The Deets

The Other Mike was right when he said that I may be in need of an intervention when it comes to my tissue habit.

Problem solved:

Paper towel folding: it’s the future. You’ll only find this in finer kitchenette enabled hotel rooms. This comes from a Denver TownePlace hotel.

Luckily, I haven’t spilled anything so I haven’t had to destroy this original origami.

Last week I blogged about Marriott’s premium TP display where they use TP stickers:

Katie suggested that this is wasteful, while Gabe explained that someone is supporting their family making these stickers (not to mention that someone is likely getting paid hourly to stick those stickers on the rolls). Jeremy’s only concern is that they may be scratch-n-sniff, which I suppose is a legitimate concern.

So this week, I’ve found myself in a Residence Inn by Marriott over in Traverse City, Michigan, which is nice, but not quite regular Marriott nice. Check out the difference:

It still has that hotel feel, but there is a definite difference that helps justify the added expense of the regular Marriott locations.

It turns out that folding the loose end of a TP roll isn’t going far enough at the Cleveland Marriott:

They take things one step further by securing the loose ends with stickers. This doesn’t seem entirely necessary to me.

It’s not that breezy in the bathroom. Is it?

Here is one of the big benefits of travel: folded TP.

You don’t get that at home unless you do it yourself.

I can’t believe there is a street in Holland, Michigan called Felch Street. If you don’t know, you probably don’t want to. You’ve been warned.

I’m a bit traveled out for a bit, so I’ve turned my attention to travel blogs. Here are a few I like:

1. Killing Batteries - Lief Pettersen is a local travel writer. As in, he’s a local, and he writes about travel. Not that he writes about local travel to Hugo or Savage. He shares behind the scenes looks at life as a travel writer for Lonely Planet and travel magazines where he’s forced to review the women’s spas at resorts in Guam or why Anthony Bourdain’s Romanian adventure was hosed. He’s the same Leif Pettersen who writes the This is Why I Love Minneapolis (and Sometimes St Paul) blog.

2. Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations - I found this one through Leif’s blogroll and really like what Tim covers. For example, he reviews an amazing Mayan ruin outside of Cancun that’s virtually undiscovered by the typical tourist crowd that heads to Chichen Itza.

3. Go Green Travel Green - Kimberly and Elizabeth, the blog’s co-authors, love to travel, but also love to try to be as green as possible when doing so. They provide great tips on how to cut the environmental impact of your travel plans. For example, taking a non-stop flight not only gets you to your destination faster, it’s also a greener choice for the environment. Now you have all the justification you need to avoid flying through Chicago.

Do you know of any travel blogs worth checking out?

Why yes, that IS a dude dressed in a Smurf costume messing with a bull on the streets of Spain. A friend of mine from college, Tim Schultz, grabbed that shot last week, along with some spilled blood from a participant who got gored in Cuidad Rodrigo.

Congrats to Tim for knocking Running With the Bulls off his list of “things I should do before I die, but not die in the process.”

I get bored near the end of flight and often whip out my camera to capture the landing. Maybe it would be useful to the FAA if we spun out into a fiery crash? Who knows.

Anyways, here are some shots from my flight back from Vegas:

We’ve reached reached the landing strip:

Almost touching down. Nice and smooth approach:

We’re down and we’re vibrating:

Things start to calm down:

If you can’t get enough of this type of stuff, here’s a video from my landing on a December 24th flight from Chicago:

Click To Play

I did a lot of work and leisure travel last year:

- Minneapolis, MN

- Stillwater, MN

- Duluth, MN

- Superior, WI

- Grand Marais, MN

- Buenos Aires, Argentina

- Montevideo, Uruguay

- Punta del Este, Uruguay

- Mendoza, Argentina

- Zagreb, Croatia

- Bled, Slovenia

- Ljubljana, Slovenia

- Dubrovnik, Croatia

- Amsterdam, Netherlands

- Winnipeg, MB, Canada

- Toronto, ON, Canada

- San Diego, CA

- Chicago, IL

- Las Vegas, NV

- San Francisco, CA

- San Jose, CA

- Des Moines, IA

- Madison, WI

- Grand Rapids, MN

- Fort Wayne, IN

- Reston,VA

- Minocqua, WI

This is pretty cool. Darren Barefoot noticed that you can now buy individual chapters of Lonely Planet books online.

For example, one of the hottest new travel blogs on the block, Camacho Watcho, is about Katie “Camacho” Cannon’s upcoming trip to Uruguay. I was paging through the Lonely Planet South America book at REI yesterday and found the Uruguay section to be the shortest section in the VERY think travel book. Lugging that thing around would be kind of a pain.

But you could buy just the 29 page Uruguay section as a PDF for $4 online.