Amateur Traveler - A blog about Travel news, travel tips, travel advice, travel videos and travel resources. A companion site to the Amateur Traveler podcast.
Who thought this was a good idea? Well, you can bet it was not someone with a fear of heights. Dinner in the Sky is part theme park ride and part dining experience. 22 guests, chefs and waiters are raised up by a crane on a specialized platform. The website for this company shows them at Nascar races or at Notre Dame de Paris.
The site says that Dinner in the Sky has been “selected by Forbes.com in its ranking of the 10 most unusual restaurants in the world”. I should think so.
Is it just the camera angle or does this video look like it is about to tip over at times?
The most recent episode of the wonderful “Fly with Me” podcast dealt with people behaving badly on flights. The host of the show Joe Dion, a commercial airline pilot, remarked that when you think about how unnatural a commercial flight is with so many people crammed so close together in a pressurized metal tube 6 miles up it is amazing how usually things go so smoothly, but sometimes they don’t as Joe’s latest podcast describes. I thought of that podcast when I saw this story in the USA Today:
A JetBlue passenger was sentenced to 10 months in prison for threatening the airline’s flight attendants after they stopped serving him alcohol, The Buffalo News reports. The 27-year-old man apparently became “belligerent” with the attendants after they cut him off. He then “made several statements about shooting and killing the crew” once the plane landed, according to The Associated Press. The threats and poor behavior led JetBlue to divert its Houston-to-New York JFK flight to Buffalo, where the man was removed from the plane by the FBI. JetBlue’s crewmembers told authorities they stopped serving the man because he was obviously intoxicated.
Just in case we are unclear about the proper standards of behavior when flying commercially, let’s just say that threatening the crew is not something I am going to recommend.
I was saddened to see the news that ATA Airlines is pulling out of some of its commercial flights because of the high cost of fuel. Back when my kids were in Jr high we flew on ATA to Boston through Midway and our kids first flew alone on this route back from Boston. Midway is a much more manageable airport than O’Hare and ATA was a very nice low cost option at the time.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Citing high fuel prices, ATA Airlines announced Thursday it will leave Chicago’s Midway Airport starting next month.
ATA will stop its domestic flights out of Midway on April 14 and its international flights to Mexico on June 7.
The decision will not affect its scheduled commercial flights to Hawaii from Oakland, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas, spokesman Steve Forsyth said.
“This was a difficult decision, but the high cost of fuel has made it economically unfeasible to continue our low-fare service at Midway,” said Rob Binns, ATA’s chief commercial and planning officer, in a statement released Thursday. “We will redeploy our ATA aircraft in profitable charter service.”
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April 3, 2008
I just read that ATA has now filed for bankruptcy under chapter 11.
An article in the USA Today called “10 great places to check into movie-hotel history” got me thinking about how much my family (especially my son Mike who is now a film student) have enjoyed the times when our love for movies and our love of travel has intersected.
The DVD for You’ve Got Mail has a tour of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Zabars, Grey’s Papaya, Cafe Lalo took on a whole new meaning when they are seen not just as interesting places but as sets.
Kauai is not just an island in the Hawaiian Islands, it is where they filmed Jurassic Park. Each valley takes on a whole new look as imaginary dinosaurs run through them.
And the crowning experience for us was when we ran into a film crew on the streets of Sydney, Australia filming a car chase stunt from the film Superman Returns. We watched for hours as they setup the stunt. A car was heading through the pedestrian mall outside of the Metropolis Museum (it was the banners for the museum that first caught our eye) jumping off of a series of steps (and landing in a pile of cardboard boxes). Extras and stunt people were rehearsed. This was not a stunt they wanted to do twice. What took seconds in the film took hours to film.
By the way, the picture at the top of the article is the The Plaza New York.
Overlooking Central Park, the distinctive Plaza — built in 1907 and currently undergoing a $400 million renovation — is a familiar movie star. “Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee figured out the function of the bidet here, and Dudley Moore entertained working girls in the hotel’s famous Oak Bar in Arthur,” Reeves says. “But my favorite Plaza scene is the abduction of Cary Grant from the hotel’s lobby in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest.”
This week Motel 6, an economy hotel chain in the United States, announced a its first new prototype property in twelve years.
“We are excited to have received such positive reactions from our customers about the “Phoenix” design, and are confident that our future guests will also appreciate the fresh, modern design look and welcoming appeal of the new rooms,” said Olivier Poirot, CEO of Motel 6 and Studio 6.
Phoenix prototype include a new building exterior designed by BOKA Powell, a spacious lobby with a new 24-hour food and beverage vending market place, and a modern (Pictures) guestroom design that features bright accent colors. The room includes ambient lighting, wood-effect flooring rather than carpet, and a 32-inch flat-screen TV. The flat screen TV is displayed on the entertainment unit which conceals the door-less wardrobe behind it, thus combining two needs into one unit. Also included on the entertainment unit is a cubby for personal items and a multi-media panel allowing guests to plug in their mp3 players, CD players and laptop computers – this feature allows guests to listen to their favorite tunes or use the flat-screen TV as their computer monitor while enjoying Wi-Fi internet access in their room. The room also features pedestal beds with a new taupe-colored coverlet and pillow-top platform mattress. Guests will also notice the clean style and the upscale touch of the colored bed scarf that matches the accent wall color.
An article in the USA Today called “