Trinkets and souvenirs rarely interest me when I travel, but I find it almost impossible to pass by a farm stand selling local honey. Each of the half dozen varieties lining my kitchen shelves has a particular use: a thick, full-bodied Blackberry honey from the Virginia hills is best drizzled over fresh fruit, while scarce honey from Sourwood tree blossoms found in the mountains of North Carolina is perfect on toast. However my most recent acquisition, Babcock’s Wilderness Nectar, had remained unopened since I purchased it from the gift shop at Crescent B Ranch in south central Florida.

Smaller alligator suns on a swamp log

I’d gone to the Crescent B to take a Swamp Buggy Eco-Tour of the ranch’s 90,000 acres of oak hammocks, pine woods, pastures, wetlands, and swamps, all located within the Babcock Wilderness Area. Swamps have always conjured images of black water, boot-sucking mud, and alligators submerged to their eyeballs, patiently waiting to chomp on a passing leg. To me these dank, dangerous places were devoid of beauty and to be avoided at all costs, thus it was with some trepidation that I boarded the old Bluebird school bus, long since painted in a khaki and olive drab camouflage, for my hour and a half tour.

Old Bluebird school bus grinds along rough sand tracks throughout the ranch

Our driver forced the rattletrap bus into gear and lurched onto a rough sand track. A moment later we sighted our first alligator, a foot long baby perched on a waterlogged branch in a drainage ditch. We rumbled across a brilliant chartreuse pasture and ducked into an unspoiled stand of moss-draped longleaf pine and Sawgrass Palmettos. On the other side, the forest opened onto a broad plain where cracker cattle Read the rest of this entry »

With all the time I spend in the Florida Keys, I’ve become somewhat of a travel expert on these tiny islands, so when Addison Schonland of IAGblogPodcasts asked if I would be willing to share some of the least touristy but most worthwhile attractions and beaches in the Keys with his blog audience, I jumped at the chance.

As any reader who has spent time on Hole In The Donut knows, for years I had a love-hate relationship with Key West. I loved the island, but after a couple of days, I hated the drunken tourists, the crowds, and the round-the-clock noisy revelry of DuVal Street. It was only recently that I finally started to discover the Keys – almost as if I had to pay my dues in order to be let into the secret places that no one tells you about. And that’s what Addison wanted me to reveal to his listeners. The podcast is 22 minutes long, but worth a listen:

IAGblogPodcast: Barbara Weibel on the Florida Keys

In the beginning, if you wanted to book airfare online you visited each airline’s individual website, entered your search criteria, and compared the prices, routes, and travel times from the multiple sites prior to booking. Ditto for hotels. It worked, but the process ate up a lot of time and was extremely frustrating.

Sensing an opportunity, sites like Expedia and Travelocity sprung up. These search engines gathered all the information on airfares and hotels and made it available on a single site. That was better, but some things were still missing. In order to read customer reviews about hotels travelers could visit TripAdvisor, but once again that meant visiting multiple sites prior to making travel decisions.

Enter metasearch engines. These relatively new sites incorporate everything into one place, making travel research and booking a breeze. If you’d like to know more, check out the recent post about travel metasearch at UpTake.com. UpTake just happens to be one of the top metasearch sites on the Internet, if not the best. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I am a contracted travel writer for UpTake.com, but then I wouldn’t be working for them unless they were the best.

Every cloud has a silver lining. In the case of our current economic woes, the silver lining is travel. With reservations down, absolutely awesome travel deals are being offered to anyone with the time and resources to take advantage of them. Two of the most popular destinations in the country, Las Vegas and Orlando, are pulling out all the stops to attract visitors, but wading through all the hype and companies advertising discounts and packages can be frustrating, if not downright exhausting.

Recently I learned about a web-based company that simplifies the process of booking attraction tickets for Las Vegas and Orlando. Entertainment Benefits Group, headquartered in Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale with offices in Orlando, is one of the largest privately held travel and entertainment providers in the United States. The company was founded in 2001 by former management executives from Disney and Universal Studios. As an officially contracted wholesaler for Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and Sea World, they work directly with Disney and other theme parks to provide tickets through their website OrlandoFunTickets.com.

OrlandoFunTickets.com

Initially, I was skeptical. Why would anyone buy tickets to Disney World or other Orlando attractions from OrlandoFunTickets.com when they could go to the official website of an attraction and buy tickets directly? So I tested it. I went to the official website for Walt Disney World and checked the ticket prices. Not only were direct tickets through Disney slightly more expensive, their web site was extremely confusing. Once I got to the pricing page, I was asked to select which add-on options I wanted to include (Park Hopper option, Water Park Fun & More option, and No Expiration option). Unfortunately, there was no explanation for Read the rest of this entry »

Beneath the I-24 exit sign for Metropolis, Illinois, a second sign read “giant Superman statue.” I’d been driving for five hours by this time and was hoping to make it to Atlanta before dark, but my curiosity got the better of me. I just had to find out more about that statue. Whipping the car off the highway, I followed a series of signs emblazoned with the familiar “S” logo to a bronze statue of America’s Super Hero standing in Superman Square, located at the junction of Market and 5th Streets.

Giant Superman statue stands at the corner of 5th and Market Streets, in Superman Square. The raised platform upon which he stands is lined with paver bricks that are engraved with the name of donors who contributed toward the cost of the new statue.

The tiny burg of Metropolis has built an entire culture around the legend of Superman. In addition to the statue, a Kryptonite meteorite is located on the southwest corner of Third and Ferry Streets and giant cut-outs of Superman and Lois Lane can be found in front of several stores and businesses around town. Across the street from the statue, The Super Museum is filled with a $2.5 million collection of more than 20,000 items spanning 60 years of Superman memorabilia. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a two-year long journey but my unswerving commitment to remake myself as a travel writer is beginning to pay off. I have been hired by UpTake.com as a freelance travel writer for their “Attractions” blog (you may have noticed the new badge at the right that says “I travel and write about it on UpTake”).

UpTake is a travel search and discovery site that helps users make informed decisions about what best fits their travel preferences. There are so many travel sites, it is often hard to know which one is right for you. Like everything else, travel is becoming a very specialized field. If you already know exactly what you want to book, you should be on sites such as Expedia, Southwest, or Hilton. If you have a range of options in mind but are shopping for the lowest price, you should try FareCast, FareChase, or SideStep. If you want to read a travel review or skim trip journals, you’ll want to visit TripAdvisor, RealTravel, or Yahoo! Trip Planner. If you need help deciding what to book, where to go, where to stay, or what to do, go to UpTake first.

They scoured more than 1,000 sites to collect 400,000 places to go, things to do, and Read the rest of this entry »

I LOVE to travel. I can only stay put for a few months before I get the urge to head out for another one of the distant, exotic places that I haven’t yet checked off my list. Unfortunately, I can’t travel all the time. Once in a while I have to stick around and make some money to pay for all this travel about which I am so passionate. When I find myself grounded for a while – like now – I have to find a way to scratch that travel itch or I go crazy. That’s when I start looking around in my own back yard.

I am ashamed to admit that, despite the fact that I was born and raised in Chicago, I never visited Lincoln Park Zoo, attended a concert at the downtown band shell, went to the top of the Sears Tower, toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, visited the Old Water Tower, or watched the futures trading at the Chicago Board of Trade. It’s a mistake I don’t intend to repeat, now that I’ve relocated to Sarasota. Read the rest of this entry »