TAG-branded coconut soda. The beverage menu matches the lets-give-it-a-shot attitude emanating from the galley.

I never pass anywhere near Denver without a visit to TAG. It's the only way to find out what happens if, say, the flavors of yuzu, jalapeño and Pop Rocks find their way onto the same plate. Desserts -- peanut butter partfait, for example, with caramel, bittersweet chocolate and Nutella marshmallow ice cream -- prolong the adventure. Tag also has a raw bar and is open for lunch and dinner (social -- a.k.a., happy -- hour is 2-6 pm). TAG, 1441 Larimer St., Denver CO 303-996-9985.

http://www.tag-restaurant.com

The url for The Detourist has changed. The real URL for this post is now
http://thedetourist.com/2011/04/16/packing-tips-making-travel-easy-safe-stress-free/

If you're tired of being mistaken for the Joads when you travel, you already suspect that traveling lighter would be traveling better. And yet, as this exhaustive site demonstrates, there's a lot more to the art and science of traveling light than jamming as much as possible into one humungous handbag.

OneBag.com, a frequently updated reference guide to "going pretty much anywhere, for an indefinite length of time, with no more than a single carry-on-sized bag," has a wealth of practical, field-tested advice for over-burdened travelers.

As author Doug Dyment writes, of "all the travel skills you might acquire, learning to travel light is the one most likely to result in enjoyable, productive, stress-free travel experiences." Less luggage means fewer opportunities theft, damage, mis-routing or finding out the hard way that you have been the unsuspecting mule for drugs or contraband goods.

Carrying only one bag can be a real money-saver, too. You can use public transit more easily, cut back on tithing cabbies, bellhops and baggage handlers, and avoid the increasingly exorbitant airline luggage fees.

And with lighter traveling comes more flexibility:

Less stuff means greater mobility, which gives you more travel options. With no checked luggage to limit your choices, you can more easily deal with delayed transportation and missed connections (you can even switch to earlier flights when space is available). You needn't arrive at airports as early, and you will be among the first to leave, while others wait for baggage delivery and long inspection queues. You can board trains, trams, and coaches with alacrity. You won't feel compelled to take the first hotel room offered: you can comfortably walk down the street should the ambiance be unsuitable or the price unreasonable. You can sell your airplane seat (by volunteering to be "bumped") on full flights. You can even travel as an air courier.

Among many useful pages on OneBag.com highlights include Using A Packing List, a detailed analysis of every individual item on Dyment's personal packing list, a checklist of things to take care of prior to leaving on a trip, contact information for suppliers of harder-to-find items he mentions, a short list of recommended books on related topics, links to some carefully-chosen sites that OneBag enthusiasts are likely to find interesting, Dyment's own compilation of travel industry links to airlines, hotels and automobile rentals, plus the best metasearch engines, handy lists of country/airport/airline codes, and tools for checking real-time flight status, airport delay conditions, and aircraft seating arrangements.

Dyment keeps track of content changes here, and site updates can be followed also via Facebook, Twitter or RSS feed.

For travelers, OneBag.com may be the single most useful destination on the internet.

Site: OneBag.com

The url for The Detourist has changed. The real address for this post is now
http://thedetourist.com/2011/04/15/let-me-stay-for-a-day-an-inspiration-to-detourists-everywhere/

If anyone deserves to be called The Godfather of Couchsurfing, it's Dutch author Ramon Stoppelenburg. He grasped earlier than most the personal networking opportunities made possible by the world wide web.

One of the first Dutch bloggers, in early of 2001 Stoppelenburg started a website called Let Me Stay for a Day with the intention of cadging free places to crash as a means of underwriting his travel ambitions. The plan worked out better than he could have anticipated: in short order, he had 3,577 invitations from 77 countries. Leaving home with no more than "a backpack filled with clothing, a digital camera, a laptop, and a mobile phone," for nearly two years, as he writes in Dutch-inflected English, he "traveled the world WITHOUT ANY MONEY, visiting people who invited me over through this website. I crossed distance with my thumb or with help of sponsors and supporters. In return for all support I wrote about this all in my daily reports on this website."

By the time he shut down the project in 2003, Stoppelenburg had visited The Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Austria, The Isle of Man, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Spain, Hong Kong, Australia and Canada, with all expenditures -- even airline tickets -- sponsored or donated by his followers: the former student, then in his mid-twenties, had found a way to become a seasoned world traveler for the cost of a $35 website domain registration.

During his travels, Stoppelenburg published columns weekly in the Dutch daily newspaper Spits, in addition to the 7,000 photos and over 550 reports he posted to his website. You won't be surprised that Letmestayforaday.com turned into a book that the author is currently translating into English. Since June 2008, he's been conducting walks up Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain. And in September 2010 he relocated to Phnom Penh, where he runs a movie theater playng American and European pictures and is organizing a European Cooking Trip that starts in the summer of 2011. He posts updates on his activities to his current blog.

Some of the American media may think of Ramon Stoppenlenburge as "the notorious Dutch freeloader," but out here on the road he's a hero to detourists and armchair adventures everywhere.

The specialized search engine Real Travel brings the benefits of social media aggregation to the work of finding hotel lodging. Combining real-time pricing and availability data, Facebook "likes," and hotel reviews from across the web, Real Travel simplifies hotel search. You'll find hotel ratings, an easy-to-use price comparison tool, property photos, location information, information about nearby attractions, and advice from fellow travelers about lodging and "things to do." Unquestionably one of the more useful travel tools.

Site: RealTravel.com

Densely populated southern California is fortunate to have two of the world's great deserts in its backyard. The National Park Service provides an introduction to the Mojave Desert, the deceptively sparse area that falls between the Great Basin and Sonoran deserts. "The Preserve encompasses 1.6 million acres of mountains, jumble rocks, desert washes, and dry lakes." Sections include desert ecology, plants and animals, geology, history and culture, plus a glossary, maps, recreation tips, learning opportunities, and management issues. <http://www.nps.gov/moja>