nerd’s eye view

Travel Gear: You Gotta Have Audio

High on the list of don’t leave home without it? The iPod. I’m addicted to it ever since I discovered podcasting. You know what’s not so great about the iPod, though? Those crappy ear buds that Apple includes. You have to head straight out and get new ones. Through PR pitches and impulse shopping, I’ve ended up with a surprising number of headsets - it’s time for a little round up.

I paid far too much money for my Shure SCL2 Sound Isolating Earphones at Heathrow Airport. What a bad choice for shopping, duty free or no. Never mind, these things are indispensable for long haul travel. Isolation headphones are like a hybrid between earplugs and ear buds - mine have replaceable foam inserts along with a number of other bits you can use for the part that sits in your ear. The sound from these little guys is great and wow, they block out a ton of noise. But there’s a downside - they are not comfortable for the long term. If I wear them for an hour or two, my ears start to hurt. And the shape of the hardware isn’t ideal - they don’t lie flat against your ear so if you nod off on the plane, dropping the side of your head on the seat back, oh, you’ll wake up again. I still take them with me on long trips when I’m super space conscious and on that super noisy trip from Chau Doc to Phnom Pehn, I was really glad I had them. Bonus, they come with a nice little clamshell carrying case that fits in the palm of your hand.

Pros: Great sound, noise blocking, great storage, compact. Cons: Expensive, not comfortable for extended use.

The Outside-The-Box Plane Quiet NC7 Active Noise Canceling Headphone came with a pitch from the company. These are full on headphones with a power supply that runs on one AA battery. They’re lightweight and comfortable and again, the sound is great. When you turn on the noise reduction, there’s a minor hiss in the background, but I didn’t find it distracting. The first time I used these things, I took the crowded commuter bus downtown and I was stunned when I took them off at how much noise they blocked out. Truly, it was amazing. Thing is, the big selling point for these babies is that they block engine noise and that wasn’t really the case on the bus. A little questioning of our resident tech geek turned up the idea that they’re designed to block a specific frequency of engine noise - that’s why they blocked the noise of the roofer’s air compressor and not that of the city bus. They take up a lot more space in the carry on, so I’d probably weigh the space vs. comfort equation before tossing them in the bag for extended travel. For shorter trips and light travel, they are in - in fact, I’ll be packing them for my upcoming trip to NYC.

Pros: Great sound, affordable, comfortable. Cons: Bulky, needs batteries.

Finally, I’ve got a pair of super lightweight seriously designed ear buds from Coosh 782048-B Headphones - White. They’ve got silicon, um, thingies, that wrap around your ear and hold the ear bud in place. And the tiny speakers pack a wallop, the sound out of these little guys is the best of all my gear. They lie flat against your ear and they’re great for extended use - I use them when I’m lying in bed listening to X Minus One sci-fi podcasts. Coosh designed their headsets to work with your phone - there’s a speaker and a clip to hold it in place, so if you’re an iPhone person, these are probably a great choice. Thing is, they don’t block external noise in any way, the only option is to turn it up.

Pros: Great sound for not much dough, comfortable. Cons: No outside noise reduction.

I thought there’d be a clear winner when I decided to stack these things up against one another, but it’s all about context. For long trips where space in my bag is a premium and I want to block outside noise, I’m sticking with the Shure Isolation buds. For shorter travels where I’ve got the space to spare and am feeling like a bit of coddling - including taking the bus - I’m going with the Plane Quiet headphones. For regular use - when I can’t sleep and don’t want to wake Mr. NEV, or when I’m off for a walk to the park with an episode of This American Life, I’m really pleased with the Coosh ear buds.

9 Comments | Posted in » Passport Travels

Fish Wednesday: Conveyer Belt Editon

God help me, I hate shopping malls. But I needed new clothes, I have been wanting to learn what all the fuss over H&M is about, and sometimes, there is nothing for it but cross a giant swath of asphalt and dive into the belly of the suburban consumer beast.

Our biggest nearby mall is Southcenter; it’s now using the shiny new name of Westfield. I can’t help but ask where the field is because there’s no sign of if and to the west, there are six lanes of traffic dumping commuters into Interstate 5 and the smaller highway that goes to the airport.

Westfield on an early September evening is packed with a lot of good looking people from all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds, it’s a chain retailer’s American dream fantasy come to life. At the south entrance to the mall, there are a handful of restaurants, a giant Barnes and Noble, and a three or four story parking garage. Oh, and Blue C Sushi. As we walked past, the husband said, “Hey, it’s Fish Wednesday, how ’bout sushi?”

Why fight it? I agreed and we found ourselves in a booth next to the conveyor belt while brightly colored plates slid quietly by. Tempura eel with cream cheese. California roll. Spicy tuna roll. Braised tuna with a special dipping sauce. Sesame noodles. The random plastic toy. A bottle of soda. A plastic sign that said “Beef, it’s what’s for sushi.”

Behind the counter a bunch of cheerful Spanish speaking guys cranked out roll after roll of sushi goodness, slicing and stacking and setting in motion. I like Blue C, it’s fun to watch the little plates roll past. It’s fun to stack up the plates by color. To watch the videos of Japanese hipster kids on the big screen monitor at the back of the restaurant. There’s a lot going on but it’s not noisy (or it wasn’t last night) and most of what we had was really yummy, save the tuna sashimi, which should have been a better cut of fish. I had a Cricket Cola at the recommendation of the young man keeping an eye on us - it was tasty too.

Sushi is pretty labor intensive and it’s hard to reproduce the kind of variety you’d like at home. Blue C isn’t the best sushi I’ve had - I think that was at some nondescript place in Honolulu - but it was really quite good.

Blue C has four locations, go check it out.

6 Comments | Posted in » Seattle

DVD Preview: The Art of Travel

Connor Layne has just graduated from high school and is getting married to his sweetheart. When he finds out that his bride to be has dallied with his best man, he makes a scene at the wedding and books the next flight out, ending up in Nicaragua. There he loses his money, his shirt (literally) and possibly his virginity. Instead of heading back to college, he joins a group of practical jokers (again, literal) who are determined to cross the Darien Gap.

Connor is played by the kid that was Francis in Malcolm in the Middle, Christopher Masterson. He’s pretty appealing, as is the rest of the cast - they’re all good looking and fairly charismatic, if a little too clean at times for the task at hand. They do the best they can with the material, save the leader of the group, who sounds too much like Patrick Warburton pretending to be unfunny.

There’s some nice film work of the South American natives and some beautiful footage of Macchu Picchu, but mostly the photography doesn’t offer the kind of heart stopping views that inspire travel. And the writing, oh, the writing! It’s not entirely awful, just clichéd, littered with the kind of revelations that all travelers think are so important. Indeed they are, for the travelers themselves, but for those outside the experience, they’re just the ramblings of a 20 something discovering there’s more to the world than high school, or a stock broker realizing there’s more to life than the pursuit of money, even if it does fund your outrageous adventures. Bully for your revelations. Yawn.

Connor has a terrific adventure. He meets hot, promiscuous Dutch girls, completes an epic task, falls in love with an older woman from a far away place who returns his affections, becomes a travel writer, throws off the chains of a path of domestic predictability to become a planetary vagabond. He lives the fantasy of so many travelers, but why is it so boring?

It’s boring because it’s the fantasy of a 20 year old boy just out of high school. It’s all about Connor’s exploits, not about the places he goes or the people he meets, not really. The back stories for Connor’s companions are flimsy, the history and native culture of the places he visits remain unexplored. Macchu Picchu is nothing more than another pretty place for Connor and his sweetheart to make out. It’s a classic tale.  20 something goes traveling, gets lost, finds love and himself. It’s not a new story and if you’re going to tell it, you have to do so, forgive me, artfully.

If you watched Malcolm in the Middle, you’ll remember that there’s a series of episodes where Francis is up in Alaska. During the movie I kept thinking that those episodes were far more expressive of place, of the characters that inhabit the Last Frontier, of the kinds of mistaken adventures that happen when you’re far from home. I couldn’t help it. The writing was better when Francis was in Alaska than it is for Connor in South and Central America.

The one moment in the movie that I really enjoyed came at the very end, at the conclusion of a practical joke. I laughed out loud for a brief moment at the cleverness. You have to see the set up in the middle of the movie to appreciate the conclusion. But it’s not worth crossing the Darien Gap for.

• The Art of Travel Official Website
• Movie Trailer
• Review on DVD File

6 Comments | Posted in » Kultcha, Passport Travels

Happy Travelers at the NEV Youth Hostel

We were delighted to host Gunther, Anna, Vanessa, and Alex from Austria at our place last month. They used the Nerd’s Eye View West Coast Headquarters as a base camp for the expedition around the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain States.

Today we received this this photo of them with all their gear on our (dead) front lawn at the end of their trip. It gave us the biggest laugh of the day. We’re notoriously light travelers, so this put us into fits of hysteria.

Hey, everyone travels differently. As long as they travel, right?

There’s a little bit of renovation happening at the hostel, by October, we should be ready for more guests. Price of admission? A photo of you in or around our neighborhood. It’s a bargain.

(Posted with an okay from Alex, the photographer.)

3 Comments | Posted in » Passport Travels

The Adventures in Travel Expo

I had a funny little moment during the introductions portion of our travel panel at the Adventures in Travel Expo. Our moderator, the articulate and well-traveled Beth Whitman of Wanderlust and Lipstick was running down the bios for the panel. These were adventurers’ histories - compact stories of women who have made travel an essential part of their lives for as long as they can remember. (Chris McKay runs Crooked Trails, an amazing developmental travel company, and you might know Mary Jo Manzanares from Fly Away Cafe.) And then, right in the middle of her third intro, at the part where she mentioned that most of the gear was carried by ponies it occurred to me, as though I was not sitting on the stage: Oh my god! She’s talking about me!

We had a terrific discussion about travel - how to be safe, how to save money, how to be green or at least take steps in that direction… we did a little show and tell and being a nerd, I brought the most stuff, but I was glad I did. We had a lively and interested audience who asked good questions. Afterwards, one woman came up to me and told me about her tourism business in Costa Rica and said that the talk was great and that we were “an amazing bunch of women” and again I thought, “Hey, she means me, too!”

Yes, I get that it’s silly. But there you have it.

From where I sat (next to Mary Jo), I thought it was quite an interesting panel. The others had entertaining stories to tell, great advice, and the minor concern I had that we’d repeat each other’s ideas was never realized. I especially enjoyed the Q&A because of the randomness of it - how do you know what someone in the audience is going to ask you? You don’t! - and I was pleasantly surprised by how many people stuck around after we were done to say hi, introduce themselves, or ask more questions. I was excited to get asked about photography. And I didn’t freak out in the spotlight.

It’s possible that I “know” travel more than I know anything. I know how to make it happen, what to do when I’m underway, I think I do a fair job of documenting it, and when it’s over, I know how to get grounded at home and turn towards planning my next adventure. I really enjoyed having a chance to talk about something I’m good at, to share those ideas, and to share the space with three others who are even better at all that stuff than I am. It was a fun experience and I’d like to do it again.

You should totally have us as a panel at your travel event.

8 Comments | Posted in » Passport Travels, Werk

Vagabond Shoes

I used to have a little blurb on my “about” page that read something like this:

Freelance technical writing pays my bills. In between gigs, I submit stories to travel, culture and outdoors publications in hopes that one day, Conde Nast will call.

Today was that day. This morning, at about 9am, Conde Nast called.

This is a story of Web 2.0. If you don’t get what technology can do for you, pay attention, because this is a really good example.

About three or four months ago I caved and signed on to Twitter. (What’s Twitter?) I didn’t get it right away, but a bunch of my imaginary Internet friends were talking about how great it is and I figured I’d try it out. After the first few weeks of reading what people were having for breakfast and what they saw on TV three minutes ago, I trimmed my followers down to people I know, would like to know, or those who work in or are all hopped up about travel. A HA! All of a sudden, it was like having a live news feed of (mostly) travel related goodness from people who shared my priorities. Nice. (I’m way behind on dealing with new followers. Sorry and thanks.)

One of the guys I “know” from Twitter mentioned how he had a Gnomedex pass he couldn’t use and was willing to let go for half price. I thought Gnomedex sounded cool (it was) and, hey, it was here in Seattle. The guy, Elliot Ng, one of the founders of Uptake, a  travel search engine, said he’d be happy to let me buy the pass and would I write a post for their blog? You betcha. I’d be delighted.

So there I was at Gnomedex, writing about it on Twitter, and all my travel contacts were seeing that stuff. Including Wendy Perrin from Conde Nast. She seemed to think I had a lot of interesting and exciting things to say, which is no small compliment when you consider that Twitter restrains you to a 140 character format. She liked my coverage so much that she passed my name along to the PR person for an upcoming Conde Nast hosted event.

That’s when the phone rang. “Wendy loved your writing about that tech conference you attended,” said the nice gal from Conde Nast. We were wondering if you’d be interested in coming to New York and writing about the World Savers Conference for our site?” The WSC is a Conde Nast sponsored event that recognizes good work being done by travel organizations - superior environmental groups, cultural groups, that sort of thing.

Whoa. Conde Nast is on the phone asking me if they can fly me to NYC, put me up in midtown, send me to a super cool travel event, and hey, would I write about it for them? Whoa. Also this: Um, yes please.

I’m a little bit dizzy with the wonderfulness of it. And I’m feeling like giving the Internet a great big hug because wow, it does an incredible job of connecting the dots. Watch this space and, um, Conde Nast Traveler (heh, I’m cracking up a little bit as I write that) for Nerd’s Eye View updates from the World Savers Conference in midtown Manhattan.

Sidenotes: I’d just scheduled the travelbloggers meetup for that exact same day. Luckily, the generous and bloggy Debbie of Delicious Baby is going to step in. You should still email me for an eVite - not only because the nice folks at Holt have given me a few copies of some travel lit to give away in a drawing - but because travelbloggers? They’re good people. You should meet them.

Also, it’s not too late to get a freebie for the Adventure Travel Show this weekend. Email me if you want the link/code for that, too.

57 Comments | Posted in » Passport Travels, Werk