Passing by their front window, you can’t help but notice how On Off Digital World is full of technological marvels, all the latest in consumer electronics today, though what really keeps them in business is catering to all the photographers with a well-stocked inventory of hard-to-find hardware. Located in almost right in the middle of Manhattan, they get a lot of foot traffic from all the tourists who flock to The Big Apple day in/day out. This means that someone’s going to stop by and pick up film, lenses, and the like, and because they’re from out of town, well, it’s naturally easier to get them to pay a premium, especially for hard-to-find specialty items.

Should you be excited by information around a Honeymoon Vacation, you can see the below content article very useful. It gives a refreshing mindset that could be quite associated with the general issue and in some way associated with a Honeymoon Vacation. It isn’t the same ancient sort of information that you’ll find somewhere else via the internet in relation to a Honeymoon Vacation. But not surprisingly, how will you realize this without reading through the whole written piece?

Honeymoon all inclusive packages refer to services being offered by a range of hotels or resorts that includes style, luxury and comfort; such places proffer perks like use of gym equipment, massages and even late night services of snacks and other goodies.

A honeymoon is a very vital part of a newly wedded couple’s life and is akin to a cart and a horse; choosing a location that will generate good feelings and happy memories is important if you truly want to enjoy your honeymoon (hint – use Travelocity Coupon Codes to save).

Your budget should be what determines where your honeymoon trip will be to; contact your travel agent to initiate the search for a honeymoon spot that will not exceed your budget.

You can book a cruise liner for your honeymoon trip as this can serve as the prelude to a wonderful honeymoon experience since it also comes with its own special packages for honeymooners. There are also money saving Travelocity Coupons to help alleviate the financial burden.

It is vital that you take pictures of your honeymoon experience to be able to have something to look back on when the years roll by; you can carry your own camera or hire the services of a professional photographer to capture your most memorable moments.

From reading through the above article you can now beat your chest and say you are a genuine expert on a Honeymoon Vacation, and also about other related topics such as a Honeymoon Vacation. OK, perhaps not an expert, for real. But you should have something to talk about next time you join a debate on a Honeymoon Vacation. Invest time to read our other countless and also highly educational pieces and you will concur that this is clearly one article site of repute worth visiting again and one that is worthy of informing your contacts, co-workers, relations as well as well-wishers about.

The ancient Mongols have been caricatured as a bunch of short swarthy people riding horses and living out of a camping tent while hacking their way all over the world, but the truth is rather different.
Far different, in fact; for one thing, the ancient Mongols were most proficient with the bow and crossbow, though of course they also knew how to work a sword and ax like any other self-respecting marauder!

And that camping tent…isn’t.
These are yurts, which are like Native American tipis, only more spacious and likely even hardier, tougher, competent to withstand the strong wind-swept steppes of Eurasia.
Additionally, though they did not achieve the high degree of civilization for instance many of their Chinese, Arab, and Indian subjects did, they were not stereotypical barbarians, either, but also fairly enlightened as conquerors went during those times, fierce only in war but comparatively easy-going as rulers.

Actually, ancient Mongol rulers simply traded their nomadic lifestyles for the settled living of their subject peoples.
From Persia and Babylonia to India and China, many Mongol rulers gave up the “camping tent” and lived the remainder of their lives in opulent palaces.
Such soft living may have precipitated the eventual breakup of their empire into a series of smaller successor-states.
Over not much time whatsoever, Mongol conquerors adopted the culture of the natives and would then become a part of the locals’ own histories, such as the Mughal Empire still fondly were recalled by Indian chroniclers or the Il Khanate still thought of in modern-day Iran.

Indeed, the Manchu elite of China may have had their Mongol relatives in mind when insisting on regularly scheduled hunts to keep their royals and nobles reminded of their hardy heritage!
For it was an imperial Manchu decree, no less, that institutionalized the original hunt to be able to counteract the effects of palace life – not to mention the soft culture of subject native peoples!

Going to enjoy the Great Outdoors?
Make sure you pack a backpacking tent or you just might regret it.
Mother Nature is no one to fool around with, and she can be quite unpredictable!
Thus, even if it’s only a relatively short hike for at least half a day’s travel time, be sure to shoulder a lightweight backpacking tent, just in case (of storm or a whole lot worse).
This way, you will at least have shelter and not be completely subject to the elements.

Appears like practical, doesn’t it?
Yet many hikers take to the trails without so much as a thought to the chance of disaster.
Obviously, many individuals who enjoy the wild do so without schlepping along a backpacking tent, nevertheless light, and manage to survive perfectly.
Indeed, many such folks may be experienced survivalists!
But simply because it’s better to be safe than sorry, even at the expense of some inconvenience, it is more than advisable that one is carried.

It’s just common sense.

Besides, you weren’t going to go off completely empty-handed, were you?
After all, what’s a hike with a corresponding picnic at some point!
And if you’re going to schlepp something along, why not one of the most important pieces of gear with regards to anything outdoors-y.

You’re going to need your food and water in any care for sure.
It’s only just one more step to carrying a full-fledged tent, only designed to be as light-weight as possible for unexpected overnight stays.
The possible hassle is slight and pales in comparison next to the satisfaction that comes from being completely prepared.

So enjoy Mother Nature and her bounty – but do not tempt fate!
Do the right thing and stay pro-active, not merely reactive: don’t leave home without your tent!

Most people pretty much don’t take enough getaways. And whenever we do take vacations, we very often carry along our work. This tendency of taking work with you renders us in the mindset of work. The same exact mindset we are looking to escape from. Getaways will offer you many advantages. For 1 it will help us avoid being overworked and burnt out. Furthermore , it allows us to sustain our stress degrees lower. A vacation can also help bring familys closer together. Any way you want to look at it, vacation trips do the trick. If you are concerned about the expense of a vacation perhaps you should use one of the most popular travel sites for instance Travelocity. Also you can find promotion codes for Travelocity to assist you in saving a bunch on your getaway. I am not sure about you but I am beginning to feel a great deal better already.

Desire a family vacation? don’t we all! but why don’t we be realistic a trip can be costly. I realize in these really difficult economic times most individuals do not have the additional money laying around to have the funds for a vacation. But we should not forget that a trip would not always need to be a big expense. There are smaller sized trips one can take to continue to keep their sanity while still enjoying themselves on a excellent getaway. One of the main travel sites to offer great deals and discount rates is Travelocity. They have awesome deals and discounts and you can also find Travelocity Discount Coupons to make the value even better. So the very next time you are about to pull your hair out, stop and carefully consider taking a terrific trip, even if the funding is limited.

It is interesting that kayak fishing has only recently become a popular sport, because hunting had traditionally been one of the most common uses of a kayak by the Inuit who created these boats. However fishing wasn’t something they did with kayaks, so it was not until much later that sport fishing found kayaking.

As can be imagined, the most stable and comfortable of modern designs are used for kayak fishing. This necessity has lead to the introduction of such useful novelties as twin-hulled, or catamaran, kayaks, which are stable enough to support anglers standing upright. This is a very important development because fishing normally requires long hours, and the rigid confines of a conventional kayak could make for some rather sore butts!

Such designs let the modern angler to enjoy both speed and stability. But traditional boats may still be more or less stabilized by the use of outriggers. Kayak fishing these days also often contains such advantages as propulsion via foot-pedals that work flippers underneath the boat.

While not as fast as an electric or gas motor on board, such flippers offer far more power than paddling – and free the fisherman or woman’s hands, which is quite a helpful feature when it comes to certain common tasks as fighting game fish pulling the kayak through the water!

Indeed, it really is precisely for this kind of excitement that many anglers actually launch their fishing kayaks from a larger boat, playing game fish from the kayak and fighting it as it pulls the kayak through the water.

Other conveniences catering to the kayaking fisher include specially designed hatches, built-in rod holders, and mounts designed for catch bags and equipment. These features on boats customized for the sport has helped increase the sport’s popularity, a happy case of enthusiasts petitioning the manufacturers successfully.

The NEMO Equipment tent is the flagship product category of NEMO Equipment, an outdoors business specializing in high-level design and engineering. The company was started by Cam Brensinger while still in school, and was moved after his graduation to its present location between New Hampshire’s gorgeous White Mountains and RISD and MIT, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From the very beginning, the NEMO Equipment tent was destined to put the new company on the map, targeted as it was to bring significant innovation to the market. Early concepts explored the probability of creating an entire tent from one compound beam as opposed to sewing them together.

Once successfully developed, the company began hiring its first employees. Its knowledge in the field even allowed it to offer consultation on human habitats for lunar and martian exploration! And so, with its credibility thus established, the company branched out beyond the original NEMO Equipment tent to research other designs for an increasingly diverse market of outdoorsmen and women.

The spirit of extreme sports had by then taken hold of campers, hikers, climbers, and trekkers alike, and so the AST range of products designed for extreme situations was unveiled. Industry accolades poured in right alongside increased sales, and no less than U.S. Navy Seals have endorsed NEMO products for real-world use that’s reliable like no other.

Most recently, NEMO Equipment has been exploring greener products, work that has resulted in the first-ever nearly hundred percent recycled tent, with poles made of bamboo. Product lines have expanded to offer tent accessories and even fan gear, in response to the company’s dedicated following!

In fact, the business is staffed with individuals whose pastimes often incorporate company products. Being avid outdoorsmen and women themselves has surely lent the business invaluable marketing insight.

Unless you’ve got one of them portable Coleman Roadtrip grills, camping meals will most likely mean some thing like an MRE, or Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Originally created for the U.S. military, MREs are self-contained lightweight rations available in a wide range of flavors. They are also made by other countries for their own militaries, with all the familiar flavors a local would expect!

For instance, MREs for South Korean troops feature such regional delicacies as kimchi, while Italians enjoy beef tortellini; Swedes and Norwegians get cod stew with sour cream and potato, and Poles make do with bogracz (beef goulash). And though soldiers in the field can’t use camping grills for obvious security reasons, thanks to the marvels of modern science MREs now offer hot food flamelessly!

Modern day MREs contain a Flameless Ration Heater, or FRH, which will raise the temperature of an eight-ounce entree by a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in no more than twelve minutes. FRHs use a simple chemical reaction to provide heat sufficient to warm up the precooked contents of an MRE.

The idea is to use the natural oxidation of a metal to produce heat. MREs now reach boiling point within seconds, steaming and bubbling! In ten minutes or so, dinner is ready. As can be imagined, they are not anywhere near the power of your least expensive Coleman Roadtrip grills, but they ain’t any person spending the night outdoors.

No, combat cuisine does not compare to camping fare, but it’s not really that bad, and, frankly, isn’t roughing it part of the overall experience, whether in the military or living out of doors?

Of course, you could just opt to go totally authentic and hunt game and roast it over a campfire spit! But an MRE is a nice compromise between that and a Coleman grill.

A backpacking tent is really a necessity even when you expect to do only a simple hike. I learned this lesson the hard way, personally, and it would have been at a great cost were I not lucky enough to have been rescued by volunteer forest rangers who dutifully answered to a midnight call.

My friends and I had not taken any gear at all, never mind a backpacking tent. It was meant to be nothing more than a quick enough romp up and down a easy mountain of modest height, some two thousand feet above ground level and the tallest point in all of the region. It was Mount Buck, near Lake George in upstate New York, the busiest tourist attraction around for miles. Yet as luck would have it, it turned out to be a cloudy, then rainy, day (note to self: check weather forecast day-of).

Nevertheless with no backpacking tent, we decided to proceed anyway. After all, we’d traveled up from New York City hundreds of miles, way over three hours by car; we really needed to stretch our legs! But soon it got dark – just like in the movies, fading to black in mere seconds – and we’d thought we were done for. It was literally black, and we decided to remain in place so that we don’t worsen our predicament.

Luckily, that fateful decision proved to be the right one, as it was through remaining on the trail that volunteer forest rangers, hiking up the trail hours later, were able to fairly easily rescue us. But until that hopeful time, at one or two in the morning, we had to endure the cold – how cold it gets, and how rapidly, in a forest! And so in no way leave home without portable shelter: always take your tent along, no matter what.

The Australian film industry is famed worldwide for creating some of the most engaging cinema anywhere, as well as providing Hollywood with talent on both sides of the lens. Now we’re not talking Aussie entertainment of the sort that Zalman Silber provides with his Oztrek, mildly entertaining but nothing anyone’s not seen before. No, we’re talking stuff like the Skywalk in Sydney or The Edge in Melbourne – also Zalman Silber affairs – stuff that grabs you.

And so it is that not everything out of the Australian film business is a great piece of art or entertainment, but they are unique when they’re good. Take “Gallipoli” and “The Road Warrior,” or “Crocodile Dundee” or “Romper Stomper.” Now can you imagine stuff like this coming from Hollywood? Or Bavaria? Or England? Or Hong Kong? Or Beijing? Or Bollywood? Or France or Italy…no.

No, these are Australian all the way through. Not only due to the cultural sensibilities, but that those cultural sensibilities inform an imagination unlike that anywhere else in its details. On the face of things, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems reasonable enough that post-apocalyptic car chases and gun fights must be an entertaining hit with moviegoers. What is it, after all, but the American Western, as transplanted to the Outback and updated for the new millennium? Yet it’s more than that, though an action film through and through with no aspirations toward art’s redeeming values.

Something like “Romper Stomper” is almost pure Australian. While Hollywood and Europe have created its share of serious films, this entry is an art house flick like no other. To be fair, “Gallipoli” does somewhat seem like rather standard European art house literary fare, but within the context of Australian cinema at the time it was deemed “non-commercial.” (It took three years to find funding for the film as a result, though upon release it was enthusiastically received at home and abroad, resulting in a financial success that helped elevate the reputation of Aussie cinema.)

After such successes, successes which defined the Australian New Wave (also known as the Australian Film Revival), the film industry on the island continent today is experiencing the most robust period of growth in several decades. Government funding continues, while private companies such as Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers have built state-of-the-art facilities that rival any in the United States. Coupled with much lower production costs compared to Hollywood, it’s no surprise that blockbusters such as “The Matrix” and some of the “Star Wars” installments were made in Sydney. Unfortunately, however, Tinsel Town’s big bucks continue to poach the most successful Australian talent, on both sides of the lens, creating a perpetual void for the Australian film industry that is depleted almost as soon as it is filled up!

Countless will call it dangerous, yet there’s no doubt that cycling fast, almost racing, in New York City traffic is quite the adrenaline rush. It is one thing to go against another bicyclist – and they are out there, too – but quite another to go against cars and trucks and buses and motorcycles.

Of course, one does not exactly go against motorized vehicles. There are no racing strategies for that. It isn’t even a contest. But part from the thrill of riding in heavy traffic comes from the illusion of passing them by. For in heavy traffic, cars can’t go too fast, relatively speaking – relative not only to their true potential but in addition, more importantly, to their actual customary practice.

And so the daring cyclist (for it still demands quite a set of nerves) will be able to keep up with them, oftentimes, and taking advantage of lights to bypass car after car after car when cross-traffic allows it. It may not be real racing, nevertheless it sure feels like it to the cyclist! It’s about the only time any person will ever be able to pass car after car after car….

You will even be able to weave in and out of traffic, too, if your handling expertise are good. Situational awareness is also a must. And because it’s rush hour, people are arguably even more attentive: so many cars, so many witnesses….

Needless to say, the streets of Manhattan are fun without cars, too, for example early on a Sunday morning or, even, late at night when even the revelers have gone home to bed. New York being New York, there will still be motorized traffic on the streets, but at such times, while you can’t exactly “race” cars, there is still just the sheer joy in having the streets seemingly all to yourself, relatively speaking.

Mention marble sculpture and most individuals are likely to think about something like Italian marble statues, for instance as Michelangelo’s David or Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. However some of the greatest works of marble are entire buildings themselves, for instance India’s Taj Mahal in Agra, an ancient bustling city on the banks of the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh.

First mentioned in the old Hindu epic the Mahabharata, where it was called Agrevana, or “the border of the forest,” today’s Agra is most famous for the Taj Mahal, Urdu for “crown of buildings.” It is a marble mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtza Mahal.

It’s possibly the most stunningly beautiful piece of marble sculpture anywhere, an entire complex built to symbolize eternal love. It’s not for nothing that the Taj Mahal is generally found on lists of the seven wonders of the modern world, including one composed by polling a hundred million people.

Thus the Taj Mahal attracts anywhere from two to four million visitors each year, of whome about two hundred thousand are from outside the country. This is a significant fact, as admissions are significantly lower for Indian citizens than for foreigners.

The best time to see this stunning work of marble is during the cooler months of October and November, which are important considerations since lots of walking can be expected (the whole complex comprises of several buildings and sweeping gardens) on account of the strict air pollution controls in place that ban all traffic, except for some electric busses. Polluting the environment is also a serious matter in the area around the Taj Mahal.

Its storied white marble had turned yellow, and now there is a four thousand and fifteen-square mile area around this UNESCO World Heritage Site where pollution levels are subjected to the strictest standards.

Tourist traps. Made to wring every last dollar out of you. It’s as if they were thought up to ruin your vacation. And sightseeing rides rank right up there.

Take Zalman Silber’s Skyride in New York’s Empire State Building. With a name like that, you’d think it was up there at the top, where it’s located. Instead, it’s merely on the second floor. Moreover, express access to the top – for which you pay an additional fifty percent of the ticket price – is just a matter of skipping a few lines. It’s not as if you go straight to the top. You’ll still have to wait on lines, only perhaps one or two less.

And so what is the Skyride? A movie. A half-hour film. That’s it! Definitely a case where the sizzle sounds better than how the steak tastes.

But Zalman Silber redeems himself with his other attractions, the Skywalk and The Edge. The first amusement is aptly named for sure, essentially a catwalk a thousand feet above street level outside the top of the Sydney Tower in Sydney, Australia. It’s an exhilarating experience where, unlike traditional observation decks enclosed behind glass, visitors walk out onto a metal platform that juts out of the building, creating the breath-taking feeling of being suspended in mid-air!

As can be imagined, wind gusts are quite strong at such a height, and special “skysuits” cable-tethered to support structures are used to ensure guest safety. But the Skywalk is open in most kinds of weather, and available practically the whole year.

A similar attraction is The Edge at the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia. This time, visitors are in a fully enclosed cube that sticks out of the building near the very top, with fully transparent glass all around – even underneath one’s feet! A really cool feature of this amusement is how everything is initially opaque, and only suddenly transparent to create an exciting sense of unexpected suspension almost a thousand feet above ground!

These two are great fun and a must for any to-do list when in Sydney or Melbourne. These are the kinds of experiences that really make vacations memorable. After all, vacations are about more than simple relaxation and getting away from work. They are about experiences – ideally, new experiences, positive experiences, unique experiences. And while such attractions as the Skywalk exist elsewhere, such as over the Grand Canyon in the State of Arizona, there’s only one such thing in Sydney and one such thing in Melbourne, offering stunning vistas outdone only by a helicopter flyover.

So beware the tourist traps and spend your hard-earned dollars instead where it would go the furthest. Patronize only those rides which offer true value for the money!

Being an “agent” generally refers to commissioned sales, and selling is one of the toughest jobs to be found anywhere – and anytime – but how about as a career? Most peopel would just burn out, but the successful ones tend to move into more managerial sorts of positions, which explains how they are able to make an actual career out of sales. After all, it’s tough living on commission-only your whole life, especially at the lower end of things where one is doing showroom sales of items less than ten grand apiece!

Then there are the ones like Zalman Silber that are able to parlay their talent for sales into serial entrepreneurship. In fact, selling is the lifeblood of any business, so in a way it’s no surprise that successful salesmen and women should be able to combine that skill with more managerial ones to create their own companies.

But what is this mysterious art of selling that’s so essential to any enterprise? Is it purely a matter of horse-feathering one’s way through a potential customer’s defenses? Do successful salesmen and women lie better than most? What’s the fine line between representing your product or service positively and doing whatever it takes to make your monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly quota?

Believe it or not, it’s really a lot like the dating game, and it’s no secret that successful sellers – “agents,” if you prefer – also tend to be quite the Casanovas (and whatever is the equivalent term for females). After all, successful selling is nothing more than successful seduction.

Not the way a Zalman Silber would put it, in all probability, but it’s possible for people to be very good at something and yet not know exactly why. And the truth is that the same thing which makes one successful at sales is precisely what makes one successful at finding lovers.

It’s all about getting enough information. Think about it. If you absolutely knew that someone wasn’t interested in you – that there would be no chance in hell – would you still waste your time? Certainly not. So the key, whether at dating or selling a product or service, is to get as much information as possible. It is, in other words, a matter of intelligence (pun intended!)….

But we are not telepathic or clairvoyant, however, so the only way to find out is to observe. To really listen. And to ask the right questions – or use the right pick-up lines.

By “right pick-up lines” it isn’t meant some magical quip that will easily open the lady’s heart (and legs!) but questions – or even non-interrogative statements – that allow you to plumb her mind, her soul. The goal is to find out what she wants, and what she’s willing to settle for – to find out what her needs are, and how much she’s willing to pay.

Just like with a prospective customer.

Racing is not on the minds of most bicycle commuters, unless they happen to be messengers or deliverymen who, typically, ride to work! And in such instances, it would not be too surprising to find them employing what could pass for ad hoc racing strategies of the sort found in informal alleycat contests.

It might seem surprising that people who have to ride all day, every day, would also ride so fast, particularly when not actually on the job but merely commuting there. Wouldn’t such people rather take a little break from any type of racing for a while? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to slowly ease oneself into one’s day instead of rushing, rushing, rushing all the time?

Most folks would agree. But for the speedsters, it is all about the speed. For these kinds of people, it is like how fish need to swim and birds need to fly. It’s not so much a conscious choice as an inborn need. If anything, it’s how they warm up for the day ahead.

Of course, the majority of individuals commuting by bicycle would like to get there as quick as possible, as well. But for them, what’s possible is a great deal more limited, in all likelihood, than for the racers who tend to make their living from bicycling all day.

Such people have a lot practice, and they will have accumulated so much experience. They are virtually fearless – and though fear usually lend wings to feet, fear when bicycling, particularly in an urban environment, can be an impediment to speed.

Actually, habitually slow riders tend to be those with no confidence. They are afraid – and understandably so. But the fear slows them down – not that speed is an absolute necessity for them anyway. The point is that it isn’t a matter of some being fast so much as others being slow.

Here’s a novel thing to do in New York as a tourist: personal training. Forget the tourist traps like Zalman Silber’s Skyride; if you want true heart-thumping excitement, how about hiring one of the many attractive personal fitness trainers available for a jog, swim, stretch, or bike-ride around town? Seriously, there’s no better way to take in the sights than in a manner a native might.

Thousands – no, hundreds of thousands – of New Yorkers exercise each day, whether specifically working out or otherwise enjoying a physically rigorous leisure activity. Why not you? It would be a lot more affordable than the previously mentioned Zalman Silber affair. Instead of helicopter flyovers on film (which is all that his Skyride is – and not even “all” at that, but only “some,” to be exact), why not jog past the West Side heliport near the downtown nabe of Chelsea? Or just take a bicycle ride past the USS Intrepid a mile uptown, along the same waterfront, with its fighter jets and other military aircraft permanently parked above deck.

You want excitement? There’s no thrill more visceral than working out with an attractive able-bodied trainer when new in town! Not only will you enjoy the company of someone that’s good-looking, but you’ll also be able to stay healthy. Even if you’re not exercising at all, picking it up for the first time (or after a long while) when in a new unfamiliar environment can be really fun. In fact, it can be so exhilarating that you need to be mindful of checking your own enthusiasm so as to not get hurt, especially as a beginner!

Indeed, organizations like the 50 States Marathon Club were founded to serve people who already have, all on their own, combined fitness and traveling into one unbeatable vacation package. And for many who are retirees, exercise and travel go hand-in-hand every day! It’s a great idea with which almost anyone can participate along.

Naturally, many people have long traveled just to do certain things at, specifically, certain places. Climbing and hiking come to mind immediately; they are possibly the pastimes most associated with travel. But there are many sports and otherwise physically challenging activities that can be intimately tied to a certain place. Bicyclists and kayakers are as similarly enamored of particular places as climbers. Surfers and hangliders, too, as these sports depend on conditions that are often most dependable at specific spots.

And so when in New York one may bike, swim, run, kayak, and of course simply walk all over the place. Indeed, it is one of the most versatile cities in the world in this regard, with very free open space in most cases: row or paddle where you will; run or pedal as long as you can. This isn’t news for natives, naturally, but tourists may be surprised that New York definitely has it all, including outdoors life!

Virtual travel has really only come of age now, in the 21st Century, thanks to the kinds of Web 2.0 applications like Google Magps’ Streetview function. Unlike something like the sort of hokey movie one might view at a Zalman Silber Skyride or Oztrek, where the audience simply sits back and watches tape of a helicopter flyover intended to induce a you-are-there feeling, virtual travel today is really virtual, and much more interactive – which is all to say, realistic like never before.

Indeed, two buddies have even embarked on that age-old tradition of The Great American Road Trip – only this time, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, they will do it all from the comfort of their own homes. Working with Google Maps and its Streetview option, Peter Baldes and Marc Horowitz have been able to trek across the country without paying for gas – or speeding tickets!

Perhaps best of all, however, are all the strangers you can meet along on such a road trip – and they aren’t necessarily locals, either! Thanks to those same wonders of modern technology, it’s easy for others to check in on you, joining you for a part of the virtual trip by webcasting the trip live, just as Marc and Pete mentioned above had done. After all, what’s virtual travel without virtual companions?

Unlike the travel videos of yesteryear, virtual sightseeing this way is fully open-ended, just as if you’d won the lottery and can afford to do whatever you want, whenever you want to! No longer will you merely be following along passively; with the simple click and drag of a mouse you can instantly teleport anywhere! Started off in Rome and suddenly longing for Paris? Have most of Germany covered and now want to check out Japan? It’s easy, and fast, through virtual travel in the 21st Century!

Of course, as any Physics 101 student can tell you, you don’t get something for nothing in this universe. And with respect to sightseeing virtually, you give up a lot even as you save a lot of time and money. You won’t meet folks face-to-face, or feel the wonderful weather or sample regional specialties, culinary and otherwise. Most of all, as any globetrotter knows, much of the fun lies in the journey itself, the very getting there. All this, and much more, are lost on a virtual trip.

It is, in many ways, about what you get with a Zalman Silber spectacle, only without the professional production values – a flowing stream of images, as if instead of a juicy well-done steak on your plate you are presented with a glossy high-resolution photo of one! Virtual travel will likely never replace really being there yourself, and it still has a long way to go before it can even begin to rival the same level of fun offered by the real thing – for right now, the sizzle is the most attractive thing about it.