Roadtripping

Out-of-the-ordinary Valentine's Day trips

With Valentine’s Day two weeks away, have you decided how you’ll celebrate? Lonely Planet, publisher of guidebooks and online guides, suggests a romantic trip and has some out-of-the-ordinary recommendations. The Roadtripping blog will be on a non-romantic trip to Orlando (unless you count flying on a broomstick with Harry Potter as romantic) on Valentine’s Day, so will bow out of this discussion.

Here are Lonely Planet’s suggestions:

  *Canterbury, England, the setting for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer changed February 14^th forever in his Parlement of Foules — a dreamy 700-line poem with its narrator visiting Venus’s temple and a ‘parliament’ where birds choose their mates, on Valentine’s Day.

   *A drive through one of the California’s great secrets—a coastal ride north of San Francisco from Sonoma County to Mendocino’s rugged peninsula. It’s almost completely undeveloped with no stoplights to break up the bliss.

   *Cartagena, Colombia — where Gabriel García Márquez supposedly based Love in the Time of Cholera (the town is never explicitly named in the book) — is one of the most romantic cities in the Americas.

   *Catch the Love Train to Churchill, Manitoba. The two-day trip up from Winnipeg is nicknamed the ‘love train’ by some, as it’s particularly popular with Japanese couples who believe the Northern Lights help with fertility.

   *Take a soak in one of Iceland’s many geothermal pools — less clichéd than a heart-shaped tub.

   *Head to Valentine’s Day capitol of the U.S. — Valentine, Nebraska — and partake in the Feb. 14 coronation of the King and Queen of Hearts.

Go here for the detailed list.

Road trip on a luxury motorcoach

I took a road trip of a different sort last week: I let someone else do the driving. I was headed to Orlando, and as much as I enjoy a leisurely drive, I’ve tired of the sameness along Florida’s Turnpike and the long drive home when I’m weary.

My driver? Red Coach, a luxury motorcoach that has been running to select cities out of Orlando for a little more than a year and a half. I caught the bus at the Fort Lauderdale airport; a little more than 3 ½ hours later, I was in Orlando. My cost: $50 one way.

What makes it a luxury bus is that it has only 27 seats, two seats on one side of the aisle, a single seat on the other. There is lots of leg and elbow room, free Wi-Fi and an electrical outlet so I could listen to music, read my iBook, take notes and periodically check my e-mail without running down the battery of my iPad. There are no prohibitions against taking liquids on the bus, so I packed a bottle of water and a snack. There’s a tiny restroom at the back, no sink or running water, with anti-bacterial foam instead.

The bus was only about one-third full, so we all had our choice of seats (although we reserved specific seats when we made our reservation).

Definitely more comfortable than a coach seat on an airplane or Greyhound – not to mention a nicer ambiance. Price for the same trip on Greyhound: $32 to $72.

My complaint: "The Great Outdoors" was playing on small overhead screens, and even though I had U2 turned up as loud as I could take it through my earbuds, it wasn’t enough to block the sound of John Candy screaming as he fell off his water skis. Next time I’ll bring noise-blocking headphones.

Red Coach travels to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando, West Palm Beach, Fort Pierce, Naples, Ocala, Tallahassee and Gainesville. In Orlando, the ride ended at the Red Coach station near the airport, with free shuttle service to the airport.

Would I take it again? You bet.

 

Indianapolis and the Super Bowl

If you’re going to next week’s Super Bowl game in Indianapolis, you should already have made your lodging arrangements. But what are you going to do when you get there, besides hang out at Super Bowl Village and the NFL Experience interactive theme park? I mean, you can only take so much football, right?

In my one trip to Indianapolis I watched Al Unser Jr. win the closest Indy 500 ever, and saw Paul Newman. I didn’t have time to do much else, but after that memorable a day, didn't really need to. If I were to go to Indianapolis again though, I'd  try the notoriously horseradish-hot shrimp cocktail at St. Elmo Steak House, check out White River Gardens, and visit the almost-new Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Maybe I’ll read Slaughterhouse Five again.

If you’re looking for suggestions for Super Bowl weekend – or a trip to Indianapolis any time – check out this article on The Miami Herald website.

 

Eight don't-miss shows at American art museums

Readers of the Roadtripping blog know that one of my favorite road trip stops is at art museums. My own favorites are modern and contemporary art, but I browse it all. My last museum stop, just a few weeks ago, was at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, where I spent quality time with Baroque tapestries by Peter Paul Rubens. (Bet you didn’t know he did tapestries. Neither did I.) I’m especially fond of temporary exhibitions, in which a curator has rounded up art from other museums and private collectors to illustrate a theme.

Fodor’s, publisher of destination guides and all sorts of “travel intelligence,” has come up with a list of don’t-miss shows worth traveling for in 2012, from Annie Leibovitz at the Smithsonian (at the top of my list) to Winslow Homer at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Don’t panic – you’ve got plenty of time. Only the Leibovitz exhibition has opened so far. The shows are listed in order of opening, which run through September, when the Homer exhibit opens. Here's the list.

Photo: Rubens tapestries at the Ringling.

100 Dishes to eat in Alabama before you die

Three years ago I was planning a two-week road trip through the South, an enormous loop that would take me from Miami to Mobile and New Orleans, up the Natchez Trace, across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, across the bottom of Illinois, through Paducah and Bowling Green, Ky., to Nashville and Knoxville, Tenn., to Asheville, N.C. and back home by way of Greenville, S.C., Atlanta and Macon.

I wasn’t about to subsist on fast-food burgers and chicken. I wanted real Southern food – traditional or nouvelle.

I started my research at Mobile, about which I knew nothing, and found the Alabama Tourism Dept.’s list: “100 Dishes to eat in Alabama before you die.” It felt like I had struck gold. About a dozen dishes were listed under Mobile, and I settled on oysters “fried, stewed or nude” at Wintzell’s, a restaurant that has been around since 1938. I had a dozen oysters and fried green tomatoes with crawfish sauce and was happy I’d crossed one of those 100 dishes off that list.

Today (Friday) the Alabama Tourism Dept. is scheduled to unveil its updated list at its website. I was glad to learn that because I’m planning another road trip this spring that will take me through Mobile again, and I think I ought to spread my money around, try a different restaurant this time. I checked out the website yesterday, thinking maybe I’d get a sneak peek, but it still had the 2010 list posted. What I did find, however, was a list of 25 can’t-miss Alabama food festivals for 2012. I’m already thinking about re-routing my road trip to take in more of Alabama and a couple of those festivals.

Universal Orlando will add two new attractions

Theme park operators know they need to keep updating their attractions and adding new ones to keep visitors coming back – and to keep them from going to their competitors.

Universal Orlando, anticipating that its big jump in revenue from the hugely popular Wizarding World of Harry Potter would start to level off, on Wednesday announced two new attractions that will open this year: a night-time show that will project scenes from Universal Pictures movies onto waterfall “screens” and a daily parade featuring floats, Universal characters and hundreds of street performers.

Both spectacles bear at least some similarity to attractions at Disney parks.

Universal’s Cinematic Spectacular, which celebrates the 100^th anniversary of Universal Pictures, will be narrated by Morgan Freeman and displayed over the lagoon at Universal Studios, surrounded by fountains and pyrotechnics. Running 18 to 20 minutes, it will include scenes from such classic films as Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, Jaws, E.T. and To Kill a Mockingbird – and one animated film, Despicable Me.

For Universal, which unlike Disney does not have regular fireworks shows, the driving force was “to create a moment at the end of the day where families can gather together” and experience the Universal brand, said Jim Timon, senior vice-president for entertainment.

 “We asked, what’s the coolest way we can show Universal’s 100-year history, a way that will be awe-inspiring?”

The answer, he said, is a cutting-edge, high-definition projection technique using three water screens measuring 30 feet by 30 feet. The scenes will appear on both sides of the screens, so guests can watch from all around the lagoon.

The show has some parallels with Disney’s World of Color at California Adventure Park, which projects Disney characters and scenes from its animated movies onto walls of water created by fountains. However, the Universal show uses a different technology with scenes from live-action films.

The daily parade – which will be Universal’s first parade not associated with a holiday or special event like Mardi Gras – will be led by a “gargantuan travel machine” featuring Gru, his daughters and the minions from Despicable Me, along with Gru’s invention, the shrink ray gun, Timon said. It will feature units with three other groups of characters: SpongeBob SquarePants and the other characters from Bikini Bottom, Nickelodeon’s Dora and Diego, and  E.B. from the movie Hop. It will be accompanied by hundreds of street performers, such as dancers and – along with E.B. – drummers.

Universal announced in December that it would expand the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which opened in June 2010 at Islands of Adventure. However, its executives have not released any details of what the expansion might include or how long construction might take, and Wednesday they did not say anything about it.

They  did, however, outline a timetable for the opening of several new or refurbished attractions that had previously been announced:

*Blue Man Group will have a new show focusing on “the world’s obsession with cutting-edge technology,” opening in February at Universal CityWalk.

*Hollywood Drive-in Golf, a 36-hole miniature golf experience, will open in February at Universal CityWalk.

*The Amazing Adventures of Spider-man will close briefly, then reopen with new technology and an upgraded set in March at Islands of Adventure.

*A new ride, Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem, already under construction, will open this summer at Universal Studios.

*Universal’s water park, Wet ‘n Wild, will open an interactive family play area this summer, with 15 water slides and more than 100 soakers, jets, waterfalls and water cannons.

The new parade will start this spring, and Universal’s Cinematic Spectacular will open this summer.

Renderings courtesy of Universal Orlando

Memphis barbecue - yum!

The “pig sandwich” – chopped pork shoulder and cole slaw on a bun. I’m drooling already.

I was trolling the Internet, looking for ideas about quirky places to go during a trip to Memphis this spring. (Don’t even mention Graceland. Been there. Love Elvis’s music, hate his decorating taste.) But I hit pay dirt when I found out that the restaurant that invented the “pig sandwich” back in 1922 is in Memphis.

Leonard’s Pit Barbecue has moved twice, but long-time customers say the food is still the same — ribs with dry rub, catfish, onion rings, BBQ bologna sandwich, and a pig sandwich made with the “brown” meat from the outside of the shoulder.

Elvis sometimes hung out at Leonard’s, where his favorite was the pig sandwich, so despite his questionable taste in other sandwiches, The King clearly got something right.

Here’s an interview with the current owner, Dan Brown, who started working at Leonard’s as an onion slicer in 1962 and bought the place in 1993.

Leonard’s went straight to the top of my what-to-do-in-Memphis list.

 

Spotting Florida's winter wildlife

For anyone taking any kind of road trip in Florida in the next month, this is the time of year when manatees seeking warmer water congregate inland or closer to shore, when right whales migrate along north Florida's Atlantic coast, and when migratory birds stop in the Sunshine State for a few months. In this article, Bonnie Gross tells where to look for these seasonal appearances.

Cruises: What do passengers want?

If you’re a cruiser, you may have wondered how the trip you’re planning stacks up against what cruises other people are taking. According to the not-necessarily-scientific survey of queries at CruiseCompete.com, an online travel agency, favorite cruise ships are Royal Caribbean’s Oasis and Allure of the Seas – the world’s biggest cruise ships, sailing out of Fort Lauderdale. Among the luxury brands, the new Oceania Marina and Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 and Queen Victoria (which are a little more luxurious than premium cruise ships but not quite luxury ships) are favorites.

Favorite cruises? On the mainstream/premium cruise lines (Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, Princess, Celebrity, Holland America), it’s the Caribbean. On the luxury cruise lines (Seabourn, Silversea, Crystal, Regent, Oceania, Cunard, Azamara), it’s the Mediterranean.

So it’s not surprising that in the first category, the favorite ports are the Bahamas, Cozumel and the U.S. Virgin Islands. For luxury cruisers, it’s Greece, Italy and Turkey.

A caveat here about the survey: It is based on queries placed by the agency’s prospective cruisers, not necessarily the cruises they actually take. (How many times have you gone to an online travel agency and asked about the price for various cruises, just to see what you could afford?) You couldn’t call these fantasy cruises, because people aren’t just asking about the high-end trips. But the numbers are large enough to suggest they’re a fairly accurate sampling of customers’ interests: an average of more than 25,000 cruise quotes per month.

Detailed results follow:

Road trip attraction: The Washington Monument

Somehow I kept missing out on a ride to the top of the Washington Monument.

Each time I made a trip to Washington D.C., the monument would be on my must-see list. Each time my efforts were frustrated. Sometimes it was closed for renovations. Other times I was late in trying to reserve a pass.

There's so much to see in Washington. I visited the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments at night — the best time to see them. I walked along the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, spent time at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, toured the Capitol. I visited the National Archives, a couple branches of the Smithsonian, the National Art Gallery, the U.S. Botanic Garden.... Well, you get the idea. I didn't feel that I was missing out by not visiting the Washington Monument because there was always something else I wanted to do.

Two years ago, I made plans to visit a friend in Washington during a road trip from Miami to northern Maryland. When I told my friend I'd never been up the Washington Monument, she immediately reserved tickets for us, weeks in advance.

The day was gray, and the breeze carried a cold bite. At our assigned time, we got in line and took the elevator to the top. At 555 feet, the monument is the tallest structure in Washington D.C. The views were spectacular. Walking from window to window, I saw a 360-degree panorama. If you think of the Washington Monument as lying at the center of a giant plus sign, you can follow each arm out to one of the capital’s iconic sights: the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Monument, the Jefferson Monument.

Inside, 193 commemorative stones that were donated by states and other governments and groups are set in the interior walls.

I’m awfully glad I finally got to see it, because the monument has been closed since August due to earthquake damage. Congress allocated $7.5 million for repairs, and this week, David Rubenstein, a billionaire history buff, put up an equal amount. The combined $15 million will pay for basic repairs directly caused by the earthquake, but not water damage caused by the resulting cracks or further strengthening against future quakes. Work isn’t expected to begin before August and probably will take about a year. (Read about the donation and repairs.) 

Photos, from top: The Washington Monument, view of the Capitol from the top of the monument, Florida's stone in the monument, a worker points to light coming through a crack caused by last August's earthquake. First two photos by Marjie Lambert, last two photos by the National Park Service.