It’s 2010 and I am in New York City! It is so cold, but this won’t stop me getting out and about!

While I am here in New York I hope to visit:

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019
There is a Tim Burton exhibition running until April that I hear is fantastic. You can also buy your tickets online beforehand which will save me having to queue up when I arrive.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue New York, NY 10128
The Kadinsky, is coming to a close on Jan 13, 2010. The Guggenheim is currently exhibiting almost 100 paintings and 60 drawing spanning Kadinsky’s career from 1902 to 1942.

Jean Georges
1 Central Park West, New York NY 10023
My friend Daniel recommended the winter meneu at this 3 star Michelin restaurant. I can’t wait to try the Foie Gras Brulee and the Squab a L’Orange.

See my NYC map below for all the places I hope to visit!

View Ny Trip in a larger map

Airtoons is a parody site of airline safety cards and had me in stitches on planes in North America in 2000 when I recognised some of the images.  From memory the purple magician featured heavily in the Canadian Airlines (RIP -  I was on one of their last flights between Honolulu and Toronto) safety cards.

Thank you Airtoons guy for resurrecting your great website. You can now buy t-shirts and even have a custom airtoon portrait made – cool!

Link: http://www.Airtoons.com

Tim picked up on my tweet from last week:

“Just noticed that Expedia.com.au has @wotif like display for New York Hotels. Not the “prettiest” but functional http://bit.ly/5Avcoy”

The Expedia.com.au blog has been surprisingly quiet recently. In fact the last post was over 7 months ago. Have they given up on the idea of the blog?

Expedia.com.au has been slow to embrace social media and their blog has been their only (correct me if I am wrong) foray into the social media world.

Judging by the number of comments it never really took off as a conversation starter, mainly a one way message.

Interstingly the blog is still linked to in the footer of the homepage, which, on a side note,  has had a great makeover recently which seems to have triumphantly conquered in their A|B testing and is now permanent.

I am very keen to test both services, Worldmate and TripIt on my upcoming holiday to Europe and compare the two. My biggest concern is offline functionality, as no one wants to pay roaming charges in another country just to check what time their flight leaves! TripIt’s offline capability was buggy when it first came out, but seems to be stable now. There is no mention on the Worldmate site about the offline capability of their app.

Check out the Worldmate iPhone app here

Useful Stuff

Ear Plugs

I never travel without ear plugs! They are light, cheap and small. I do recommend the flesh coloured plugs, rather than the fluoro orange or green ones.

by VeryBadLady

Travel snaps for:

• Cutting down on annoying aircraft, train or bus noise
• If you cut them in half, not only are they more discreet, you can safely sleep leaning your head on the side, without dislodging your inner-ear
• Useful for concerts, festivals, nightclubs and crying children

Alternatives:

• Toilet paper or tissues.
  My mum once did this at a Midnight Oil concert at Selinas in Coogee. Although not as effective as ear plugs, it does help. However it does look ridiculous!

Chewing Gum

My ears always have a terrible time on take-off and landing so chewing gum is invaluable. Combine the gum with a good yawn and your ears will be fine.

by biphop

Travel snaps for:

• Saving my ears in planes, elevators and funiculars
• Freshening your breath after that especially garlic Italian dinner
• Can be used to replace blue-tac if you are desperate!

Alternatives:

• Lollies.
  Minties or other strong chewy lollies are best

Travel Locks

Anyone travelling through the US needs to have TSA locks if they want to have any kind of security on their checked luggage. They are a bit pricey, around $20, (You can currently find them for $17 at GoGear), but definitely worth the money.

Travel snaps for:

• Ability to keep your luggage locked when travelling through the US
• Combination lock, so you don’t need to worry about losing keys
• Avaliable with an unlock indicator, so you know if your luggage has been opened by security.

Alternatives:

• Leave your luggage unlocked!

Listening to: The Final Countdown, The Final Countdown: Europe

Here is a list of things that I always ended up taking with me.  The few times I omitted something on this list, I would end up cursing myself on a plane, in a hotel room at Narita airport, a random bar in Seattle, a post office in Toronto etc.

BTW – I originally started this as one long post but it got a bit out of control.  I have split it up into 4 parts: useful gadgets; fun gadgets, services and stuff.  Here is part 1:

Useful Gadgets

Portable wireless router

Portable Wireless Router not much bigger than my passport

I paid around 7,000 YEN for this back in Feb 07 which was about $75AUD at the time.  A little bit tricky as it is all in Japanese – but I muddled through it with a few calculated guesses.

A portable wireless router is very useful for hotel rooms with non existent or flaky Wi-Fi connections.  Or even better, when the broadband cable doesn’t reach to a desk, or  a power point for your laptop!

A classic example of this was when I stayed at the Vibe Hotel in Surfers Paradise.  I had to sit cross legged in the middle of the floor, with the laptop connected to the broadband cord one side, and a power cord from the opposite wall.  My poor laptop looked as if it had been strung up.  I tried to take a photo, but couldn’t even fit the ridiculousness into one frame.

Also, having a router means you can share the Internet connection via an Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi.  Since most hotels charge upwards of $20 a day (The most expensive I have paid was $39.95 with excess charges above 200mb!), it can be useful for friends to check their email using their own devices.  I think this will come in very handy with the iPhone since most hotel rooms still only have decent wired broadband access.

Travel snaps for:

• Freedom to roam around your hotel room
• Ability to share connections amongst friends/colleagues
• Useful to carry with iPhone for hotel rooms with only wired connections

Alternatives:

• ‘Borrow’ bandwidth from open W-Fi Networks
  This did work for me once in suburban Barcelona, but I had to balance precariously on the window sill, 3 floors up.  Generally I find  Wi-Fi connections in hotel rooms pretty crap all over the world.
  

Noise Cancelling Headphones

Cheap noise cancelling headphones - do the trick

Obviously I had been lusting over the $500 BOSE noise cancelling headphones, but couldn’t justify the money.  These Sony Headphones are great (but clearly no where near the quality of more expensive devices) and I picked them up at Narita airport for around $50.  They do they job and make a big difference on that hellishly long flight between SYD and LAX.

Travel snaps for:

• Drowning out the constant roar of the aircraft
• Only requires 1 AAA battery and lasted the pacific flight with spare juice
• An In flight adaptor for us plebs who sit in economy is invaluable (make sure you have one of these)

Alternatives:

• Ear plugs

Power-board

Don't get caught short when you need more power!

I think this is one of the most underrated useful gadgets ever!  As we accumulate more and more things, we need more and more power, battery life and ability to charge!  Carrying an Aussie power-board means I only have to carry one country adaptor with me for each country I visit.  I can then charge or power my phone, laptop, camera, Nintendo, router etc without any problems .  I usually carry a 4 plug board, but now I think it’s time to upgrade to a 6 plug, just to be sure!

Travel snaps for:

• Charging multiple devices with one power adaptor
• Lightweight
• Range of sizes fro 2 plugs (aka a double adaptor) to 8 or even more!

Alternatives:

• Additional Aussie to X country adapters.  I have collected numerous adaptors, but since the UK, Europe, and the US are all different it gets pretty expensive if u need 3 adaptors for each device

Warnings:

• Be careful of voltage.  Luckily most devices these days are dual voltage, but there is nothing worse than buying and American gadget and smelling the smoke of death upon power up.
  Nintendo Wii’s are NOT dual voltage (Thanks to Magda for proving this one)