Recently in Travel Category
Michael Overs blogs about his efforts to learn the streets of London well enough to earn the green badge of the London cabbie.
The London cabbie's "Knowledge" - downloadable for £24.99
To get a London taxi license, a cabbie has to master "The Knowledge" --memorize 320 runs and 20,000 points within five miles of Charing Cross. This is a set of study materials. "This complete pack contains a full set of runs, Points (over 30,000), Blank Maps (over 30), a list of London Embassies, Restaurants (over 4,000), Police Stations and Police memorials, Blue Plaques, London Museums, Theatres, Squares and Statues."
Cultural Faux Pas: What are some cultural faux pas in New York City? - Quora
A sensible summary of how to avoid giving offense or causing annoyance in The Big Apple. (For example, never call it that.) (Via the Ace of Spades HQ overnight thread.)
Airline fees: What you'll pay to check a bag, change your ticket, more - USATODAY.com
A handy guide to change fees, luggage fees, price of snacks, drinks, and wifi, etc.
Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University
"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers." (Via a comment on the dearauthor.com blog.)
BBC - Voices - The Voices Recordings
A collection of thousands of sound clips from all over the United Kingdom of people speaking their own various accents and dialects. (Via a comment from Courtney Milan on dearauthor.com)
http://bigthink.com/ideas/39872
"'Tourism' - a word first appearing in print in 1822 - quickly turned professional, attested by the rapid spread during the 19th century of Hotel Bristol as a generic name for overnight accommodation for the weary tourist [1]. Tourism also produced a new type of cartography - the tourist map. These were explicitly designed to be alluring, to include and reflect the leisurely enjoyment of travel.
"This map is a late example of an early type of tourist map, the so-called Rheinpanorama. It depicts, in overlapping sections, and embellished with postcard-like images of riverside attractions, the most popular stretch of what came to be known as the Romantic Rhine, from Bonn to Mainz."
Route 66 nearly 60 years ago « Route 66 News
A home movie of the Chicago-to-LA trip in 1953, with scenes that include the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore and the lights of downtown Las Vegas.
Highway signs for Interstates, U. S. highways, state highways, turnpikes, named roads, both contemporary and historic. Includes such wonders as Florida's color-coded U. S. highway signs.
