A little over a year ago, the Gowalla and Foursquare apps on my phone led me to Houston’s House of Pies – a slice of their Bayou Goo pie, to be precise, with chocolate and pecans and whipped cream and all sorts of other unmentionables….

This time it was Yelp on my phone leading me to these delicious grilled shrimp tacos at Surfside Sandwich Shoppe in a small strip mall on North Padre Island, Texas, near Corpus Christi.

A GPS-enabled smartphone is really changing how I find places to eat.

Yes, I still lug my usual stack of print guidebooks out of habit, but many times I have a carload of hungry family members and I just want to know, right then, what is good within about a 2-mile radius of wherever we are.

No, the dude behind the counter at the local gas station has pretty much struck out for me as a source of restaurant recommendations.

While we’re ordering, I always tell the proprietor that, “Hey, we found you through reviews on Yelp (or Gowalla or Foursquare.)”

The response is either, “Oh, yes, we get a lot of activity on there. Thank you!” or it’s a blank, quizzical stare – as we say sometimes in Texas – “like a cow looking at a new gate.”

All I know is, I don’t have to end up at Wendy’s unless I want to.

Update:  This post was included in Wanderfood Wednesday: Between the (Bean Curd) Sheets – food stories from around the world. 

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Work on the sea has always had a certain romance about it — leaving home, testing one’s self against the forces of weather and water, working to sustain a family with hand and mind and heart – and it has always had a certain harsh reality about it, too. The Hungry Ocean, The Perfect Storm,and going back to the classics, Moby Dick all have both sides of working the waters in them.

So does the music of Stan Rogers. He’s a poet of the reality of fisher people’s lives, from the joyous homecoming to the loss of life, from the pride in the work to the despair of finding work in hard times. Through it all, you hear the slap of the wave and taste the tang of salt air in his melodies and his words.

Rogers’ musical canvass was, for the most part, the Canadian Maritimes.

His parents had moved to Ontario for work, but the Atlantic Coast connections of place and family remained strong, and became a source when Rogers went to writing songs. His deep baritone, varied melodies with hints of Celtic and Cape Breton music in them, and his lyrics which hit home to the hearts of working people of all sorts and lovers of the seas in all latitudes, have made Rogers an enduring presence in music. This presence remains strong, decades after his death in an accident at age thirty three.

Though several of Rogers’ albums have been reissued, his widow, Ariel, had long resisted the idea of a best of compilation. With Stan’s long time producer Paul Mills working on remastering decades old recordings, though, the time was right. The sixteen track album The Very Best of Stan Rogers is the result.

A top notch result it is, both for those who know Rogers’ music and for those to whom this may be a first meeting. It is a thoughtfully sequenced set of songs, winding its way from the high stepping song of waiting and homecoming Fogarty’s Cove through to the closer, a song of resilience and facing troubles if there ever was one, The Mary Ellen Carter. In between are a song of keeping on with making a life in the sea even when it seems not to make sense, in Make and Break Harbour, another view of that in Tiny Fish for Japan, a song which explores staying home and the traveling life of musician and seafarer called the Lock-keeper, a look at the heart and hard work of the farmer in The Field Behind the Plow, a song of lasting love and hope in Forty-five Years, and a song that unites history, present day, and all of Canada, in Northwest Passage. Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger has called Stan Rogers one of the most talented songwriters of North America. Take a listen to The Very Best of Stan Rogers and see if you agree.

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The rich really do sleep better at night — or at least the bed isn’t to blame if they don’t.

This was one of my last conscious thoughts before I dropped off for the night in the nearly vertiginous comfort of the Frette linen draped bed at Forty 1 North – a newly opened twenty-eight room hotel in Newport, Rhode Island that had invited me for a weekend visit. It turns out to be an ideal place to contemplate the dreams of the very wealthy.

Earlier that day, I’d been to visit the famous Newport mansions, or, as their first Gilded Age owners would have had it, “summer cottages”. Each “cottage” has ample room to fit the entire hotel I was staying at, and its marina, several times over. The giant size of these houses were part of the point, of course. These were the occasional homes of the newly and outrageously wealthy Americans, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, who, after traveling in Europe and seeing what old money and its trappings looked like, “sought to establish self-made royal status”, writes Amy Handy, in American Castles. This anxiety to establish aristocratic bonafides led to mad collecting of art, fabrics, windows and architectural materials for these homes – both contemporary to the period, and antiques from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Sometimes the owners would limit themselves to a country, or a period of history, but often it would end up in all under one roof. And so The Breakers, the famous Newport mansion of the Vanderbilts, was modeled after the sixteenth century palaces of Genoa, but didn’t trouble itself with any borders (or the notion of Switzerland) that lies between Italy and France. Its staircase cribbed its design from the Paris opera house, the music room went further and was constructed in Paris, to be assembled, like a very expensive Lego set, in Newport. And everywhere you looked there were rare marbles, mosaics, sculptures and frescoes. The excess crescendos in the dining room, which, Handy writes, “is the most magnificently appointed in this exclusive community”. It’s two stories tall, alabaster columns, dramatic red curtains, no surface left unembellished without a frieze or a Baccarat crystal light fixture or molten gold.

The dining room elicits a “whoa” when you walk into it, as it’s supposed to, but as I stood there listening to the audio tour, I couldn’t help but thinking I wouldn’t want to eat a meal in there. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend the night in the place, even if it was bustling with servants, even if my bath tub had three taps, one for hot water, one for cold, and one for salt water piped directly from the sea. To my modern eye, the place was not just a little over the top. It was tacky.

***

Back at Forty 1 North that evening, I looked around and felt some satisfaction about the superior luxury aesthetics of our own age. I mean,  here we have a newly designed boutique hotel, aimed at the modern well-to-do. (Rooms average around $600/night, suites well exceed $1000.) It was designed incorporate some of the same aspects that so delighted the Gilded Age upper crust – the goal, according to a presentation by DAS Architects, was to “respect the history of Newport and highlight the nuances of the old grand dame hotels but also convey a new era of Newport hospitality.” And so modern luxuries are well heeded: the aforementioned linens, the 40 inch flat screen TV, the fireplace, and not just an iPod dock, but an iPad in every room. There’s no salt water spigot in the bathtub, but it does accommodate two people, the separate shower has many means of soaking, and there are Malin + Goetz toiletries.

There’s certainly nothing you’d describe as a vaguely rococo at Forty 1 North: it’s all clean lines, ample spaces left unadorned, and a soothing palette of pewter and pale blue and creamy white and wood and glass. But there was one aspect of Gilded Age aesthetics that made it into the hotel’s décor — I hadn’t quite registered it in the morning, but that night at the bar my mansion attuned eye noticed the execution of one DAS design concept: “The hotel should glisten in metallics & shimmer,” the presentation firmly states. And so it does: floor mosaics in the bar shimmer, the chair upholstery in the restaurant glints copper, the tiles in the guest room bathroom are iridescent glass, and a dramatic nine foot square sculpture made from abalone shells glitters in the hotel foyer.

***

On a frieze in the main hall of the Breakers, the Vanderbilts had their craftsmen insert a locomotive behind a cherub, since they made their money in railroads, and an acorn motif is repeated in the mosaic floor of the billiard room — the acorn a symbol of their family. All that self-reference, and that was besides the many shimmery reflective surfaces.

Oh the shiny object, which holds such enduring allure! That’s what I thought, or something similar, as I drifted off to sleep that night. After all, in what else besides a shiny surface would we have the chance of glancing that most pleasing and precious of images, the deep and satisfying luxury of our own reflection?

If you think that the only thing that travel insurance companies are interested in is selling you travel insurance, then you’ve obviously not come across WorldNomads.com.

Sure they want to sell travel insurance.

But they also want to be an integral part of a traveler’s journey. Over the years, they have also created plenty of fun and interesting programs  – Travel Scholarships, Van-tastic Adventures, safety alerts, Footprints, language guides, and travel blogs – that not only help travelers but also give back to local communities.

And their latest creation – Ask a Nomad  iPad App – is no different.

This free iPad App is a great travel knowledge-sharing tool that draws on World Nomad’s existing community of travellers who already respond to questions from around the world via it’s website.

Want to find out where to get bubble tea in Sydney or how to rent an apartment in Paris or Prague?

There’s bound to be someone on ‘Ask a Nomad’ who can help you.

At the same time, browse already asked questions and answers by continent, country, city or suburb to learn more about places you are visiting or plan on visiting.

And just like twitter, Ask a Nomad stores your questions in a separate location for easy access. And you can favorite other questions for future reference.

All you have to do is download the App and then start asking.

A high school string ensemble, an award winning actress, a group of second graders, a man who’s written hits for Elvis Costello and Reba McEntire, two fourth grade classes, an internationally touring folk musician — sounds like a pretty good group to write songs, doesn’t it?

Throw in a few more songwriters and a bunch more kids, all from Albemarle County in Virginia, and you’ve got the Virginia edition of Kid Pan Alley, a project started by musician Paul Reisler several years ago which brings songwriters into classrooms across the country to get kids exploring creativity through writing songs — and they turn out some wild things, too, songs that speak of the serious and hard and crazy things of life and songs that are just plain funny. There have been projects in several parts of the US, and sometimes, as with the Charlottesville/Albemarle project, this results in recording.

Virginia based songwriters got together to put eighteen of the songs the kids wrote on a CD, which is called I Used to Know the Names of All the Stars. That title song talks wistfully of time and change. I Sure Do Love Virginia speaks of love for home and landscape. My Dog Did My Homework is a wry and funny twist on a common excuse, and We Could Make A Song About Love offers surprising perspectives on that eternal subject of song. The songs aren’t kid stuff, and yet they are, funny and engaging and thought provoking at the same time.

Musicians who sing and play on the album include regionally and nationally known artists, among them award winning actress Sissy Spacek, hit songwriter Jesse Winchester, and internationally known folk singers Terri Allard (who co ordinated the project) and Ellis Paul.