Travel can often be interesting. This evening, I sat next to a retired executive returning home from two weeks panning for gold in Nome, AK. He mentioned that he had 25lbs of king crab in the cargo hold ($4.99/lb) just off the boat....
Dave Winer is in Santa Fe. The excellent India Palace restaurant features delicious East Indian cuisine. The Fodors says:
Even seasoned veterans of East Indian cuisine have been known to rate this deep-pink, art-filled restaurant among the best in the United States. The kitchen prepares fairly traditional recipes -- tandoori chicken, lamb vindaloo, saag paneer (spinach with farmer's cheese), shrimp biryani (tossed with cashews, raisins, almonds, and saffron rice) -- but the presentation is always flawless and the ingredients fresh. Meals are cooked as hot or mild as requested. Try the Indian buffet at lunch. AE, D, MC, V.
-Fodors
Gilles Vidal sends notice of a beautiful set of VR scenes from the Pyrenees: Pic du Midi.
David Haward Bain's latest: The Old Iron Road is an enjoyable book that describes his family's vacation tracing the route of the first transcontinental railroad.
Richard Seaman posted some beautiful photos of last week's historic spaceship one flight.
P. J. O'Rourke on Iwo Jima or Sulfur Island.
From February 19 to March 26 of 1945, 6,821 Americans and about 20,000 Japanese were killed in the fight for the island.
Mojave Airport, with its stands of refreshments (orange soda and doughnuts) is the site of Monday Morning's Spaceship One Launch. This will be the first privately funded initiative into orbit - paving the way for space tourism. Mike Hodgkinson updates us from Mojave. Mike Melvill is the pilot of this Burt Rutan designed craft. Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has backed the project with $20M.
Zermatt based Ulrich Inderbinen, who made his last Matterhorn ascent at 90, died Monday at the age of 103.
Watertown is a very wet place, as these photos show:
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The idea is to create a new tourist industry: "For the last 30 years, people have thought that space flight is only for a select number of government employees," said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and president of the X Prize Foundation, the competition's organizer. "We want to change that mind-set."
One of the 15 Ornamental groves in the gardens of Versailles will be reopened on June 12th.
It marks the latest in a series of American gifts to restore the great creation for Louis XIV of André Le Nôtre and Charles Le Brun. After the second world war John D. Rockefeller gave millions to restore the place, convinced that the chateau and its gardens were of wider than French significance. Americans then responded generously to storm damage in the 1990s, and now the American Friends of Versailles have given $4m and years of voluntary work to help French experts recreate the Bosquet des Trois Fontaines (the Three Fountains Grove).
A quite extraordinary site: Virtual Parks, has just published a list of full screen Quicktime VR Panoramas.
Minneapolis's Walker Art Center features Rock the Garden 2004 (June 18). Looks like fun! Featuring David Byrne | Tosca Strings | Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra among others.
Susan Spano takes us along on a US tour group's (Mt. Travel Sobek) journey to Libya:
Best of all, Libya, like China in the 1970s, remains largely untouched by the despoiling hand of commercial tourism. There's a prevailing air of naiveté and freshness unlike any I've ever felt.Lonely Planet has a Libya Travel Guide.Visitors have been trickling into Libya all along. It received 300,000 foreign tourists last year, mostly Europeans drawn by Libya's fabled Roman ruins, considered the best outside Italy, and its sandy Saharan south, which in the last decade has taken the place of strife-torn Algeria as a destination for desert treks.
Then he showed me how to cross the street in Tripoli, where the roads aren't divided into lanes, there are no stop signs and vehicles move in herds. You walk out bravely, with a raised hand and index finger pointing heavenward, as if to say, "Fail to stop at the risk of Allah's wrath." It worked.
Echoes of the 'Sea of Cortez'
NPR profiles a modern day re-creation of Ed Ricketts' and John Steinbeck's journey through the Sea of Cortez, of which the log and narrative was published as The Sea of Cortez.
Matt Sedensky writes about surfers & sharks (I remember discussing this issue with abalone divers when I lived in California....).
KAHANA, Hawaii — Sam George can't believe the audacity of surfers who seem to return to the water as soon as the blood of a shark attack dissipates — even though he's one of them."Once the blood cleared and the paramedics got off the beach, I'm as silly as the rest," said George, San Clemente-based editor of Surfer magazine.
Detroit's Cyprus Taverna: More on this later. Needless to say, it was quite an excellent dinner (try the lamb special & the vegetrian plate). [map]
Don Bain, Director of the Geographic Computing Facility at UC-Berkeley, has posted The World Wide Panorama. These Quicktime VR scenes, including one from Mineral Point, were shot March 20, 2004 in celebration of the Equinox. Enjoy - there are some extraordinary scenes.
Virginia Postrel writes about the new 0. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia (Link recorded the waning years of steam locomotives)
The museum is in the former Norfolk and Western train station, which famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy redesigned in 1947. As Modernism's Victoria Pedersen writes: "He completely transformed the 1905 neoclassical station, adding 22-foot ceilings, marble walls, terrazzo floors, a futuristic wall of horizontal windows and a dome. He also designed a concorse leading to the train platform that featured the first passenger escalators in the Roanoke Valley, cutting-edge technology for the period." The new station was the epitome of streamlined modernism. But what that meant in the Virginia of a half century ago is spelled out in the letters above the door in these photos from the Library of Congress collection, the first of which Modernism reprinted
Rene Sanchez updates us on Yosemite's $440M plan to "change human activity in and around the glorious & beleaguered park".
I posted some photos from a 2003 trip to Yosemite here.
Beautifully done Quicktime VR and Video tour of the Bahamas (58MB)
Rather appropriate on a cool, snowy Madison day...
Virtual Parks has a beautiful new Quicktime VR tour of California's Eastern Sierra, starting at Florence Lake (near Bishop, CA)
liu zen shares a stunning Quicktime VR Scene from China:
Situated in the northeast of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,
Guilin has always been famous for its scenery and culture.Guilin is a
karst basin surrounded by mountains. The Li River flows through Guilin
from north to south.
Liu's email: liuyz37@hotmail.com
Ignacio Ferrando Margelm shares a stunning Quicktime VR scene from a recent ice climbing expedition (I don't know where this was shot)
He shared this note: "The wheather was fine to do this (max temperature -8:C) but not for my foot fingers.... I wait 2 hours in place and lost some sensibility..."
Today's windy/cold weather makes French Polynesia very tempting.... (Quicktime VR Tours)
(From Quicktime News)
Affendy Awalludin shares a very nice Quicktime VR Hot bath in a natural pool scene from Perpignan in the South of France. (650KB)
A very cool gallery of photos from a Marine aviator, here. Shot with a Sony DSC-F707 digital camera. There's a lot of very impressive stuff in his portfolio. Thanks to instapundit.
Acting Milwaukee Mayor Marvin Pratt and Pier Wisconsin officials made public the long-awaited redesign of the $46 million lakefront education center at Municipal Pier. In an earlier interview, Pratt called it "spectacular" and "a wonderful addition to the lakefront."
Stunning, beautiful, visit! (we did last year)
Bridgeport is one of those California places Californians don't think about much. If you drew a line due east from Petaluma, across the valleys and the mountains, you'd hit Bridgeport, about 115 miles south of Reno and 90 miles north of Bishop.
It's as pretty as a postcard, nestled in a wide valley with the Sawtooth range of the Sierra Nevada to the west. The highest peak is the 12,264-foot Matterhorn, named for the Swiss mountain.
Highway 395 is the town's main street, and it runs past old white houses, and a modest business district surrounding the 123-year-old Mono County Courthouse, plunked like a Victorian wedding cake in the middle of town. There is even a cannon on the lawn. Carl Nolte, SF Chronicle.
