California Wine Writing and Photography Contest
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Weekly Worldwide Writing and Photography Contest
This week’s contests are live 
We’re starting off the year with a redesign and a whole new series of weekly writing and photography contests. These are going to be fun, because our editors have been busily scouting out Trazzler-worthy places for you to write about and photograph. It’s a work in progress, so if you want to cover a place that’s not on our list, just shoot us an email at suggestions@trazzler.com and we’ll review it within 24 hours.
Let us know what you think!
Thanks to all who downloaded our iPhone app! We’re now working like crazy on the next big thing. It’s going to be much more participative every step of the way. Here’s what we’re thinking:
We want to collect the experiences that drive people to check places out and report back on them. To put it succinctly:
People + Places + Love
A place will only appear on Trazzler if:
Frankly, most places won’t make the cut. Instead of listing every place in the big wide world and waiting for people to check in, we want you to send you on assignment to check places out. Instead of interacting with a chosen few, our editors work with everyone, devising creative contests that feature places we care about—and reward the people who love a place enough to capture its essence in photos or words.
Here are two contests that are happening right now (soon there will be more all over the world that you can enter right from your phone or Trazzler.com):
East Coast Local Institutions: Sandwich Edition: Writing Assignment—$250 Contract + a Free Philly Hoagie Getaway
West Coast Endangered Places Contest: California State Park Edition—Writing Assignment: $500 Contract
Deadline for entry: November 30.
Assertion: The hefty Philadelphia hoagie is the greatest sandwich ever.
If you agree, wax poetic about the hoagie’s greatness. If you disagree, challenge the hoagie with the sandwich you think rules the land. The five most creative Tweets win. Include #Hoagie and link.
So many are fond of misguided generalizations, calling America a Christian nation, a zombie nation, a TV nation… but it was chef and food writer James Beard who hit the nail on the head: America is a sandwich nation.
Sandwiches are the food of the people—cheap, nutritious, easy to assemble in large quantities—what better vehicle for delivering the flavors of a regionally and ethnically diverse nation to people on the move?
The only thing aristocratic about sandwiches is the name—borrowed from John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, a rather unenlightened Enlightenment-era figure who most certainly did not pioneer the concept of placing delectable morsels between two pieces of bread. He may, however, have had a penchant for snacking combined with an aversion to getting his fingers dirty—and he did play some part in making sandwiches trendy for the first time.
It was during the industrial revolution that the sandwich took off as a portable and easy-to-eat meal for workers. In America, wave after wave of new arrivals reinterpreted the form. Thanks to them, today there are sandwiches that add up to far more than the sum of their parts. A symbol of local identity and heritage, the most beloved among them inspire loyalty, passion, and a cult-like following.
Sandwiches matter. When election season rolls around, candidates invariably hit sandwich shops across the country looking to buff up their populist cred, while being careful to avoid missteps like John Kerry’s devastating 2004 “swiss cheese incident” at the temple of cheesesteaks, Pat’s in Philadelphia (food critic Craig LaBan predicted that requesting the wrong cheese would “doom his candidacy” in Philly—quite the exaggeration, but the story of his cultural faux pas did spread like wildfire).
Attention fanatics: as the member of a clan of sandwich obsessives, I am well aware that putting together a slideshow like this is a treacherous endeavor. More than a “best of,” consider this list as an exploration of the beauty of the sandwich—a mere point of departure. (I left off hotdogs, didn’t venture outside of the US, choose only one hamburger, and one barbecue joint—each is more than worthy of a slideshow of its own.) Let’s talk about the sandwiches we love in the comments (we’ll add them to our new Trazzler iPhone app so we find local writers to cover these local institutions).
—Megan Cytron, Trazzler Editor
P.S. Still hungry? You can find many more sandwiches at http://www.trazzler.com/tags/sandwich
Thanks so much to everyone who downloaded our free app, played with it, and provided brilliant feedback. We just posted an update to the App Store that will make it much easier for you to invite friends, share your personality, and find out what you have in common. Give the new version a try and let us know what you think.
What’s next:
About the App and Trazzler’s Philosophy
The places we go and the things we do are personal and meaningful. A sad fact: most sites that recommend or review places are neither. Three years ago, our small team blew up the four-stars-and-a-rant model popularized by TripAdvisor/Yelp and started from scratch with real editors, writers, photographers, and a new framework for exploring the world. Trazzler goes deeper than a check in or SEO-bait content lifted from third-party sources. As you play, you’ll learn more about yourself and your friends. You’re building a complex personality, an expression of who you are and what you like to do. We value your creativity and experience—soon, we’ll bring our popular writing and photography contests to the app so you can compete for freelance assignments and share the places you love.
» Get the app update
Los Angeles, CA
September 27, 2011
The Trazzler App for iPhone and iPod touch is now available on the App Store. The places we go and the things we do are personal and meaningful—Trazzler’s new app goes far beyond a conventional travel guide or random collection of reviews. As you complete the quiz and explore the world with your iPhone or iPod touch, Trazzler gets to know you and your friends, assembling a dynamic personality profile and an ever-evolving itinerary of short, well-crafted recommendations of things to do tailored to your preferences.
Take the quick visual quiz:
Trazzler kicks off with a quiz—a series of beautiful images that will take you around the globe. There are no personal, prying questions, just striking photos that elicit a deeper subconscious response. Are you a low-key cerebral sort? A professional loungehound? A culinary disciple? You’re building a complex personality, an expression of who you are and what you like to do. With your device in hand, the results will set you on a path to explore, dream about and share the places that are important to you and your friends.
Compare with friends:
Can you guess which personality best describes the people closest to you? Invite anyone you want to get to know better—as you play, you’ll find out which relationships share the strongest bond—and get recommendations on where you should go together and the best activities for your combined personality.
Get smart recommendations on the go:
Every single recommendation on Trazzler is an unforgettable experience, submitted by a community of smart travelers and carefully selected by our editors. We started from scratch with mobile reading in mind. There is no rehashed content, just short well-written articles contributed by real writers and local experts who visited a place, loved it, and took our challenge to write about it. You are sure to find secret places, even in your own backyard.
The Trazzler App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore.
We’re working on a new Lists feature and would love your feedback. Trazzler’s editors make a lot of lists based on different themes, now writers (and readers) can do the same. We think it will make browsing a lot more fun and personal—and may also give you a way to better showcase your work. Example: Best Junk Food
It’s easy to build a list… just Save any trip on Trazzler, then create a List and curate your own mini-guide. A mural tour of San Francisco, best swimming holes in the world, trips you’ve written about a particular area… you tell us.
To create a List, just save any trip, then follow the instructions.
We’d love to improve this feature. Please let us know what you think. Our next steps will be based on your recommendations.
Thanks,
Megan, Adam, and the Trazzler Team
Photographer: European Citizen»>Go to Slideshow: Wine Trails
While the prospect of travel may inspire your inner Apollonian to fantasize, scheme, and dream, once on the ground, there is immense pleasure in letting a well-laid plan play itself out in a hedonistic, Dionysian fashion. A bit ahead of the now-trendy agritourism curve, wine trails developed as rural outposts of flavor and culture, providing travelers with stimulating opportunities for inebriation.
Even if you know little about grapes or abhor the fussy dissection of flavors and terroir—you can learn so much just by exploring the leafy landscape of wine—digging into the dirt, smelling the vines under the beating sun, going underground to contemplate the almost holy ritual of controlled fermentation, and pondering the effects of a cold night, southern exposure, altitude, or soil composition on acidity and flavor.
—Megan Cytron, Trazzler Editor
Sponsored by
Photographer: Mike Nielsen»>Go to Slideshow: State Parks
America’s 58 national parks are expansive and glamorous, gracing calendars and inspiring countless cross-country road trips. In their shadow, over 3,675 state parks carry on in relative obscurity, hiding an almost unbelievable variety of landscapes, ecosystems, and wildlife habitats. The masses mostly head to the big-name parks, leaving these smaller state alternatives on the fringes, often without another soul in sight.
During this particular economic crisis, the future (and funding) of state parks looks as precarious as that of the wildlife they harbor. As cities sprawl into megalopolises, even during tough economic times, it seems short-sighted to abandon the few unspoiled places that remain—especially considering that America’s system of parks was developed by forward-thinking leaders during even rougher patches. In the midst of the Civil War, in 1864, a vocal group of advocates convinced Abraham Lincoln to set aside the land of Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias for the state of California. And the well-conceived parks infrastructure that we take for granted today was a product of the Civilian Conservation Corps program of the 1930s.
Given the embarrassment of riches that America enjoys (our parks make up 10% of the protected land in the world), it wasn’t easy to narrow it down to sixteen. In addition to the slideshow above, you can read about many more state parks here: State Parks Close to You
Photographer: Fiordiligi0127 »>Go to Slideshow: Flower Travel
It takes a special kind of traveler to plan a trip around a phenomenon as capricious and fragile as seasonal flowers. As spring arrives in Japan, many foreign tourists will stay away this year, but—despite the recent series of terrible tragedies—Japanese meteorologists are still tracking the “cherry blossom front” as it slowly pushes north over the islands, waking the countryside from the slumber of winter.
The metaphor of a spring emerging from a cold winter and the ephemeral nature of beauty and life have always had a particular resonance for poets, artists, dreamers, spiritual sorts, nature lovers, and even politicians. Over the past century, the country of Japan has sent tens of thousands of flowering ambassadors around the world, creating gardens of cherry-blossom peace and beauty that bloom every spring in unlikely places like Newark, Toronto, Philadelphia, Macon, GA, and Istanbul. Even a town of serious workaholics like Washington, DC takes a brief pause to embrace the hanami spirit with plenty of suit-clad serious types lounging carefree for a few spring days in the shadow of the Jefferson memorial under the pink clouds of falling petals. It’s hard to imagine a more pure cultural impulse than sharing beauty—from one culture to another or the communal experience of crowds of people letting nature interrupt their daily routines.
Here are 14 places where flowers dominate the landscape, remind us of the endless cycles of nature, and command the attention of even the most distracted humans, at least for a short time. »Go to Slideshow
Photographer: José Luis Ametller »Go to Slideshow: Settings for Novels
Novels make particularly good travel companions. They make even better travel guides. A well-written book is an envelope of space and time. Inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity, the literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin called the fictional universe of well-conceived novels “‘chronotopes,’ the places where the knots of narrative are tied and untied.” What better way to explore a novel’s “timespace” than to transport yourself there and read your way through it?
Travel writing tends to skate on the surface of a place, while novels reveal much deeper truths. For any literary traveler, it’s a thrill to seek out those settings where the real world has carried on, yet the fictional world is still palpable. Often, the imaginary—the Macondos and Yoknapatawphas—eclipse the here and now—a testament to the writer’s power to transform the ordinary into the eternal.
»Go to Slideshow
—Megan Cytron, Editor of Trazzler
Sponsor: CODA Cristina Quattrone
Photographer: ConstantineD»Go to Slideshow: Abandoned Mines in the American West
As early as the 1920s, roadtrippers headed “out west” to explore the ruins of America’s boom-and-bust 19th-century gold rush. Alongside successful mines, towns sprang up in the middle of nowhere in a matter of months and many crashed just as precipitously when the easy gold or silver was exhausted. Today, there are over 500,000 abandoned mines in the US. Most are on private property, blocked up, or too dangerous to venture into, but others have been shored up enough to visit.
Seeking them out is a good excuse to explore some of the most remote, forgotten parts of America, deep inside state parks or down long dirt roads. These places tell the story of a turning point in American history; just at the time when the federal government was using the myth of “manifest destiny” to justify expansion of the US territory from coast to coast, another myth—that of a real El Dorado—drove the frenetic settlement, economic exploitation, and industrialization of the wild western expanse.
Countless movies and novels have delved into the diverse cast of characters who populated the mining towns and prospecting camps scattered throughout the American West. Their free-wheeling debauchery and restlessness is in stark contrast with the empty quiet of the skeletal present-day ruins left behind.
»Go to the slideshow
—Megan Cytron, Editor of Trazzler
