As the editor of Perceptive Travel, I don’t normally chime in too much here because I have five capable bloggers writing great stuff all the time. But I’m at the PhocusWright conference right now, a place where the brightest (and best-funded) start-ups in the travel technology space come to strut their stuff.

This year it’s all about sharing, Facebook integration, and planning your trip in collaboration with others. It’s already getting crowded though and the writers and analysts I was with weren’t sold: after all, a LOT of travel is planned by one person who then dictates to others what’s going to happen.

Anyway, some companies win, some lose, and many innovations are on the back end anyway, invisible to those of us actually spending money on travel. But here’s a sneak peak into what I saw that I personally think is useful and cool.

Hipmunk – Apparently I’m late to the party on this one as the company already has loads of traffic and has built up a legion of fans in just three months. These are smart and funny guys with lots of venture funding and a platform that makes booking a flight far easier than it is now. I’m ready to use this tomorrow and for every trip from here on out. The big sea change? They sort by “agony.” As in the trip with the least stops and the fastest time in transit comes up first, with all awful trips hidden away on a different screen, but you can sort by price, by departure time, etc. without ever having to leave your original browser page—new options open in new tabs. The interface is customer-centric instead of advertiser-centric and is a joy to use compared to what you’re used to.

Goby.com is the first site I’ve seen that would actually spur me to carry a smart phone around while on vacation. It’s a great local travel resource for seeing everything to do in a city, with maps directions, opening hours, etc. From within the application you can do pretty much everything you need to do booking-wise or to call or e-mail a place, plus it’s connected to Facebook, so you can patch in anyone who’s on the trip with you and keep them in the loop. (They can make suggestions and add places/activities.) It’s tag-based, so it’s pulling info from all around the web: tourism sites, park sites, festival sites—then putting it into a pretty package with photos. It’s “rich, hyper-local content” for Android or the iPhone family.

SilverRail – This one’s so dead obvious it’s a wonder nobody has made it work before: one-stop shopping for rail travel. Booking a train trip anywhere should be as easy as booking a flight anywhere, but it’s not. This company has done all the very hard legwork of tapping into all the fragmented systems and putting them into one easy interface. Whether you’re traveling around Europe or taking the bullet train in Japan, this site will get it sorted.

GroundLink – Need a car and driver somewhere instead? GroundLink is the one-stop shop for booking ground transportation with someone else at the wheel anywhere in the world. Book through these guys and you don’t have to worry about getting someone reliable after your plane lands.

Bonvoy was one of many social media booking/sharing/planning platforms shown off and this one got my attention because it’s not a website, but a Facebook app. If four of you are traveling together, you use this to plan it together, keep each other updated, and—here’s the key thing—automatically splitting up the costs. No more nagging your friends for that 180 bucks they owe you before your credit card bill is due. Simple and cool, and it cuts down on the e-mail chatter.

TripAlertz is a new members-only coupon site that’s like Groupon or LivingSocial, but just for travel. You get notified by e-mail or text about a screaming bargain hotel deal and if you turn some friends on to it, the price goes down. Just U.S. travel for now, but sign up and check it out.

OffandAway is a little too complicated for my tastes, but the basic idea is that you can bid on a fabulous hotel suite in places like New York and Las Vegas and the worst thing that happens if you don’t win is that you get a regular room for that price instead. So not much downside, but a lot of upside if you’ve got a nice vacation budget.

I heard 32 presentations yesterday, so obviously I can’t cover all of even just the consumer-oriented ones, but hopefully one of these can result in a great trip for you soon!

Of the 189 photos I took in Detroit last week, 17 were of the exterior of Michigan Central Depot, the city’s abandoned train station.

I’m not the only one to lavish attention on this Beaux Arts building – the question of what to do with the station, erected in 1913, and designed by the same architects that created New York’s Grand Central Station, has been the subject of local controversy and national attention.

In September, someone non-official installed an official-looking “photo opportunity” sign in front of the station – an acknowledgment that the Depot is, at the least, visually compelling. I found it breathtaking: the combination of Corinthian columns and grand arched windows with shattered glass hanging like lace, behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire — even the scrawling graffiti seemed not out of place with the building’s stone scrolls, swags and medallions.

I only read about the “photo opportunity” sign later, I didn’t see it myself, so perhaps it was removed – along with chandeliers, marble and anything else of value that was left when the station went out of use in 1988.

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Michigan Central Depot has become an icon for Detroit’s extraordinary blight – it’s one of its 45,000 abandoned structures.

In 2009, the city council voted to tear the station down, although it is on the National Historic Register. Both major local papers issued editorials essentially in support of demolition, and a lively preservation movement emerged to save it; it now appears demolition is off the table.

I’ve been reading about the controversy, and it keeps getting more interesting – for instance, the city councilwoman who introduced the bill to demolish the Depot, and was quoted as saying she wanted it “down now”,  also apparently liked to wear a tiara.

I’m not going to pretend I understand all the issues at play here.

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What I’m attempting to understand, though, is why I can’t stop thinking about the building. Musing on why the train station has become a tourist magnet, Jeff Gerrit, an editorial writer for the Detroit Free Press, wonders whether the appeal is “poverty porn”.  I don’t think that’s quite it, since poverty, it seems to me, requires people. There are no people evident in the Depot.

The comparisons I’ve seen to Roman ruins seem to be more apt. “Why couldn’t we have a ruin to celebrate like the Coliseum in Rome?” asked Timothy McKay, executive director of the Greater Corktown Development Corp, in a Fox Detroit story.  (Corktown is the neighborhood around the train station.) “It’s an iconic piece of architecture that needs to be regarded in a very good way…” He envisions it as a “fabulous ruin”.

Ephesus Ruins, Turkey

It’s hard to imagine rundown areas in other American cities being preserved as ruins, but it seems to me that Detroit stands apart, simply because it is so empty.

I roamed some of New York’s more distressed areas during the 1980s and saw plenty of lovely old buildings, burnt out and boarded up, but always, and not always to the benefit of my sense of safety, there were people around.

It’s unpalatable to turn a living part of a neighborhood, no matter how troubled, into a monument and memorial to failure – that’s what ruins are, after all. But there are wide swaths of Detroit that are echoingly empty – the city’s population is 910,000,  half what it was in 1950.

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In December, Steidl will publish Ruins of Detroit, by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. On their website, the photographers write:”ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes … the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things.” (See a Time magazine slideshow of their photographs.)

The antiquarian John Aubrey goes further: he valued the ruin as much as he did the intact structure, writes Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. “Ruins inspire the feelings of melancholy and wonder associated with the sublime,” she writes. “They stimulate the viewer to imagine the building in its former pristine state. They offer the pleasure of longing for the irretrievable object of one’s fantasy.”

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I returned home to New York the next day. I always enjoy the ride in from the airport, since time away allows me to see a place I know well with new eyes. What I notice depends on where I’ve been — the city’s struck me as incredibly drab (after a trip to Hawaii), fuddy duddy (after Shanghai), lavishly wealthy (post-Honduras).

After Detroit, New York seemed absurdly shiny, even sparkly. After a while, I realized that the effect came from all the windows in the buildings I passed: the glass was present, intact, unboarded. Unruined.

Here at Perceptive Travel blog we have a  ‘biggest highest longest category’ where we highlight some of the unique, bizarre, and eccentric sights we come across on our travels. Ranging from super-sized bodies to corrugated towns to underground cathedrals, we’ve really only skimmed the surface of what’s out there in the big, wide world.  
 
At Go Big or Go Home, however, freelance writer Traci Suppa has created  an entire travel blog focusing on the “world’s largest”  whatever…wherever.  Taking to the road, family in tow, she has made it her goal to actively seek out and report on the most unusual attractions she can find through out the world.

Go big or Go Home has only been online a few months but has already built up a great collection of entertaining and humorous posts featuring diverse topics such as the World’s Largest Dairy, the tallest tree house, and the world’s second largest garden gnome.       

It’s the perfect site for anyone who’s interested in adding a little oddity to their travels.

There was something about this plaque that appealed to me during a visit to the massive Hoover Dam that straddles the Nevada and Arizona borders.

I loved the period font; immediately evocative of the 1920′s and 1930′s, isn’t it?

Mostly, though, I like the idea of thousands of proud builders who want you to know….in brass….forevermore….just exactly how many butterfly valves and steel penstocks they worked so hard to install in order to tame the mighty Colorado River, in the teeth of the Great Depression.

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It is harvest time in the northern hemisphere. With Canadian Thanksgiving just past and Thanksgiving in the United States coming up, thoughts often turn toward Native Americans, and to first encounters and later ones. The music of Native America in the twenty first century is vibrant and varied, continuing tradition, commenting on history, and working with new ideas and collaborations.

If you’ve been intrigued by short snippets of chant and drum that often turn up in documentaries, news reports, or film, Gerald Primeaux Senior’s Into the Future is an album which explores that sound. What he presents ais music based on harmonized songs of the Native American Church. With gourd shakers, water drum, and voice, he connects to a singing legacy generations long.

Joanne Shenandoah, who is of the Oneida Iroquois people, and Michael Bucher, who is Cherokee, do that in a different way, through contemporary song, both their own compositions and those of writers including Peter LaFarge and Johnny Cash on their album Bitter Tears Sacred Ground. It is likley you’ll emerge from listening to this one — to any the recordings here, actually — with a different view of Native America than when you began.

Canyon Records has been collecting Native music and sharing it with Native peoples and the wider world since 1951. In recent years they’ve begun a series called Voices Across the Canyon, well thought out albums which each offer a dozen or so tracks from across the range of genres and styles Canyon represents. Volume Five in the series, for example, includes Encuentro, from Robert Tree Cody, Ruben Romero, and Tony Redhouse, a consideration through music of those first meetings of southwestern peoples and those from Spain, as well as a traditional dance song from the Black Lodge Singers. Sharon Burch, whose voice has been compared to that of Joan Baez, offers the song We Are Here, and award winning flute player and composer R. Carlos Nakai adds Song for the Morning Star.

Bill Miller of the Menomonee people of Wisconsin lives in Nashville these days. He speaks through his words and his flutes of Native history, social justice, faith, and contemporary life. Ghostdance is a good place to meet his work, as is the retrospective album Spirit Songs.

There may very likely be Native music celebrations and concerts going near you this autumn. Take a look around. Whatever path you follow in the music of Native America, it is sure to be an interesting journey.

Speaking of interesting journeys, that’s what we talk about here all the time at Perceptive Travel, from Thailand to Texas, from the high seas to the highlands of Scotland, from a food stall in South Africa to a book store in Montreal. Subscribe to our rss feed (see the link up there on the right hand side of the page) to keep up with where we’ve been, and where we’re going.