Oh my yuck.

Obviously, this blog is about travel news, places to go, things to read...in short, reasons to travel.

This is a good reason to stay home.

Link.

Things I like keep burning down...

... and frankly, it's starting to piss me off. How can I indulge my retiring-to-Catalina fantasies if Catalina ceases to exist? Here is a photo gallery from a couple of my trips to Catalina Island, and if you want to follow news of the fire, check out the L.A. Times' breaking news blog here.

A little bit of a new look...

The gerbils that run the Internet have finally worked through their forwarding issues, and now I'm pleased to say this site can be reached by either planestrainsandautomobiles.blogspot.com or travelswithannie.com. Why Travels with Annie? I'm sort of punning on Travels with Charley, which, yes, makes me the dog. And Travels with Ann sounds staid for some reason. (And my grandmother, who was the big traveler in our family, was the one who called me Annie, so it's find of a full-circle thing.)

The ugly ass Register.com refer at the bottom should be gone shortly. I hope. Go gerbils, go!

Around the World in 80 days.

I just came across this - it's writer Mark Schatzker's blog as he tries to go around the world, never traveling faster than 100 miles per hour. He started in March from Brooklyn to Chicago; now he's loitering in Italy. Who can blame him?

80 Days or Bust

Song sung Blue

David Neeleman, the CEO of JetBlue, was jettisoned today in favor of Chief Opering Officer Dave Barger. This, of course, comes in the wake of the airline tripping over itself earlier this year when it canceled flights and stranded passengers because of bad weather. I'll always have a soft spot for them, though - I love my personal in-set DirecTV and blue corn chips.


Link

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

A software company with a sound database is creating a patch so you can hear relevant noise when you scroll over a location in Google Earth. So, like, if you looked at my house, you'd hear police helicopters and sirens - and if you looked at Yosemite, you'd hear nature. I'm kind of surprised Google didn't think of this on their own...


Link

Dread Zeppelin - Immigrant Song

My friend send me this clip this morning, which inspired the question...how would one flee to Kathmandu today?

Again, rather easier than I expected. Maybe it's not so much "fleeing" as "having a big credit card limit."

You'd leave LAX on Thai Airways Flight 795 at 11:50 p.m. for Bangkok, arriving at 6:10 a.m. After a 4 hour, 30 minute layover, you'd get on Thai Airways Flight 319, leaving Bangkok at 10:40 a.m., arriving in Kathmandu at 12:45 p.m. Total cost? $1423, and you'd get there in 24 hours and 50 minutes.

Painful, yet funny.

Here's a video of Washington Post columnist John Kelly - in celebration of Jamestown's 400th anniversary - dressing up as John Smith and accosting people on the Mall. They don't pay you enough, dude.

Link

And now for something a little less depressing...

Tulips! Tulips!

The Griffith Park fire

So what do you do when one of the best parts of the city you live in is burning down?

I lived in Los Feliz for several years, then moved across the freeway to Atwater Village. And there were many mornings I would get up, look at huge, scrubby Griffith Park, and think "Jesus, some day that's going to burn." Yesterday and today seems to be those days. This was more than five years ago, when it actually rained in Los Angeles and therefore was much less Mad Max/Thunderdome than it's been this year.

Really, with the ocean polluted along the entire coastline of L.A. County, Griffith Park - and the Santa Monica Mountains as a hole - are sometimes the only thing natural that's accessible in Los Angeles. It's phenomenal that none of the landmarks have burned down yet - I'd be much more devastated by losing the Observatory than by losing the Hollywood sign. As ever, firefighters are pretty damn amazing.

The L.A. Times is following the story on their breaking news blog.

The photo is from the LATimes.com, taken by Spencer Weiner.

Ancient science

And here's another amazing story: how modern universities are looking into the physics and the materials that the Incans used to construct bridges across the Andes. I'm rather desperate to go to Peru sometime.

Link

Ooh, ooh, archaeology find!

Here's a goodie: archaeologists from Hebrew University think they've found King Herod's tomb in Israel, 8 miles south of Jerusalem...but they're being all mysterious about it, not releasing any details of the find. Hmmm...I wonder why? Are they afraid of looting? Terrorism? The mind boggles. I find a quarter in the street and I tell everyone about it.


Link

Backblogging: Japan: Heading home

A note before this entry...I can tell from my journal I intended to fill this out on Monday, 12/23/02. Then there's an additional note that I actually wrote it April 30th, 2003. I seriously thought I had Ebola on the plane on the way back...and I think my general exhaustion wiped out any intent I have to write on the actual final day.

So I was going to fill out the last day on the plane, but obviously I didn't. Form what I remember I got up, dropped the present off at new friend's house [the church where the woman who lead us to the Sword Museum worked] ate the the hotel and was then on the shuttle bus to Narita just after noon. We had to pay extra for the extra suitcase we sent back. I had a raging head cold - if this were the time of SARS, I'm sure I would have been quarantined. It was kind of jarring to get back on a plane with a bunch of loud Americans. We want to go back soon, I want to see more of Kyoto.

Kenya Airways: KQ 507

Consumer jet crashes are rare, nowadays - and thank goodness for that - so it's always kind of shocking when something does happen. The BBC, as ever, is doing a thorough job following the loss of the Boeing 737 in Cameroon.

Link

TV: The Amazing Race finale

I can say, honestly, that about four years ago The Amazing Race was my favorite show. It combined two things I loved: travel and sports...well, at the very least, competition. I even went to a panel about the show at the Television Academy; when you're dork enough to attend events about a TV show, that's a new level of geekiness.

However, since the disasterous family edition, which mananged to pander to both the constestants and the TV audience at home, my enthusiasm has dimmed. Last night marked the end of this season's All Stars edition - and while I watched, I'm just not excited about the show any more. I still love the travel shots, and seeing the logistics of how the production gets to various locations. But the tasks at the locations - and the contestants themselves - have close to zero interest to me. What used to be the rare reality show dedicated to casting quirky characters with an interest in the world has devolved into the trap of thinking that aggressively annoying personalities make good TV. (Hi Charla. Hi Mirna.)

In any case, Eric and Danielle won.