Researching for Travel

~ How much research is too much? I ask this question because I have been spending hours online researching my summer New York trip, and everyday I find new and exciting events, places, and activities to add to my already extensive notes and burgeoning lists.

At some point you have to stop researching and start arranging your findings into some sort of coherent order so as to get a better idea of what your findings reveal. I’m probably at that point with researching my New York trip. In fact, I’ve got more than enough pencilled in to keep me busy for the whole of my stay, but I keep discovering extra things to add to my schedule. To make matters worse, several major events have yet to publish their full summer programs, which means I will need to return to their websites over the next month or so, to see what their final schedules will look like.

At least I know I will never be bored!

I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said of London, England, "The man who is tired of London is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford." A statement that surely applies to New York City even more so than London.

I certainly don’t expect to be bored in New York, and if I am, I will have no-one to blame but myself!

When I have more time I will list some of the many activities I am considering for my stay, but right now I’ve got to get back to my research. In the meantime take a look at my New York Dreaming entry…

iPhone App of The Week: New York Times

~ I’ve been using this free application from the New York Times for a couple of months now, and it has become my favourite source of news about America in general, and New York City in particular.

As soon as you launch the app, it downloads the latest news, and presents you with a list of around 15 of the days top news stories, along with the opening sentence of each so you can get a quick look at the latest headlines (see image). As always with the iPhone, you simply tap the screen to read a news story or scroll through the list to see what else is available.

Along the bottom of the application is a five icon menu bar which lets you jump to the Latest News, and the most popular Emailed news items. You can Save an article for future reference, and Search through the days news stories to find a topic that interests you.

However, the application offers much more than this.

Tapping the More icon (no pun intended) presents you with an array of 22 other icons representing the different sections in the hard copy of the daily New York Times. From World News and Technology to Sports and Travel; from Fashion & Style to Automobiles and Obituaries, every department of the physical paper seems to be available at the touch of a ‘button’.

~ Tapping the Edit button calls up another screen of icons with which you can modify the main menu bar that runs along the bottom of the screen.

You simply drag and drop your icon of choice over an existing menu item, and your icon will replace it. Due to lack of space, there is only room for five icons on the menu bar, and one of these must always be the More icon, but if you have a particular interest in one or two areas of news, this feature allows you to jump straight to them with one touch rather than two or three.

But wait – there’s more.

When you tap on an article to read it, the main menu bar is replaced with a new menu bar from which you can ‘share’ the article. A pop-up box lets you Email the item to yourself or anyone else on your Contacts list. In addition, you can send the article as a text message, or let your friends know about the item via Twitter or Facebook (assuming you have accounts with those sites). This new menu bar also lets you enlarge the font size of the on-screen print to make it easier to read, if you like me, struggle to make sense of anything under 10 or 12 point type.

Finally, the application has its own section under the iPhone’s Settings menu (accessed from the main screen). Here you will see a section headed General, from where you can make permanent changes to the way the New York Times app displays content each time you open it. For instance you can choose to Save News for… (1 to 7 days); change the Article Font Size… (from the smallest, 8pts to the largest, 14pts); turn Landscape Orientation… (on or off); and turn Large Headlines… (on or off).

In return for providing the application for free, the New York Times displays a thin strip of advertisements towards the bottom of the screen. Thankfully, the ads take up little screen space and are unobtrusive enough to not be a constant source of irritation. It’s a small price to pay for access to some of the best, most up-to-date newspaper content in America.

You will find the New York Times application in the iTunes App Store under the News section.

Highly recommended (even if you are not living in, or travelling to the United States).

Training For Travel

~ For the past month or two I have been in training for travel.

Health professionals, and national health authorities constantly encourage people in first world countries to eat well, drink less alcohol, exercise regularly, and in the case of smokers, to give up the habit completely. Thankfully, I have never been a smoker and I’m only an occasional drinker, but at 110 kilograms (240 pounds) I can afford to lose some weight and not miss it.

The hard part is motivating myself to get up off the couch – or more to the point, to tear myself away from the computer – and find some type of exercise that will help me shed some weight and get a lot fitter.

My biggest problem is – I hate exercise. I get no pleasure at all from pumping iron at a gym, sweating profusely in an aerobics class, or sitting on a stationary bike pretending I’m in the pelaton at the Tour de France. As for running on a treadmill, all that conjures up for me are images of mice racing headlong on running wheels, getting nowhere fast.

As I say, I need something special to motivate me to get up and move. For me, this motivating factor has become travel. It is just the incentive I need to get fit or die trying!

Since travel tends to involve a lot of walking, I’ve settled on walking as the best low impact way of preparing myself for my next round of jet-setting. So every day, I head off to walk one of three circuits I have mapped out around my neighbourhood and along the foreshore between Semaphore and Largs Bay.

The three circuits involve distances of three kilometres (1.86 miles); five kilometres (3.10 miles); and eight kilometres (4.97 miles). How far I walk on a particular day, will depend on how I am feeling, but more and more I am walking the longer distance of eight kilometres. In fact, after a couple of months of regular walking, I have now become fit enough to extend that distance even further. Hence my previous entry, Walking Manhattan.

The more I walk, the more convinced I am that I can tackle the length of Broadway, which for my purposes I am measuring from the 207th Street/Inwood subway station to the running bull sculpture at Bowling Green. According to Google Maps this is a total distance of 20.4 kilometres, or 12.67 miles. Again, according to Google, this distance could be covered in around four hours and eleven minutes of continuous walking.

Clearly, a reasonably fit person should have no trouble completing this walk. However, at 61 years of age, I am not quite reasonably fit – or ready to take on 20 kilometres. Yet. But I’m getting there. By the time I hit the streets of New York City in July, I will be ready, although I have no intention of completing the distance in one long continuous four hour walk. With rest stops and some sightseeing along the way, it is more likely to take the better part of 8-10 hours, but complete it I will.

So if you have problems like I do with exercise, take my advice and don’t call it by that name. Instead call it Training for Travel. It might just be the incentive you need to get up off the couch and out to the gym or onto the streets of your neighbourhood, in preparation for your next journey.