Welcome to the first tips and links round-up for 2008.  We’re off and running with some new year goodies:

**  Last month’s issue of Perceptive Travel magazine featured a great Norway article, Notes Towards a True Historie of the Vikings,  so this travel deal caught my eye and I wish I’d posted it sooner — a Norway musical cruise later this month with live performances by the Norwegian National Opera.  More recently:  the Guardian’s Insider’s guide to Oslo and Instant weekend - Tromso.

**  Yep, it’s true — Hello Kitty’s gone macho.

**  My community on Twitter is hand-selected by me (no biggie, everyone picks who they want to follow, that’s what personalizes it for you.)  Since I tweet back and forth across time zones with Aussies like blogging evangelist Duncan Riley, digital creative guy John Johnston and ProBlogger Darren Rowse, I’ve started paying attention to Australian travel links in case I ever get to visit Down Under.   How about 36 Hours in Melbourne?  If you’re traveling with kids, consider Away games, the family-friendly side of Melbourne, from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

**  If you want to escape the winter above the equator right now and get warm in Oz, the 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss writes about Endless Summer: How to “Winter” Like Old Money.

**  Another bloggy/Twitter colleague, PR and media expert Geoff Livingston, returns from Christmas trip to Cairo with six reflections from Egypt.

**  Speaking of warmth, here’s what Gabriela Quintero  (half of the awesome guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela) has to say about her Mexican hometown, Zihuatanejo.  If you move fast, you can get your Mexico travel questions answered tomorrow, January 8th, by Budget Travel’s Trip Coach.

**  Travelers, think about unplugging and reclaiming “dead time,” even on long Andean bus trips.

**  What’s new in Eastern Europe and Central Asia?  How about Kosovo as a travel destination, and a Gadling breakdown of the ‘Stans - Kyrgyzstan , Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

**  Lonely Planet has a short update on the precarious travel situation in Kenya, and BootsnAll contributor Kesse Buchanan has some insights from the Kenyan campaign trail.  Also in Africa, how about this….a Holiday Inn opens in Soweto, South Africa.

**  In U.S. travel tips and news, the New York Times Frugal Traveler visits Santa Fe, NM (and did not have the service problem that I experienced on my visit,) a Missouri girl who is now a travel editor gives us the scoop on great coffee, gyros and falafel in St. Louis, MO,  you can check out some honky-tonkin’, boot-scooting Central Texas dance halls,  designer Isaac Mizrahi dishes his fave flea markets and somebody finds one of my favorite little Florida towns, Micanopy. 

**  Finally, nice to see that US border/immigration officials can, in fact, be quite pleasant.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 6:24 pm 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.