All Blog Posts from Travel Guru

If you ever want to witness a dictionary-perfect definition of controlled chaos, you should peek into the kitchens of a cruise ship right around the dinner hour. I had the pleasure recently on a trans-Atlantic crossing of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, with chef and “Global Culinary Ambassador” Jean-Marie Zimmermann as host. Despite his lofty title, Chef Zimmermann, who hails from the Strasbourg region of France, was charming and self-deprecating and quite a likeable guy. He also obviously knew what he was doing:

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Coming and going by sea makes a lot of sense when it comes to visiting Hawaii. I found that out again last week when I arrived in the islands on a 15-day Holland America cruise from San Diego and back that stopped in Oahu, Maui and twice on the Big Island. Pulling into the Aloha Tower cruise terminal at the heart of the Bishop Street downtown business corridor in Honolulu evokes images of the old days, when the Matson Line brought Hawaii’s first mass tourists on ocean-going cruises. Go even farther back and imagine Mark Twain stepping off of a sailing ship from San Francisco when he visited the islands more than a century ago, and brought back some of the first evocative travel writing from these parts.

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While I’m on the subject of Cunard cruise ships this week, let’s have a closer look at the Queen Victoria, the newest and grandest ship that the venerable cruise company has launched. She just went into service last month in Europe, did a little jaunt around Scandinavia, and then crossed the Atlantic in time to pick up a couple of thousand lucky, wealthy people in New York at the beginning of a 105-day world tour.

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I thought we’d seen just about everything from airlines in regards to unusual customer service, but in their never-ceasing attempts to amaze us, they’ve managed to top themselves once again. I’m speaking, of course, about the recent news that a Delta jet lost a number of passengers’ bags when the cargo door opened in flight and the bags made a hasty exit somewhere between Chicago and Atlanta. They have yet to be found, but for all we know, their contents have been scattered over several states.

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Small, medium or super-sized? What flavor of cruise is right for you? I’ve now done something like fifteen cruises over the years on all sizes of ship, so let me run you through some of the questions you should ask before deciding on which boat to cast your fate. It’s really the difference between staying in a small, intimate boutique hotel with not a lot going on in terms of entertainment or diversions, or staying in an enormous, Vegas-style resort hotel with 2,000 of your fellow cruise enthusiasts. Or somewhere in between.

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Could we, as reasonable people, come to some kind of consensus on an aspect of travel that I’ve always found to be irritating? I’m referring to the fellow travelers whom you meet on the road who insist on finding out every detail about where you’re from. Maybe it’s just me, but after about the fourth penetrating question about exactly where I live and where I grew up, I’m ready to start screaming.

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New York and Paris and Los Angeles are great, but sometimes the weary traveler just wants a beer and a pizza and some minor-league baseball and really sensational outdoor recreation and gardens, so you go to Portland, Oregon. The Rose City might be getting more crowded, with rush hours on I-5 that rival behemoth Seattle to the north, but for the most part it continues to be that mid-sized, west coast city of your dreams, and a great place to visit.

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I just got a press release from Air Tahiti Nui, the national carrier of Tahiti, announcing new flights from L.A. and New York to Tahiti, and my first thought was, “Sounds great. When do we leave? I can be ready in, oh, ten minutes or so.” If there is any travel experience more exotic than flying into Tahiti, I haven’t found it yet (and yes, I have been to Wildwood, New Jersey). I’ve been there three times and would happily return for a fourth if you paid my airfare and threw in a couple of Hinanos, the local beer of Tahiti.

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The coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life – and this is saying something, because I once interviewed Hayley Mills – was to return to New York on a business trip in 1984 and stay at the Helmsley Palace Hotel (now the New York Palace). It was awesome, because two months earlier I had moved from a squalid, tiny, walk-up apartment on West Fourteenth Street in New York, and the Palace, which is located uptown in the former Villard mansion, was gorgeous, opulent, free (because my company paid for it) and my room was bigger than my apartment. It was my first ultra-extravagant hotel experience, and I’ve never looked back.

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Not too long ago in this lazy August, your faithful Travel Guru was found floating peacefully atop the blue-green waters of Lake Osoyoos in northern Washington State. We were holed up at the new Veranda Beach cottage community on the shores of the long, skinny lake that crosses the Canadian border.

I’m a lake guy. We’re building family memories on these waters, and personally, I could spend the whole summer walking a straight line from my veranda to the water. What are some of your favorite lake experiences?

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