It’s the first week of Spring and my mind is on getting the hell out of here. There’s no legitimate reason – during Spring wherever you are is likely as good as anywhere else; shit renews everywhere – but it’s not just the surroundings, it’s the act of moving. For the next six months, days are longer than nights: hibernation is over and my legs need stretching.

Years ago, my wanderlust would be satisfied by Spring Break. Indeed, for me it was more about the travel than the destination. My freshman year, a friend of mine hopped in my 94 Saturn and drove almost 4,000 miles. We met a girl for some turkey bacon in West Virginia and left the next morning for New Orleans. There, it rained for two days straight, so while sitting on a stoop outside a grocery store drinking scotch from a bottle we said, “Let’s blow this joint.” We drove to Miami to visit relatives I hadn’t seen in 10 years. Along the way, we forgot to factor Alabama into our driving time, leaving us stranded in a park and ride halfway down the Florida turnpike at 1:00AM. We took nips of cough medicine to sleep, woke up the next morning, put our chairs in the upright position and drove on to Miami where we promptly fell asleep on South Beach.

From there we decided that Key West was too close to be ignored. We drove the road suspended over the Gulf, drank beer and ate conch on a pier sticking out into the water, bought two t-shirts for $5 and left. That’s still my favorite t-shirt.

We bypassed Miami on the way back leaving a message for our hosts that said, “Thanks for the pancakes.” Instead we opted for a stop at Disney World. We rented a wheelchair to get to the front of the lines and when returning it my friend stood up and walked away from the park claiming the Magic Kingdom had healed him.

We stopped to see my friend’s sister in North Carolina on the way home, sneaking into a jazz club for a few drinks merely by saying we weren’t underage. Probably because we didn’t feel underage at all. We felt like we’d just lived a lifetime without stopping for a day. That’s what movement will do for you. Ask me my favorite part of that trip and I’ll tell you coming home – because my legs were limber and tired and finally I could sit back and enjoy the weather.

- by Dan Murphy of [redacted] fame

Brangelina and the Zagat guides are doing their best to help New Orleans back on its way to hedonistic health, but a party like Mardi Gras really speaks for itself:



Hell and high-water were only going to keep the good times down so long; crowds this year are almost back up to pre-Katrina levels. MardiGrasDay.com has the lowdown on all the day’s happenings.

– “New Orleans sees recovery in Mardi Gras revelry” (Reuters)
– “Zagat’s New Guide to New Orleans” (Jaunted)
– Tagged: Carnival

Best Beaches
– “Top 10 beaches of the world” (Guardian)

Dallas for Art Buffs
– “Bohemia in the Big D” (LA Times)

French Country Retreats
– “The best of rural France” (Times of London)

Hanoi
– “The Awakening of Hanoi” (NYT)

New Orleans Dining
– “Preparing a Renaissance” (Washington Post)

Singapore
– “Another side of Singapore” (LA Times)

Tahiti’s Tuamotus
– “The Fragile Paradise That Tahiti Used to Be” (NYT)

Taiwan
– “Fantasy Island” (SF Chronicle)

This weekend there will simultaneous partying involving parades, masked mischief, beads, babes, and drinking going on all over the nominally catholic world. To get the skinny, take a gander at the latest episode of The Map, where Liza runs down some of the world’s top Carnival spots, and hits up a German “Karneval” party right here in New York. For some extra goodness, take a look at other carnival videos from our archive. Here’s a clip about Rio’s Samba school parade, and a list of the cities most famed for their pre-Lent madness:



– Basel, Switzerland
– Binche, Belgium
– Cologne, Germany
– Mobile, Alabama
– New Orleans, Louisiana
– Patras, Greece
– Port of Spain, Trinidad
– Rijeka, Croatia
– Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
– Sitges, Spain
– Viareggio, Italy
– Venice, Italy

Argentina
– “Maté obsession knows no class, age boundaries” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Brazil
– “In Lapa, Rio de Janeiro, the Samba Never Stopped” (NYT)
– “Discover ‘Black Gold’ in Ouro Preto, Brazil” (Houston Chronicle)

Car-less California
– “A freeway-free coastal journey” (LA Times)

Chile
– “Surreal Patagonia” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Mexico
– “Chiapas, Without Reservations” (Washington Post)

New Orleans
– “Back to New Orleans, Gently” (NYT)

Oslo, Norway
– “Norway’s grand prize” (LA Times)

Protecting World Heritage
– “Saving the Great Wall From Being Loved to Death” (NYT)
– “Wearing out our welcome” (LA Times)

Senegal
– “7 hours away” (Guardian)

Whatever your story of Thanksgiving travel woe this holiday weekend, the LA Times wants to remind you that it could always have been worse. In honor of the busiest travel days of the year, they asked their regular writers to weigh in with stories of their worst travel experiences. Their tales range from a snowstorm in the Canary Islands, to a two-week road trip through strip-mallandia in a 37-foot RV with plumbing problems, and will leave you feeling that nothing complements Turkey leftovers like a side of schadenfreude.

Travel Turkeys
– “37 feet of sheer agony”
– “Saving her clutch from their clutches”
– “Sure was a swell time (for her foot)”
– “Feeling flurries of panic”
– “If you can see it, you can eat it”
– “After ‘I do,’ trip doesn’t”
– “Honey, saddle up the spider”


Enjoy the long weekend everyone, I’ll be back with new posts on Monday.

What will become of the Big Easy remains anyone’s guess. Here are three versions of the city’s reality, in ascending order from grim to hopeful:

- ‘New Orleans is rotting away’ (Globe and Mail)

- ‘New Orleans in Photos: Then and Now’ (NYT)

- Mardi Gras – New Orleans

It was another round of the unlikely-destination Olympics this weekend with each paper trying harder than the last: Libya! Vanuatu! Angola! Honorable mentions go to the Times of LA and London, respectively, for pieces on car-cult tourism in Germany and love-cult tourism on Aphrodite’s isle, Cyprus.

On a more sober note, USA Today ran a piece encouraging renewed tourism to New Orleans since the the most-visited parts of the city – the Garden District, the French Quarter – were relatively unharmed by Katrina, and much needed tourist dollars will only spur redevelopment. A story from the San Francisco Chronicle, on the redevelopment of Kauai’s east shore, where visitorship has been low and at least one major property derelict since Hurricane Iniki blew through 14 years ago, shows what a long and hard road New Orleans has ahead of it.

- ‘French Quarter set to roll’ (USA Today)
- ‘Tripoli: Once a Pariah, Now a Hot Spot’ (NYT)
- ‘The Original Bali Hai’ (NYT)
- ‘In Post-War Angola, Glimpses of an Emerging Country’ (Washington Post)
- ‘Kauai’s east side comes into its own’ (SF Chronicle)
- ‘Temples of Vroom’ (LA Times)
- ‘Mighty Aphrodite’ (Times of London)