No Place Dazzles quite like Venice

Conde Nast Traveler

No place dazzles quite like Venice—and there's no guide more versed in its treasures than the city's premier historian, John Julius Norwich

I was lucky; I first arrived in Venice by train. It was in the summer of 1946, a week or so short of my seventeenth birthday. My parents and I had driven from Lake Garda, but they had very sensibly left the car in Mestre, because they knew how vital first impressions were and that nothing could match the excitement of walking out of the faintly Brutalist railway station straight into a Canaletto. That afternoon, my mother went off to see an old friend, and my father undertook to show me Venice. The thing to remember, he told me, was that however glorious its churches and palaces, the greatest miracle was the ensemble, the city itself. For the next two hours, therefore, we would walk through it, entering two buildings only: at the beginning, St. Mark's Basilica; at the end, Harry's Bar. That indeed was precisely what we did, and when the time came to leave and, in the gathering dusk, we took a gondola back the length of the Grand Canal, I felt that I had never left anywhere with such an aching sense of regret.

But that was more than sixty years ago. Gondolas are no longer the rather cheap taxis they once were, and anyway you'll probably arrive by air. So what about that all-important first impression? Try to get seats on the right-hand side of the plane, and not over the wing. Then, three minutes or so before landing, you will be rewarded by the perfect aerial view of Venice, laid out below you like a single, isolated jewel set in the sea, devoid of suburbs or—apart from the single causeway—of approach roads, looking almost exactly as it has for the better part of a thousand years. Not quite as good as that Canaletto, perhaps, but enough to lift the spirits in time to negotiate the new airport and the walk to your boat.

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Italy Vacations from World Travel Warehouse

What Not to Pack

Independent Traveller.com

The goal is simple: to visit your destination without running out of clean socks and without a suitcase so stuffed that you emit strange animal sounds trying to heave it into the overhead compartment. But if only it were that easy! If you've struggled over whether you need a raincoat for your trip to Cairo (just in case!) or wondered how many guidebooks is too many, you're certainly not alone. Packing for a trip is often a struggle to distinguish what we want to bring from what we need to bring.

When we're forced to choose between our favorite things, we're sometimes tempted to just bring it all and to hell with it -- but overpacking can cost more than just extra suitcase space and a free hand. Checking more than one bag, exceeding your airline's weight limit or even checking a bag at all can cost you. Spirit Airlines, for example, charges passengers a $10 fee each way for checking a piece of luggage, and many other airlines charge $25 for a second checked bag. And bringing home souvenirs is impossible when you can't even remember how you managed to pack your bag so tightly in the first place.

This article provides a list of what most travelers shouldn't pack, along with tips and ideas on how to pack better. Everyone's packing style is different and we all have our own travel needs, so before you turn red at the idea of leaving behind your beloved toothbrush sanitizer, please remember that these are only suggestions. Leave out a few of these items on your next trip -- you'll enjoy traveling with a lighter load, and we promise you won't miss a thing!

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Spain’s Wild Coast - Costa Brava

by Sarah Wildman
Travel - NY Times

ON the small roads between Cantallops and Llançà — two names that were barely dots on our map of Catalonia in northeastern Spain — the lush mountain greenery turned quickly to farmland rolling out for miles around us and filled with sunflowers and bales of hay.

We were traveling from the interior mountains of this Spanish autonomous region to the Mediterranean. Again and again, rising up in the near distance, came fantastic, if dusty, terra-cotta-colored medieval hamlets and equally ancient churches and farmhouses. On the streets everywhere the lingua franca was Catalan, not Spanish, and amid all the tourists that descend from France and elsewhere, a local pride seemed to pervade the scene, against a backdrop that fell away suddenly, breathtakingly, into the sea.

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Spain Vacations from World Travel Warehouse

Wi-Fi: The mystery of free versus fee

By Joe Brancatelli
Portfolio.com

Why do some hotels provide free internet access, while others charge big?

A decade ago we were complaining about the cost of calls from hotel-room phones. Why, we wondered, did cheap hotels give us free calls, but fancy, five-star joints ding us even for toll-free numbers? Who made more sense: The general manager who insisted that telephone calls were an integral part of the nightly rate, or the one who claimed he wouldn't think of charging a guest for a service he or she didn't use, so anyone who used a hotel's telephone system had to pay inflated, à la carte prices?

Mobile phones mooted that debate, and no business traveler even thinks about using a guest-room telephone today. But the deep, philosophical disagreements are back—over the price hotels may or may not charge to access high-speed internet and Wi-Fi service.

Business travelers expect select-service properties (that's politically correct, 21st-century lodging jargon for "cheap hotels") to offer free wired and/or wireless internet access. And free access is standard at places like Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn, and Four Points by Sheraton.

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