Travel

Travel Photo Thursday: Silhouette Shots

Travel Photo Thursday

When taking photos as a kid using the family’s Kodak “Brownie” box camera, I was told to always stand with the sun coming over my shoulder.  By doing so, the sunlight would bounce off of the subject of the photo—often a friend or relative—back through the camera’s lens and onto the film. The result: Brightly [...]

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Booking Yosemite for Summer or Fall

Destination Updates
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Computer: “We’re Sorry.” “We apologize. There are no available rooms for your desired dates. Please modify your dates or number of guests.” That’s the error message I got on Monday when I tried to book a week’s stay in Yosemite National Park for this June using the park concessionaire’s online reservation system.  It didn’t surprise [...]

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It’s YouTube Travel Movie Weekend!

YouTube Travel Movie Weekend
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You can be virtually transported to anywhere in the world by watching travel videos broadcast on YouTube Channels. But finding time during your busy work week to tune in for even a couple of minutes at a shot can be difficult, if not impossible! Now it’s “YouTube Travel Movie Weekend” on Tales Told From The [...]

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The Ultimate “Green” Rental Car

Travel Tips
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Interested in reducing the carbon footprint of your travels? One solution: Drive a “Green” rental car. Whose Got A “Green” Fleet? Hertz has a Green Collection which it says made up of “fuel efficient, environmentally-friendly cars that are both easy on the wallet and good for the environment” like the Ford Fusion, “smart fortwo,” the [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Building “Bites” and “Slices”

Travel Photo Thursday
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Two months ago in “Travel Photo Thursday: Sweating the Small Stuff” I said: “Sometimes getting ‘The Big Picture’ just isn’t going to happen when you are shooting photos. If you move back far enough to ‘get it all in’ you end up getting a lot of junk into the frame. This is particularly true when [...]

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Roll Over (in Your Grave) Beethoven!

Travel Essays
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You remember Beethoven (aka “Ludwig Van Beethoven”), right? He’s the guy that practically invented “Classical Music” way back in the day—beginning around the time George Washington became the first U.S. President. And we still listen to his stuff today. A least I do, sometimes. Unfortunately, about the time that Washington was stepping down and John [...]

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Travel Print Publications Get “Tagged”

App Reviews
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Photos in a newspaper or magazine travel story can inspire you to travel to a destination, but an video embedded in a story posted on a travel Website can instantly “transport” you there. Now there is an easy way for “print” to take you on such “virtual journeys” using Microsoft “Tags.”

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Travel Photo Thursday: A Sense of Place

Travel Photo Thursday
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Capturing A “Sense of Place” Through Words The phrase “a sense of place” can be defined in many ways. Here’s what an article in Wikipedia says about its importance: “Understanding how sense of place develops and changes is relevant to understanding how people interact with their environment…” In order to write A Sense of Place: [...]

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At The Movies: A Perplexing “Personnel Problem”

Movie Reviews
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The Human Resources Manager (2011) does not examine the skills of those who work in corporate personnel offices.  But the film’s premise is a “True/False” test of sorts. True: One character is a human resource manager. False: The person the movie is all about appears “in the flesh” on-screen. True: The employer is a corporation. [...]

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Travel Memoir: Remembering Budapest

Travel Essays
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“Hey, John!” “Hey, Dick!” “What’s up?” “On the run. Leaving for Budapest tomorrow.  Haven’t packed yet.” So went less than a minute of conversation with one of my travel writing mentors, John Flinn, former Travel Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Like friends walking down the street in opposite directions, we had just enough time [...]

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Travel By Movie: “The Sound of Revolution”

Travel By Movie
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Why do we go to “The Movies”? To be entertained, to be thrilled, to be frightened out our wits! And, of course, to be transported visually to places we’ve never seen before, or those where some of our fondest memories of life were born. But what about the “pre-show” stuff that we must sit through [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Natural Disasters, Signs of the Times

Travel Essays
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You’ve seen them all too often:  Newspaper photos, television film clips, and even YouTube videos, chronicling the the utter destruction caused when irresistible forces of nature—winds born of hurricanes, the sucking vortices of tornadoes, or the swirling waters of floods—overwhelm puny man-made structures. I have lived in California for over forty years.  It’s known as [...]

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At The Movies: On Location in “Yemen”

Movie Reviews
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Patricia Maxwell, the British Prime Minister’s press secretary, badly needs a “feel-good” Middle East news story to offset the endless daily reportage from that region about bombings, bloodshed, and dead bodies. She finds a potential savior in Sheikh Muhammed of the Yemen who has a plan to turn his desert fiefdom into a Garden of [...]

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Travel Tech: Best “Road Trip” Apps

App Reviews
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“Spring Break”?  Well, that’s come and gone.  But summer’s not that far off. When I was a kid, Dinah Shore exhorted Americans to “See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet.”  Whatever make of car you are driving today, and wherever you might be heading on your summer “road trip,” you won’t want to leave home without [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Enigmatic Images

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I said “Light is an essential ingredient in cooking up a photographic image.  No light, no photo, no how.” Today it’s “some light, some enigma, somehow.”

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Travel Canada: Rockies By Rail

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) In our last “Travel Canada” post we checked out riding the rails between British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies on the Rocky Mountaineer excursion trains.  Today we’ll look at another train that travels that route, Via Rail [...]

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Travel Canada: Rail Journeys

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Now that our “Travel Canada” series has completed its tour of British Columbia, it’s time to head to the Canadian Rockies and the gateway cities of Calgary and Edmonton which lie just to the east. While you [...]

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