Travel Blog

Homewood Suites by Hilton

If you’re a business traveler, or are visiting a city and will be staying for awhile, you might do yourself well to try to stay at a Homewood Suites by Hilton. It’s a national chain of hotels that offers the opportunity to stay in a room that will remind you of home if you live in an apartment, and, depending on which city you’re in, might offer some other amenities that you may not have at home.

The first thing you notice about the rooms in a Homewood Suites is how big they are. All of them have at least one bedroom, though there are some that have two. The living room area is always fairly large and spacious, with very comfortable furniture. Some of the rooms will have couches that can fold out into another bed. Each city will try to design the rooms to match the feeling of the community you’re in. For instance, in Reno, NV, all the rooms have a southwestern feel and color, with bright oranges and muted browns, whereas in Syracuse, NY, the rooms are blue with hints of green and brown.

The next thing you’ll notice is there’s a kitchen. It’s not a full sized kitchen like in a house, but it is a full sized kitchen like what you’d have in a small apartment. This will allow you to prepare your own meals, or store items in a full sized refrigerator. All the utensils and cooking materials you would ever need are already in the cabinets, along with soap for both the dishwasher and to clean up your plates and the like. If you’re not in the mood to clean up after yourself, don’t worry about it; the people who clean the rooms every day will take care of it for you.

The bedrooms are large enough to hold a king-sized bed or two twin beds and still give you room to walk around. There is a flat screen TV in both the bedroom and the living room, with a separate vanity and bathroom area. There’s also a large closet in the bedroom, the only closet in the room.

Homewood Suites also has a buffet breakfast and dinner, in case you’re not in the mood to go buy food yourself or go to a restaurant. They serve breakfast every day, but in some Homewood Suites, may not have dinner over the weekend. They all have workout rooms, a pool, a laundry area and multiple meeting rooms. And, if you want to sit out in the lounge, it’s usually a large area with a large flat screen TV, in case you’re there on a Sunday and want to watch shows, including sporting events, outside of your room.

All this, including Wi-Fi access, for a very reasonable price. The Hilton name usually means quality, and the Homewood Suites will make you feel right at home.

See more:
Discount Hotels in Las Vegas
Wikipedia – Hilton Hotels
Newly Opened Homewood Suites

Photo Credit: www.monorails.org

By now, probably everyone has seen a picture of Sydney, Australia, with their grand Sydney Opera House looking like it’s sitting in Sydney Harbor, sometimes in front of the large Harbor Bridge, and sometimes sitting out in front of multiple skyscrapers. Sydney, the home of the 2000 Summer Olympics, is one of the most popular vacation spots in the world, and one of the top 10 most livable cities in the world.

Let’s talk about the Sydney Opera House first, as its most prominent attraction. The building itself is more than 4.5 acres in scope, and houses multiple theaters that handle more than just opera. The number of seats depends on what you’re going there for:

1. The Opera Theatre has 1,507 seats and also has the Australian Ballet perform in there
2. The Concert Hall has 2,678 seats, and houses the Sydney Symphony, other concert performances, and the Sydney Opera House Grand Organ, the largest mechanical tracker action organ in the world
3. The Drama Theatre has 544 seats, is used by the Sydney Theatre Company

And there are many other smaller venues that can handle other types of performances.

Sydney has a couple of great beaches as well. The most popular is Bondi Beach, which is closer to the city than the other favorite, Manly Beach. Surfing is a favorite pastime of people at Bondi, and since it’s close to the city center, it’s a great jumping off point to the nightlife the city has to offer. Manly Beach is set more within a peninsula, and is highlighted by many outdoor restaurants and stores, and holds many different types of festivals. Because the weather is more often warm than not, the beaches are always crowded.

One of the favorite attractions in Sydney is the Taronga Zoo, home to more than 2,600 different animals. It covers more than 51 acres of land, making it one of the largest zoos by area in the world. A couple of the special exhibits it has are the platypus and elephant exhibits, where they have highlighted the birth of animals in captivity for these species.

Other things to see while in Sydney include the Australian Museum of Natural History, The Powerhouse Science and Technology Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Sports galore are throughout Sydney, and if you’ve never seen it in person, you should try to catch a game of cricket.

With a population of more than 4 million, and its being considered as one of the most multicultural cities in the world, there’s just so much more that could be said about Sydney that, instead, we recommend you stay in Sydney at least 2 weeks to take in as much as you can. And, since your flight will probably be 16 to 18 hours anyway, you might as well get as much as you can out of the trip. But be aware; you might like it so much that you may never want to leave.

See more:
100 Things to do in Sydney
Sydney Top Restaurant Guide
Sydney Sights and Getting Around

Photo credit: www.api.ning.com

Salt Lake City, Utah, is home to the country’s largest salt lake, the Great Salt Lake. It’s what most people know about the city besides its history as the city created by the Church of Latter Day Saints in the 1800′s.

A visit to the city might ultimately start at the lake, which is salty because it has rivers that bring water into the lake, but no way to get that water back out of the lake except through evaporation, which leaves salt deposits. The lake is surrounded by marsh and wetlands, and actually is considered as being next to the city rather than within the city limits. There’s no development around the shoreline because the size of the lake changes within a 15 mile radius at various times, so it’s also considered fairly natural and pristine. No fish can live in the lake, but there are a couple of different types of shrimp living there, as they can handle the saline in the water. People can swim in the lake, and there is a beach, Bridger Bay Beach, which is nice in warmer weather.

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Once you decide you’ve had enough of the lake, of course there are other sites around Salt Lake City, which is the largest city in the state and also the capital of Utah. As it would figure, one of the top museums in the city is the Church History Museum, which is run by the Mormons and has artifacts from the history of their church. There’s also the Utah Museum of Natural History and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

One of the most popular areas of the city is known as the Gateway District, which has over 100 restaurants and stores, as well as many office buildings, residential properties, and other attractions. The Clark Planetarium, which has an IMAX theater, is located in this area, as well as the Discovery Gateway Children’s Museum.

Of course, one can’t visit Salt Lake City without taking in a performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which performs at the Salt Lake Tabernacle. It’s been in existence for more than 140 years, and has one of the most recognizable sounds in the world. It has one of the largest pipe organs in the world also, with more than 11,500 pipes. They are often accompanied by the Orchestra at Temple Square, but have also performed with the Utah Symphony Orchestra.

Finally, since it was also the home of the 2002 Winter Olympics, you know that it has many winter sports, including skiing and ice skating, that are world class.

See more:
Salt Lake City Visitor Resources
Salt Lake City Restaurant Guide
10 Things to do in Salt Lake City

Photo Credit: www.research.rutgers.edu

If you’re really in the mood to go someplace extra special, and you’re not looking for the best weather in the world, Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, would be a great place for you to visit, and be more than you might be expecting.

Outside of Antarctica, there is one small town of around 1,000 people that’s further south, but if you want to be in a place that has both a population and a few things to do, Ushuaia is the place to go. It’s a city of around 64,000 with its own airport, sitting on Lapataia Bay and the Beagle Channel, somewhere slightly removed from both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It’s a beautiful pristine area where visitors can see mountains and glaciers, crystal clear if cold waters, and animals such as seals, penguins, sea lions and killer whales. There are wildlife tours and cruises that will take you all around the area so you can enjoy being out in the open and see things like the Straits of Magellan.

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The area is known for being able to do all sorts of activities such as skiing, mountain biking, and hiking. You probably won’t be going swimming, as its warmest temperatures on average rarely go above 60, though there has been the rare occasion that temperatures have hit 80′s in the summer, where there is upwards of 18 hours of sunlight, as opposed to 6 hours in the winter.

There are attractions to see in the area also. For instance, there’s the Tren al Fin del Mundo, otherwise known as the Prisoner’s Train, as the area was once a penal colony. There’s another train known as “Ferrocarril Austral Fueguino”, or the Train of the End of the World, which will take people on a tour of the area, into the Tierra del Fuego National Park, with much of the trip going along the River Pipo. And there’s the Museo del Presidio, which was actually a former prison that was closed in 1947, which housed the worst criminals of the country, and these days has wax statues of some of those prisoners.

Ushuaia is a beautiful area with lots to see and do, and pretty much a place where you really can say you’ve gone as far south as you could without going to Antarctica.

See more:
Ushuaia Information from Wikipedia
Ushuaia Sights and Attractions
Ushuaia Restaurant Reviews

Photo Credit: www.cooperstownguide.com

Most people know that the National Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, NY. Even if that was the only attraction, it would be, and usually is, enough of an attraction for people to decide it’s worth a visit to. But there’s a lot more to the town than that which can give a lot of people something to enjoy.

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Every conversation starts with baseball, however. The Hall of Fame was created in 1936 to honor great baseball players, and continues to do so to this day. It keeps growing and being modified as technology gets better and as the money keeps coming in. And with more than 350,000 visitors a year, the money keeps coming in.

If you’re a baseball fan of any type, this is the place for you. It’s not only reliving old history, but reliving the history while you were alive. Baseball is one of the few sports where a person of almost any size can play and be an all star, even though some players are getting bigger these days. You can go from guys like Ty Cobb, who is in the Hall of Fame for the highest batting average in history and was a small guy, up to guys like Willie McCovey, who in his time was one of the biggest players in baseball and left the game with over 500 home runs. You can see uniforms, balls, bats, and other memorabilia. You will see plaques and game film of players and plays. You will see special games and moments, such as Carlton Fisk hitting the home run in the 12th inning of a playoff game in 1975 or Kirk Gibson hitting the game winning home run for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988. In essence, anything baseball that you can ever think of is there; well, except for Pete Rose.

As we said, Cooperstown is more than just baseball. There’s the Fenimore Art Museum, which has one of the largest collections of Native American art in the country, as well as a lot of items from the life of James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote Last of the Mohicans, was from Cooperstown and remains its most famous citizen. Also, the Farmers Museum is here, which houses the famous Cardiff Giant, a statue that had many people in the late 1860′s believing it was the unearthed remains of a super human man from the prehistoric era. And it’s the home of the Glimmerglass Opera, one of the best known opera houses in the world, where many brand new operas are often debuted, and it’s still the last facility in the United States that was built specifically for opera.

Cooperstown is worth the trip, but know that you can’t fly directly into the city. So, you will have a nice little drive, but it’s a beautiful drive.

See more:
Where to Eat in Cooperstown
Baseball Hall of Fame Admission Fees
Cooperstown Attractions, Best Places to Visit

Photo Credit: www.offexploring.com

The Vietnamese War ended more than 30 years ago, and Vietnam has become a unified and growing country. Sure, there are still shades of the jungles of Vietnam, which has helped Vietnam become a tourist attraction on its own. But there is also some of the best cuisine in the world, much of it with a French flavor that many might not expect, forgetting that Vietnam used to be a French colony.

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Something else people don’t think about Vietnam is that it has a huge population. There’s more than 85 million people in Vietnam. Hanoi, with a population of around 6.5 million people, is the second largest city in the country, with Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, being the top city by population. Hanoi is also the capital of the country. Hanoi is located right on the Red River, which helps to make one of the favorite things to do for its visitors possible, that being junk rides up and down the river, seeing much of the countryside.

Hanoi is also an old city, as it will celebrate 1,000 years of existence in October 2010. The region, however, has had settlements going back as far as 3,000 B.C. Many exhibits are shown in Hanoi’s many museums, such as the National Museum of Vietnamese History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. There are also tributes to artists from Vietnam with the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum, as well as tributes for the many wars and city history of Hanoi, like the Vietnam Museum of Revolution, Vietnam Military History Museum and Ho Chi Minh Museum.

There are also plenty of excursions into the jungles around the area, where visitors can get a sense of what it might have been like during the many years of the Vietnam War. For people who want a more contemporary experience, the city has more than 600 pagodas and temples, many area lakes, a puppet theater, and many therapeutic spas. Restaurants can not only serve up local Vietnamese and Chinese favorites, but some of the best French cuisine in the world, at prices that are less than what one would spend in either France or the United States.

There are also luxury hotels in Hanoi, which would figure for a city of its size. One of the oldest and best luxury hotels is the Sofitel Metropole Hotel, which opened in 1901 and has a French colonial style. Its antithesis would be the InterContinental Hanoi Westlake Village, one of its newest luxury hotels that only opened in 2007.

You’ll find a wealth of experiences in Hanoi; think about it for your next Asian vacation.

See more:
Vietnamese Traditional Foods
Vietnam Travel Destinations and Sights
Vietnam Dangers and Annoyances

Photo Credit: www.italianvisits.com

The Villa d’Este Hotel in Florence, Italy, was voted as the top hotel in the world by Forbes Traveler in 2009. It’s hard to deny that this is, indeed, one very spectacular hotel.

The hotel sits on Lake Como, and is actually a converted residence from the 16th century. To say it’s palatial is to diminish its grandeur. It sits on around 300 acres of space, groomed and planned to inspire the senses. There are fountains galore, including the Fountain of Neptune and Fountain of Tivoli, and the row of 100 fountains. As a matter of fact, there are over 500 fountains on the premises. There are also many statues and gardens, mosaics, and multiple spas on its grounds.

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There are nearly 160 rooms available in the hotel, ranging from double rooms to suites. Most of the rooms have their own Jacuzzi, which is a nice touch. There are three restaurants in the hotel, one of which is supposed to have the best Japanese food in the nation. The residence has been a hotel for around 130 years, and is known for high marble ceilings, columns, and multiple staircases.

If you’re lucky to arrive at certain times of the year, there are even tours planned through the hotel that will let you see other areas of Italy during an extended stay at the hotel. You’re already on the shores of Lake Como, but there are other sites to see along the lake, including other old villas. There are also tours to Florence, Tuscany, and Chianti. Whether or not you like wine, taking an Italian wine tour is something you just can’t experience anywhere else. Also, we all know that Italy has a rich history, so there will be tours of historic buildings and sites, including the ruins of Rocca di Tentennano and its art museum in Tuscany.

The hotel has boats for going out on the water, and still employs horse drawn carriages for guests who just want to saunter around a bit. There’s also an 18-hole golf course on its grounds, considered one of the most beautiful and challenging courses in Europe.

And, if you’re in the need for something a bit more modern, Rome is only 30 minutes away. But the Villa d’Este is meant to take you away from all of that, offering your senses enough to help you relax and replenish your mind so that, when you go back to your daily grind, you’ll be more mentally prepared than when you left.

See more:
Florence, Italy Restaurant Guide (Where to Eat)
Florence, Italy Weather
Sights to See in Florence

Chinatown in the New York City area is in the lower part of Manhattan. It was a thriving and growing area of the city until the Twin Towers disaster in September 2001. Now, though it still has a vibrancy to it, its not what it was because many businesses moved out of the area, and that’s left a number of empty buildings that no one has moved back into.

Take that out of the mix, though, and Chinatown is a fascinating area of the city. You have to start with the street front vendors because, well, you just can’t miss them. Many of the remaining stores put out some of their wares to entice you to go inside to see what else they have. You can get anything from watches to purses to jewelry to electronics, all at discount prices that you couldn’t get anywhere else. How good are the items? Well, that’s another story.

Here’s the other side of it all. If you don’t see what you want, you can indicate that to someone, and probably within minutes you’ll be escorted to places where you might not have ever thought you’d go, but there’s just something compelling about it all. Chinatown has many secret nooks. One minute you’re standing in the middle of a store, and in another minute you’re in a secret, probably cramped room surrounded by all sorts of things. In some stores, you mention what you want, and they’ll get it for you. Some of these stores have catalogs of items such as Rolex watches or Gucci purses, and they’ll give them to you at major league discount prices.

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Like what? Well, I decided to buy a few things for myself and my wife. I bought a gold Rolex with a black face and diamonds not only on each number, but diamonds signifying each minute on the watch face. In the catalog, that Rolex goes for $27,000; I bought it for $45. I bought two more watches for myself, two for my wife, and it came to less than $200. I then went to another store and bought 3 Gucci bags and a Coach bag for my wife and mother; those all came in under $200 also. If you believe retail prices, I spent more than $90,000 in one day; I came home with dollars still in my pocket.

Chinatown is more than just stores, though. You just can’t get real Chinese food without going into Chinese areas. One restaurant I went into had two menus, one for Chinese, and one for everyone else. It’s not the same food either; I know because I saw something being eaten and asked the man to point it out on my menu; he said it wasn’t on my menu. You need to be warned, though; you will get things in your food that you won’t get in most suburban Chinese restaurants. But everything smells great, and you’ll enjoy it.

You’ll have a good time in Chinatown because there’s a lot to see. Make sure you’re careful, though. Never go by yourself, and always keep an eye on your bags. You won’t know the language, and though you should be safe, don’t take any unnecessary chances with your safety. It’s a lot of fun overall.

See more:
Best Restaurants in Chinatown
Chinatown-online.com
Top 25 New York Sightseeing Destinations