Here’s my grand plan;  I’m going to try to start the New Year better organized, and then maintain it, instead of waking up the morning of January 1, 2008 and only then beginning my makeover as Organizational Ninja.

Consequently, I posted a blogging editorial calendar over at my Family Travel blog, and I’ve completed one whole week of following it.  The good news is that it worked; the better news is that I want to bring some new ideas over to the PT blog as well.

On Mondays each week, just as I did today on Family Travel, I’ll post some great travel links that I hope our PT readers will enjoy.  The cool thing about writing for PT is that I have an outlet for some of the more, er, quirky links that might not make sense for travel with kids.

Herewith:

**  I’m feeling London-y.  Fortunately, the Times Online has a bargain guide to London, TimeOut London has Weird Christmas 2007 and I’m always happy to plug the well-guided and reasonably-priced London Walks tour group for visitors who’d like a narrated stroll.  Even found a blog by a Savile Row tailor.

**  Vagablogging has an info-packed post on couchsurfing: how to score some sweet couch.

**  The Guardian has top 10 Tokyo cheap eats.

**  In good news for budget travelers, the Miami Herald reports that the U.S.-based Greyhound bus system is overhauling its bus fleet and terminals.   That’s good, because things had gotten a little funky in recent years.

**  The bookish will like the article in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald about two famous bookstores that are still going strong:  City Lights in San Francisco and Shakespeare and Company in Paris.  My family and I have poked around in Shakespeare and Co., and my teen daughter bought ”The Little Prince” in French just to get the shop’s famous ”Kilometre Zero” stamp inside the cover. 

**  I’m somewhat embarrassed to report that a top U.S. tourist attraction is the massive Mall of America in Minnesota;  here’s the story of one knucklehead brave soul who tried an experiment to actually live there for a week.

**  In the U.S. we have a rather strange custom of hearing about how Santa’s sleigh is traced by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD,) the folks who work in a mountain bunker in Colorado tracking things like intercontinental ballistic missiles.  Find out the real story behind a bunch of military people eyeballing Santa.

**  Europe travel guru Rick Steves reviews the new Amazon Kindle electronic book/newspaper/blog reader on his Blog Gone Europe.

**  Reuters reports that the Chinese are hitting the backpacking trail.

**  Arthur Frommer blogs about saving money by staying in towns within a half-hour of major European cities (Padua rather than Venice, for example.)

**  The CEO of TripAdvisor says that truth is online gold dust.  No fair padding those TripAdvisor reviews with fluff stuff from employees….

**  Thanks to the blog carnivals that have recently featured PT posts.   The Carnival of Cities on the Go Chicago Card blog featured our Netherlands Christmas market in a cave, on IgoUgo we were one of many in an edition that featured food around the world, and this week’s Carnival of Cities is hosted by An American in Norway and features our video post about Native American dancing in Albuquerque (plus some other goodies that I’ll feature in another post.)

Thanks for checking out this week’s list of great travel links.

Technorati tags: travel, travel blogging, travel links

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 am and is filed under Sheila projects, travel blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.