Chris Around The World: Your Guide to Value Luxury Vacations
Unique, chic, boutique: Vacations for Sophisticated Travelers
This week, I’m serving as a paid spokesperson for Hilton HHonors’ Seven Tickets to Paradise Sweepstakes. The contest, open to Hilton HHonors members through Aug. 31, features seven prize packages to destinations ranging from Bali to Palm Springs to a location of your choice. I previewed one of the prizes, the “Your Ticket To Dine,” in Napa [...]
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This is the third in my series on things to do in St. Petersburg, Russia. As I said in my post on visiting St. Petersburg, a trip to the Hermitage Museum – the second largest in the world, after the Louvre in Paris – has long been on my bucket list. And I’m happy to report [...]
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This is second in my series on things to do in St. Petersburg, Russia. One of the most interesting things I saw in my few brief days in Russia were the elaborate St. Petersburg Metro stations, decked out with marble, chandeliers and Soviet-era art. Plans for an underground had been in place in the Soviet Union [...]
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This is the first in my series on things to do in St. Petersburg, Russia. One of the highlights of my travels last year included three days in St. Petersburg, Russia (known as Leningrad during Soviet times). While I’ve written about the bureaucratic ins and outs of applying for a Russian visa, I haven’t put [...]
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This is the first in my series about my girlfriend getaway to North Carolina. What’s one of the best ways to save money on a vacation? Add in something fun to a work-related trip. So while I went to North Carolina last weekend to speak at a tourism conference about how to pitch bloggers, I [...]
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Every once in a while, you come upon something in your travels that goes beyond the ordinary, something that makes you grab your camera and thank whatever deity you believe in for the life that you get to live. For me, that moment came in Jigokudani monkey park in the Japanese Alps, when I stood [...]
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Every professional travel writer, it seems, has a happy place, a destination where they return not so much to gather new material, but to unwind and relax. For me, that place is Sanibel Island, Florida. My parents started taking us to Sanibel when I was a teenager. Eventually, they bought a condo there and now [...]
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By Natalie Pompilio, Contributing Writer When my sister and I were making our plans to visit the Harry Potter theme park at Universal Orlando Resort (the Wizarding World of Harry Potter) in Florida, the question we got most frequently was, “How many kids are in your party?” To which we answered, “None.” Because we grown-ups [...]
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In September, I made my first trip to Scandinavia when I took the train throughout Finland, hitting Helsinki, Lapland and a few other towns. In a way, though, it seemed quite familiar; the result of growing up in Minnesota. All throughout my trip, people kept mistaking me for a native Finn, even though I never [...]
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Proof that you can find fun things to do almost where you travel: On a recent trip to Iowa to visit my husband’s parents, we discovered Madison County, which not only has the famed bridges from the Robert James Waller book/Meryl Streep-Clint Eastwood movie, it also contains Winterset, the town where John Wayne was born [...]
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