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.
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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 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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By Tom Philip via College Humor
By Tim Richards via Lonely Planet
Vampires and their stories seem to be enjoying an eternal renaissance in contemporary fiction and film. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire kicked off the modern raft of tales, and the popularity of more recent book and movie offerings likeTwilight and True Blood shows that folks are, well, batty for vampire tales. So where can you go to learn more about these creatures of the night? Discover the top destinations with this excerpt from Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel.
Image by ZeWaren
There’s nothing better than going to the source, and in the case of vampire lore that’s Vlad Ţepeş, legendary ruler of Wallachia, now part of Romania. Ţepeş became the scourge of the Ottoman empire and was fond of impaling entire Turkish forces sent against him. His bloodthirsty reputation inspired Irish author Bram Stoker to use him as the model for Dracula, and thus a legend was born. Bran Castle, one of his strongholds, now houses a museum dedicated to Queen Marie of Romania. It has an impressive clifftop profile, looking like the quintessential location for a vampire movie.
Image by MiguelVieira
The vampire bat has become inseparable from the legend of the vampire. Apparently inspired by a newspaper article about these inhabitants of South and Central America, Bram Stoker wove their blood-sucking habits into his novel and the rest is history (or at least, folklore). These small bats do feed on animals’ blood but rarely suck on humans, though there have been reported attacks in recent years in Brazil andVenezuela. One of the best places to see them in the wild is Costa Rica, especially within Santa Rosa National Park and Corcovado National Park.
Hidden away in the Les Lilas district of Paris is an enigmatic museum devoted to the vampire. Visits can only be made by appointment, but once through the forbidding red door, the visitor is treated to an eclectic collection of books, photographs, weapons, masks, models, costumes and other curios referencing the vampire legend. There’s also a creepy Gothic garden out the back. The Musée des Vampires.
Image by ericnvntr
When author Stephenie Meyer set her vampire novel Twilight in the small town of Forks, Washington, she had little idea of the wave of vampire tourism she was setting in motion. When Twilight went ballistic on the bookshelves, ardent fans headed for Forks, neatly arresting the slow economic decline caused by its traditional mainstay, the timber industry, losing momentum. Now vampire fans can buy undead memorabilia, go on tours to locations that resemble Edward and Bella’s literary hangouts, and celebrate Bella’s birthday on 13 September. Dazzled by Twilight offers three Twilight-themed tours of Forks and La Push.
Image by msprague
Anyone who’s read Bram Stoker’s Dracula will remember Mina Harker, whom Dracula attacked with the intent of transforming her into a vampire. Given that this curse was apparently lifted once he was destroyed, you might be surprised to find Mina Harker wafting about in 21st-century San Francisco, and sporting an American accent. But every weekend you can join Mina for a vampire tour of the city’s historic Nob Hill. It covers documented San Francisco history as well as speculative supernatural events, and attendees are encouraged to dress spookily. The Vampire Tour of San Franciscocommences at 8pm each Friday and Saturday.
Image by vintagedept
Given the British capital’s starring role in the original Dracula novel, it makes sense that there should be a vampire tour of its darker nooks and crannies. This supernatural outing takes in a house in Highgate where the vampiric one apparently lived during hisLondon sojourn. It also takes in the ghosts of Highgate Cemetery, the satanists of Highgate Woods, and other dark denizens. Curiously, the whole thing is then followed with a medieval banquet. Blood, presumably, is not on the menu. The Dracula Tour of London, run by Transylvania Live, takes place nightly except Mondays.
Vampiric creatures aren’t just a Western obsession. Malaysia and Indonesia share the legend of the pontianak, supposedly the undead manifestation of a woman who has died during childbirth. This supernatural being is said to take the form of a beautiful woman, attracting men to their deaths by disembowelling them with her razor-sharp fingernails. You wouldn’t really want to encounter one of these hellhounds, but if feeling brave you might visit the city of Pontianak, said to be named after the undead creature which once terrorised its men. Pontianak is the capital of the Indonesiaprovince of West Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.
Image by jlcwalker
Before Dracula reached London in the pages of Bram Stoker’s novel, he came ashore at Whitby. The North Yorkshire seaport is famous for being the home base of 18th-century explorer Captain James Cook. However, no amount of historic circumstance can top Stoker’s evocative description of the Russian schooner Demeter blown across Whitby’s harbour with its dead captain lashed to the helm, crashing beneath the East Cliff before disgorging the vampire in the guise of a huge dog. As a result, Whitby has become a popular destination for vampire-fanciers. The Whitby Gothic Weekend is held twice-yearly, in April and October, and features concerts, markets and comedy nights.
Image by janeway216
Buffy the Vampire Slayer gained vampires a big new TV audience in the 1990s. If you loved seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar stake scowly-faced evil vampires while finding time to fall in love with a reformed one then you might like to visit the locations in and around Los Angeles where the series was filmed. The series’ exterior scenes at Sunnydale High School were in fact filmed at Torrance High School. Shots of the fictional University of California at Sunnydale were taken at the UCLA campus in Westwood, and at California State University in Northridge. And the vampire mansion once lived in by Angel, Spike and Drusilla is the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Ennis House near Griffith Park. You can find a comprehensive list of Buffy locations within the IMDb entry for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Image by sookiebontemps
Bon Temps, Louisiana, is the fictional town in True Blood, the rightful heir to the vampire-mania stoked by Buffy. As with Buffy, the main character of the show is female, Sookie Stackhouse, who, like Buffy, falls in love with vampires. Unlike Buffy, vampires no longer hide from mainstream society — they have ’come out of the coffin’ to drink a synthetic human blood (Tru Blood). But vampires aren’t the only supernatural citizens of Bon Temps. Werewolves, werepanthers, faeries, shapeshifters and maenads also roam its streets. While all the human characters in the series pass through Merlotte’s Bar & Grill, the vampires of the show frequent Fangtasia, a bar owned by the thousand-year-old vampire Eric Northman in Shreveport, Louisiana. The actual bar used for some of the filming is located in Long Beach, California, so if you want to be a fang banger then head to Alex’s Bar. Other True Blood film locations are scattered over Southern USA and California. Seeing Stars has a site dedicated to finding these sights.
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