take me home or loose me forever! top gun spoof with Boeing 787 vs. Airbus A380 airplanes
via gadling
[youtube=http://youtu.be/gFrKzbgwgQs]
Let’s do this. Goose and Maverick are back on the (computer) screen in this new spoof from 3D-Aviation. The team took classic footage from Top Gun and re-worked the plane shots to feature a 787 and A380 completing dastardly feats of daring, including spins, turns, and “goosing” the tower.
Filed under travel
Sure we all love traveling but is your passion verging on addiction?! Check out these tell-tale signs and see if you are, in fact, a travel addict!
By Katie via Tripbaseblog
I love to travel…. loads but I also like staying in one place.
Some people, however, take their passion to a whole new level.
If you really really love to travel all the time then this article is for you!
Check out these 21 tell-tale signs and see if you are, in fact, a travel addict!
1. Your travel bucket list is 4 pages long
2. Coming home is more like a vacation from traveling
3. On your home-ward flight, you’re already planning your next trip
4. Once home, you’re already booking your next trip
5. Staying in the same place for more than one week makes you fidgety
6. Films make you want to travel
7. Books make you want to travel
8. Music makes you want to travel
9. Every day brings a new destination idea
10. You work to fund your next trip
11. 9 to 5 makes you feel like you’re in prison
12. You don’t wait around for people but take off on your own
13. Thinking about all the places you haven’t been makes you feel anxious
14. When you’re not traveling you fantasize about traveling
15. You say you could stop traveling whenever you want
16. You’re happiest on the road
17. You’re constantly counting countries and continents
18. Booking flights gives you an amazing high
19. The high street in your hometown plunges you into despair
20. You’ve tried living a stationary life many times but you always fall off the wagon
21. Your parents have suggested you seek professional help
How did you score?? 15 out of 21 and we’d recommend you join our Travel Addicts help group!!
If you liked this you might also like: 25 Signs that You’re a True Citizen of the World
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By Jess Lowry via Lonely Planet
Art and travel go hand-in-hand. Local galleries can capture the history and creative culture of a destination, but if you’re looking for a gallery with a difference next time you hit the road, why not check out the local tattoo culture instead? Lonely Planet staffer and tattoo aficionado Jess gets under the skin of tattoo tourism:
Visiting tattoo shops and learning about the people who have expanded the art form can be as inspiring as visiting any art museum. It has been said that tattoos are 5000 years old and are as diverse as the people who have them.
Travelling for a tattoo follows a rich legacy of trend-setters. There are many places that still use ancient tattooing traditions and these might inspire you to travel for a piece of their traditional art. Destinations known for their ritual tattooing include Tahiti, Hawaii,Japan, New Zealand, Borneo, Thailand and Samoa. Whether you get a tattoo for fashion, tradition or commemoration, there are many reasons to seek out an artist who you admire. Many people choose to travel to a specific tattoo conference where they can get inked by a world-renowned artist while immersed in all things tattoo. (There is some debate about whether you get a good bargain at a convention as most artists raise their rates due to demand, but the costs can be rationalized considering you’ll presumably have the tattoo for life.)
Tattoo culture has a rich history of outlaws, misfits and travellers. Bert Grimm, the ‘grandfather of old school’, tattooed Bonnie and Clyde, the famous outlaws who travelled the Central US with their gang during the Great Depression. It’s unknown exactly where and when Grimm tattooed the famous pair, but Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo was the oldest continually operated tattoo parlour in the continental US. If you’re taking a road-trip up the Pacific Northwest it’s fascinating to check in at locations that shaped the industry as we know it today. You can pay your tributes at Seaside, Oregon where Grimm is buried, or you can stop by the shop he was best known for running, which was located in an amusement park called Nu Pike in Long Beach, CA. (The tattoo shop was under threat of condominium developers but it was purchased in 2004 by tattoo artist Kari Barba and two silent partners and still operates as a tattoo studio today.)
The highly popular exhibition Skin & Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor that was staged at the Seaport Museum in Philadelphia beautifully illustrated the journey of tattoos from the east to the west; the melding of travel tales and art. Sailors didn’t just carry cargo from port to port; they also brought new forms of artistic expression on their skin.
So, want to blend tatts with travel? Here are some places of interest:
Top-rated international conventions
A short list of internationally renowned tattooists:
Other great resources to check out:
Filed under travel
By Lyndsey Matthews via Travel + Leisure
There’s more to admire than the passing scenery. Have your camera ready when you pull into these beautiful train stations.
Norway's Flam Railway features a steep climb through fjord country
By Randall H. Duckett via National Geographic Traveler
Much of European train travel is about efficiency and comfort—punctually leaving and arriving and having a cozy seat or sleeper compartment in which to devour the latest issue of the Economist. But rail travel in the United Kingdom and on the Continent is also about experience: gaping out the window at Alpine glaciers, savoring gourmet cuisine in a restored last-century dining car. Accordingly, our ten favorite European trains don’t necessarily offer the fastest journeys—just the most memorable. All aboard!
Route: Montreux to Broc, Switzerland
Duration: 9 hours, 45 minutes, roundtrip
www.raileurope.com
This charming train running in summer and fall climbs from Montreux overlooking Lake Geneva to the medieval town of Gruyères, population 1,600, home to the cheese of the same name. Tour the cheese factory and the local castle, have lunch, then reboard the train and continue on to Broc. There you’ll bus to the Cailler-Nestlé chocolate factory, tucked between Lake Gruyères and mountain peaks, for free samples, before making the return trip.
Route: Chur, Switzerland, to Tirano, Italy
Duration: 4 hours, 14 minutes
www.raileurope.com
This narrow-gauge, vertigo-inducing train takes on seven-percent inclines, a 360-degree spiral, 55 tunnels, and 196 bridges—reaching an apex of 7,391 feet and then descending 5,905 feet before coming to a stop. The word “express” refers to the availability of short-notice seat reservations, rather than the train’s velocity as it courses through the Alps south from Switzerland’s oldest town to a charming Italian town of just under 10,000 people. Part of the route is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Route: Paris to Madrid
Duration: 13 hours, 30 minutes
www.elipsos.com
Leave Paris in the evening, enjoy a three-course dinner and the increasingly rural scenery, slumber to the soothing rhythm of the rails, and wake the next day as you arrive in Madrid, rested and ready to tour the third-most-populous city in the European Union. Grand class includes a welcome drink, gourmet dinner, breakfast, and an in-room bathroom with shower.
Route: Inverness, Scotland, to Gwynedd, Wales
Duration: 15 days
www.britishheritagepass.com/castles
Discover the United Kingdom’s historic fortresses on this itinerary combining a two-week BritRail pass with the Great British Heritage pass. You’ll get entry to 580 attractions, as you hop off for local touring. Start in Inverness, Scotland, near Loch Ness, to tour Urquhart Castle. Continue south to Stirling Bridge, where William Wallace triumphed over the English in 1297, and on to Edinburgh Castle. English sights include Dover Castle, with its wartime tunnels. In Gwynedd, Wales, tour Caernarfon Castle, a World Heritage site where the investiture of Prince Charles was held.
Route: Moscow to Vladivostok, Russia
Duration: 19 days
www.trans-siberia.com
This fabled route, an icon of Russian culture, crosses eight time zones to connect the Russian capital with a port on the Pacific Ocean. On board, poor mingle with rich, young with old, foreigners with locals. Social barriers disappear as passengers share a unique rail experience—and shots of $3-a-liter vodka. You can book a private car via a tour operator for added comfort; schedule any number of side excursions from trekking and scuba diving to city tours.
Route: Flam to Myrdal, Norway
Duration: 1 hour
www.visitflam.com
A must-do on any tour of fjord country, the Flam Railway, rising from a village on the shores of Aurlandsfjord, mounts a steeper climb than any other non-cog, normal-gauge railroad in the world. In just 12 miles, the train climbs over 2,838 feet to reach the mountain plateau of Myrdal in under an hour. See the Rjoandefossen waterfall with a free drop of 459 feet, and the Kjosfossen waterfall, plunging 305 feet, where the train makes a photo stop during the summer.
Route: Munich to Nuremberg, Germany
Duration: 1 hour
www.bahn.de
Want to go fast? This high-speed wonder zooms you between two historic Bavarian cities at speeds up to 199 miles an hour. “It’s amazing to watch the landscape change so quickly,” says Gillian Seely, a Boston resident who traveled widely by rail while living in Europe for 22 years. “The train is completely quiet inside,” she says. “Vibrations are barely enough to cause ripples in your strong German coffee.” In December, visit various German cities via the ICE rail network to take in traditional Christmas markets selling seasonal foods, handmade gifts, and gluhwein, a mulled spiced wine.
Route: London to Venice
Duration: Two days, one night
www.orient-express.com
Step aboard the VSOE, as the train is known, and the calendar turns back to the 1920s and ’30s, the golden age of rail on the Continent. The operator spent $16 million restoring 35 sleeping cars to their original art deco sophistication; passengers are expected to dress elegantly for dinner: at a minimum, suit and tie for men and the equivalent for women; black tie and gowns encouraged. Awake to the sight of the snowcapped Alps and learn the story behind each of the restored carriages.
Route: Belgrade, Serbia, to Bar, Montenegro
Duration: 10 hours, this leg
www.raileurope.com
Explore the heart of the former Yugoslavia via a Balkan Flexipass (which offers unlimited travel for five, ten, or 15 days through Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey). Start in Belgrade, with its glitzy all-night club scene, hop off at any of various stops to shop or overnight, then board a later train to continue on to sleepy Bar, an ancient town influenced by various conquering cultures on the sun-swathed Adriatic. “Relax, and budget extra time for the inevitable delays,” says Chris Deliso, a travel writer who lives in Macedonia. “The trains are run-down, and the local characters you meet are salt-of-the-earth types.”
Route: London to Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: 8 days (including stays in Budapest and Istanbul)
www.danube-express.com
At the top of the food chain among European trains is the Danube Express, a private train with classical elegance, modern conveniences, and fine dining. On this route, which begins in Budapest after your flight from London, you penetrate the heart of Transylvania and enjoy a walking tour of the medieval town that was the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler. Eventually you approach Istanbul along the Bosporus, where the Topkapi Palace marks the skyline.
Gilded dining cars and white-glove service help us remember the golden era of train travel
Credit: Courtesy of Rovos Rail
Credit: Flickr/Steve BowbrickBy Nicole Campoy-Leffler via The Daily Meal
Back before we could book flights from an app on our iPhone in the cab on the way to the airport, there was train travel. And while the days of getting dressed for dinner and retreating, post-Cognac, to a smoking lounge may have largely been replaced by modern day conveniences (non-smoking airplanes, frozen pizzas for one), there is one mode of transit still holding on to the true meaning of luxury travel — trains.
The romance of traveling by train now exists primarily because we don’t have to go that way, we can choose to. When traveling cross-country for business, for example, you’d probably not choose to take a multi-day train trip for a single day of meetings. Spending a week of your holiday staring at picturesque views rolling past, dining on gourmet meals in a sumptuous setting, and sleeping in an over-sized, fully decked out train suite, on the other hand, is a perfect way of enjoying your journey as well as your destination.
Of course, not all trains can offer the gilded extravagances of South Africa’s Rovos Rail. Commuters in the U.S. are lucky if the “dining car” (or cart) hasn’t run out of milk by the time they’re ordering a morning coffee. But book a ticket on the Royal Canadian Pacific railway, and enjoy superbly crafted meals with well-thought-out wine pairings at dinner before pulling the red and gold curtains closed and tucking into bed in your cozy sleeper suite.
Likewise, not all views enhance a train trip. That’s securely not the case when riding The Ghan railway in Australia. The Australian outback provides an unparalleled backdrop for the green and gold dining car’s meals — no matter how fast you’re powering through it.
If you think about it, trains are the most glamorous way of having breakfast in one port, lunch in another, and dinner in yet another. Plus, you get to skip the TSA.
Click here to see the 10 Luxury Trains Around the World Slideshow
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