Travel

Travel Canada: British Columbia Wines Come of Age

Destination Updates

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Bad Babies Baby Duck. Baby Deer. Cloyingly sweet and rather disgusting in taste, these were the British Columbia produced wines that I drank in Victoria, B.C. during a visit in 1974. Heck, there probably was  even “Baby [...]

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Travel Tech: All The World Before Your Very Eyes

Travel Tech

You’re on vacation, in an unfamiliar city, thousands of miles from home. What’s the weather going to be like today?  Just look straight ahead. Made a reservation for dinner, but can’t remember where?  Just look straight ahead. What time is it?  Your watch is in the other room, but just look straight ahead. Need to [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Reflections of A City

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I used a photo of Chateau de Chenonceau in France’s Loire Valley to illustrate how a photographer can use reflections of a building into a river on a cloudy day to create a a memorable shot.  This week, I’ll present another way of using reflections in a [...]

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Travel Canada: British Columbia’s Backroads

Travel Canada

(Tales Told From The Road” continues its series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Vancouver, B.C. is a terrific Pacific Northwest destination:  Mountains tumbling down to the sea on the north side, beautiful city parks, lively entertainment, and fine dining. Whistler, just north of Vancouver, was the site of the 2010 [...]

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Found in My Own Backyard: Bee Gardens in The Air

Found in My Own Backyard

Something is abuzz these days on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill. But it’s not some hot bit of socialite gossip. And it’s not hype about the latest and greatest thing since sliced sourdough bread. It’s all about bees and beer.

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Travel Canada: “Hanging Out” at Capilano River

Destination Updates

(Beginning today, Tales Told From The Road” will run a series of “Travel Canada” stories highlighting destinations and attractions from sea-to-sea.) Remember that scene from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom when Jones uses a machete-like sword to cut loose a rope bridge over a canyon, sending “The Bad Guys” flailing their limbs in [...]

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Stockholm: Bringing You There with iPads

Destination Updates

Earlier this week, I attended the 2012 Canada Meeting Marketplace in San Francisco where travel writers spend a day “speed dating” in 15-minute mini-meetings with Canadian tourist boards and travel providers to learn about the latest travel opportunities in Canada.  This year, many Canadian presenters used an iPad as a tool for visually conveying “What’s [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Looking Up

Travel Photo Thursday
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Since we’re bipedal creatures, when we’re walking about we are almost constantly looking directly ahead, or just a bit off to one side or the other.  We look the world in the same way when driving down the road in a car. Because of this habit of staring straight ahead, we tend to shoot nearly [...]

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Buying iPhone Apps and Music with an iTunes Gift Card

Travel Tech
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Getting Free Apps or Buying Them You just got a brand-new, shiny iPhone and you want to fill it up with music and those little software programs called “apps” before you head off on trip.  Downloading free apps directly from your iPhone or through iTunes on your computer  is straightforward and easy, and so is [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: “Capturing” Wildlife

Travel Photo Thursday
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Small digital point and shoot cameras are lightweight, simple to use, and easy to carry along when traveling.  They are usually adequate for shooting both cityscapes and landscapes, as well as portraits.  But when it comes to taking photos of wildlife, a DSLR with a long telephoto lens will outshine its smaller cousin. In the [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Who Stole My Sunshine?

Travel Photo Thursday
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Light is an essential ingredient in cooking up a photographic image.  No light, no photo, no how. As travelers, we want plenty of sunshine bouncing off the subjects of our photos, making the colors “pop” or casting shadows that lend an air of mystery to the image.  If the sun hides behind thick clouds, we’re [...]

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Travel Tip Tuesday: Keeping Your Bags “Locked” When Flying

Travel Tips

When you travel by air you want to make sure that no one but TSA can open your checked luggage and look through it.  One way to secure your bags—and the one I use— is with a TSA-approved lock. But the award-winning San Francisco Chronicle Travel Editor, Spud Hilton, takes this “low-tech” approach: (This video [...]

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Heather Poole: Come Fly with Her

Book Reviews
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On my wife’s birthday, I took flight attendant Heather Poole with me to Las Vegas. Five days later, I brought her home for a brief stay. And my wife didn’t mind at all. But Heather and I are finished.  You can have her.  And odds are, soon or later, you’ll find her at the newsstand [...]

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No 3G Network Where You Are? Here’s Why

Travel Tech
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Smartphone users in large U.S. cities may have no problem finding a cellular carrier’s 3G network, or even a newer, faster 4G LTE one, making uploading and downloading of data such as e-mail, photos, video and Webpages relatively fast.  But if you are “Out in The Sticks” you may be “out of gas” when I [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: There’s A Pattern to My Madness

Travel Photo Thursday
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The human eye is a wonderful, optical instrument.  It’s more sensitive and versatile than any of the still or video camera that either amateur or professional photographers lug along with themselves when traveling. Tie the eye to the brain and they will can make sense out of what they detect.  And one thing they are [...]

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It’s Not “Your Fathers” United Airlines Anymore

Travel Tech
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The United and Continental Airlines merger has just spawned significant changes to the way passengers “interface” electronically with the new, unified carrier. Navigating United’s Home Page United has put together this video to help you find your way around its redesigned Website which went “live” at 1:00 a.m. Central Standard Time on Saturday, March 3rd: [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: The Eye Has It

Travel Photo Thursday
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Four weeks ago in “Sweating the Small Stuff” on Travel Photo Thursday I pointed out that when getting “The Big Picture” proves impossible, or when the light is not optimal for shooting a grand landscapes photos, look for some small detail in the scene that will produce a memorable image. No doubt both at home [...]

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