Posts tagged travel

We just posted the winners of our Winter Parks and Weekly Worldwide writing and photography contests. Thanks so much to everyone who entered, we really enjoyed seeing and reading about your cold-weather explorations (even the hardcore snow kiting and ice climbing—brr). If our furry oracle is correct, we’ll be looking forward to at least six more weeks of the underappreciated, ethereal quiet beauty of parks in the winter.

• Winter Parks: 1st Prize Photography: Alex Eriksen 
• Winter Parks: 1st Prize Writing: René Jasper
• Weekly Worldwide: 1st Prize Photography: Rachel Chang 
• Weekly Worldwide: 1st Prize Writing: Stephen Drum 

• Writing 1st Place: $50 Contract
• Photography 1st Place: $50 Contract

• Deadline: February 8, 2012

In the meantime, we’re busily judging the California Wine Contest and last week’s Weekly Worldwide and will make an announcement by 2/8/12.  Thanks so much for the great turnout!

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:

• The check-in market is cornered. The world doesn’t need another Foursquare clone.
• Unedited reviews: Sometimes useful, often faked or spammy, almost always demoralizing to wade through. See TripAdvisor or Yelp’s four stars and a rant.
• Guidebooks/newspaper travel sections: Based on an antiquated, elitist model that relies on a handful of people (often just passing through or relaying  hearsay) to cover a huge geographic space. Prone to obsolescence, inaccuracies, shilling, and sameness.

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: 

• our editors scouted it out and loved it.
• a person scouted it out and loved it and our editors agreed.
• a person scouted it out and loved it—our editors disagreed, but smart people convinced them they were wrong.
• an expert (like a tourism bureau or local blogger) suggested it and our editors agreed.

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.

Photographer: Fritz Berlin Fan

»Go to Slideshow: 11 “People’s History” Places

Hotels are places of transgression. While there doesn’t appear to be a medical term for people who suffer from a fear of hotels, there’s something about these transitional spaces, teeming with intimate human moments, that can make us feel a bit uneasy. Hitchcock knew this—his sketchy, rootless characters breezed in and out of hotels and boarding houses. In “Psycho” (and later Stephen King’s “The Shining”), the specter of an empty motel off the main road produced a sense of dread and foreboding.

If a hotel has been around long enough, it’s probably safe to say that someone died there at some point—and most don’t make much of a fuss about it. Some places, however, have a way of holding on to their sad stories—and embellish and fictionalize the facts to feed our morbid curiosity.

Each of these 15 hotels has a dark past—they are all, also, lovely places to spend a night, if not an eternity. Several are said to harbor ethereal remnants of the people who perished there, others bear physical scars from real violence, and a handful go down in infamy as the site of a messy, high-profile celebrity death.

• Lizzie Borden B&B in Fall River, MA
  
• Foulksrath Castle in Jenkinstown, Ireland
  
• Kenmore Inn is Fredericksburg, VA
  
• L’Hotel in Paris, France
  
• Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO
  
• Hotel Dalen in Telemark, Norway
  
• Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, CA
  
• Ballygally Castle in Northern Ireland
  
• Grand Hyatt in Taipei, Taiwan
  
• Hotel Coronado in Coronado, CA
  
• Chateau de Brissac in France
  
• Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, FL
  
• Three Crowns Hotel in Chagford, UK
  
• Bates Motel in Hollywood, CA
  
• Chelsea Hotel in NY, NY
  

While a visit to the home of a famous literary figure offers a peek at an eerie, lifeless space suspended in time, seeking out the public places where a writer wrote, drank and caroused tends to be a messier proposition. Life marches on in bars and cafes. Regimes fall. Neighborhoods change. New people take over. If you are lucky enough to find the place still in operation, you can never be sure what to expect.

It’s true that many of the world’s great literary haunts have been reduced to a tourist-trap cliché — just consider the countless European bars with dubious “Hemingway drank here” signs propped up outside. Some venerable salons were disbanded and commandeered for decades for some other use (like the communist occupation of Kafka’s coffeehouses in Prague). Others managed to stay afloat but couldn’t keep the intellectual spark alive or the market forces at bay. It’s enough to make a sentimental literature nerd somewhat despondent. Nostalgia aside, reading about these temples of debauchery and creativity and then making a pilgrimage to their present-day incarnations is sure to reveal a fascinating intersection of history, homage, mythology, memory and marketing.

And then there are the places that haven’t given up the ghost: like the creaking boozer on the edge of Hampstead Heath where Keats morbidly pondered his nightingale; the Oxford pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis plotted their modern-day take on mythology; or the Madrid coffeehouse where starving postwar writers ran up tabs and sipped free soda water while plotting their next act of literary subversion. Time has passed, writers have changed, but the gathering places still feel relevant.

Here are 13 that run the gamut. Papa Hemingway only appears once, so it’s obviously an incomplete list. Have you ever gone on a literary bender? In 50 or 100 years, where will the hallowed writer hangouts from the early 2000s be? Tell us

— Megan Cytron

Here’s the list:
Eating a highwayman’s feast at a historic pub in Hampstead, London
Raging with dead poets in the West Village, New York City
Imbibing with the spirits of sotted Spanish writers in Madrid
Drinking in the history of al-Fishawy coffee shop in Cairo
Quaffing ale With J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Oxford, England
Downing bourbons with Gatsby’s ghost in Louisville, Ky.
Hanging out with Henrik Ibsen in Oslo, Norway
Downing a pint at the Old Country’s oldest pub in Dublin

More:
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/cafe-savoy-in-prague-5-hlavn-msto-praha-cz
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/le-mouton-blanc-in-paris
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/bowery-poetry-club-in-new-york-ny
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/ye-olde-cheshire-cheese-in-city-of-london-greater-london-ec4a-3-gb
http://www.trazzler.com/trips/harrys-bar-bellini-in-venice-italy

From its charming coastal New England-style village to its forests of towering Redwoods, Mendocino County is a Northern California destination that combines the sea, the wilderness, romance, and outdoor adventure. The region is a playground for beachcombers and nature enthusiasts: there’s Van Damme State Park and Glass Beach, and sophisticated getaways from its quaint inns along the coast to its artisanal wineries.

If you are reading this blog, then you must be wondering why anyone would be crazy enough to launch a travel site start-up at the tail end of the summer of the staycation (how I loathe this term!). I don’t know about you, but personally I need the escape of travel more than ever before. I love my day-to-day life, but it’s intense and it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world really exists outside of the self-absorbed confines of Madrid.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a little house in “el pueblo más raro de Andalucía” (Andalusia’s weirdest town, as our friend who loaned us his apartment calls it). This place has zero tourist interest. When I plugged my laptop into a Franco-era outlet, my power cord caught on fire. Wifi? You’ve got to be kidding. Every evening families leave their front doors open and eat dinner. When you walk down the street, you can’t help but be a voyeur—it’s like peering into dozens of living dollhouses. When we went to the local public pool the kids flocked around us as if we were endangered animals in a zoo (my paleness is pretty freakish here). Every day, we drive through the dusty hills dotted with toros bravos to the windy, nearly abandoned beaches, look across at the dark mountains of Morocco, check out Roman ruins and white medieval towns perched on hills, eat sea anemones and reproductive organs from tuna from the Strait of Gibraltar. For a lot of people, this would be the vacation from hell and for us it’s the best one ever.

And, for me, that’s what Trazzler is about. So many other travel sites are essentially reference books with logistical information, tourist bureau propaganda, or an unedited, overwhelming morass of useful and useless information. Guidebooks rely on just a handful of undercompensated writers to do it all. When I started writing for Trazzler, I quickly realized that it was completely different from any other assignment. Here, a writer creates his or her own beat. There’s no pressure to write about places you don’t know or care anything about. No need to create trips that appeal to everyone. Here you’ll find what slips through the cracks everywhere else—those secret places that you might only tell your friends about… those defining travel moments that reside in your memory long after you have returned home.

What we want to do is create a world of travel possibilities. Each Trazzler Trip transports you to a very specific place and moment. Real human beings are behind each and every trip, carefully choosing the photo, writing the copy, and editing it. You decide what appeals to you and what doesn’t. Trazzler is a savvy friend who will get to know your Travel Personality over time. You can use it as “virtual teleportation” (as Biz Stone imagined when the idea was hatched), travel therapy, a game, an escapist fantasy, or—we also hope—as a tool to learn about new ways to travel to one-of-a-kind spots and an outlet for your travel ruminations.

More later, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to the smart and creative people behind this site. I worked with Adam Rugel over twelve years ago at AOL, writing ad copy for everything from frozen steaks to the Weekly World News. He moved onward and upward to specialize in online travel sites (and I took the escape route into the world of freelance writing, design, and perpetual studentdom). Trazzler is the culmination of many years of experience, experimentation, inspiration, planning, and dreaming. It’s not going to be anything like anything else out there. And it’s just going to get better.

So sign up and take this crazy journey with us, then take a crack at writing your own trips. But, be warned, if you are really astute and analytical, we’ll rope you into helping us—we’re wily that way.  Let us know what you think.

—Megan Cytron

In 1995 I abandoned the hostel-hopping circuit for my first real job, at AOL in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Traveling was definitely more fun than working at AOL, so when a position came up with AOL Travel, I thought it would be better because of the “travel” in the title. The job had its moments, but I learned there was a great divide between “travel” and “traveling”.

I left AOL in 2002 itching to do something in travel that was fun. My friend Dave and I made several travel-related pilots for TV, including Bargain Travel Minute, Hostel Days and a bunch more. We spent some time in Los Angeles, had an agent at ICM, pitched a show to MTV — that was fun.

When I came back to San Francisco in 2004, I spent a year working at pre-podcasting company AudioFeast, then another at the podcasting pioneer Odeo. When Odeo morphed into Twitter, I continued to work in the office and eat the snacks, but I started working on my own project, 71Miles.

During my three-year hiatus from online travel, there was a lot of innovation and the creation of a number of new products, but almost all of it centered on search and price. Arbitrage can bring about useful results, but fun?

Trazzler is our attempt to bring at a much-needed dose of the fun of traveling into the world of online travel.