Thinking About Travel – Flung

From Blueberries to Baby Blanket: History’s Most Entertaining Efforts to Describe the Color of the Ocean

Sarah Stodola — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 19:04:37 +0000

During the several years that I researched The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, I immersed myself in our cultural obsession with the beach. One byproduct of this obsession that kept me perpetually entertained: the writers major and minor the world over who have taken up the challenge to finally describe the ocean satisfactorily. Here, I’ve collected some of the best and most amusing attempts I’ve come across. [T]he beach itself is still the […]

Source

Is Travel Worthy of Its Carbon Footprint?

Sarah Stodola — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 13:19:53 +0000

To read travel magazines or watch Anthony Bourdain’s shows or browse Instagram today is to come away always with the sense that travel, intrinsically, improves both the traveler and the world. It is to be inundated with familiar quotes that cumulatively tell us that as a concept, travel does not contain multitudes, it contains only positives. Not all those who wander are lost. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. The world is a book, and those who […]

Source

Flung Is Back!

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:39:33 +0000

Flung is back! If you are reading this, you may have already noticed the completely redesigned website. Among the design improvements are a better mobile experience, enhanced presentation of photographs, a new logo, and a more streamlined reading experience overall. But more significant changes will be found in the content priorities of the new Flung. Gone will be traditional travel writing—the kind that relies on lists of recommendations, or roundups of the best, say, romantic hotels in the U.S. Instead, […]

Source

PowerPoint from Paradise

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:09:19 +0000

I often tell people that I became a writer at least in part because of the untethered lifestyle it offered. I knew that nine-to-five office culture didn’t appeal to me, one of the few things I got right in my early twenties. At the time, most jobs required an employee to show up to his or her place of employment on a daily basis. Writing seemed an exception. No more. In this fall of 2020, programmers are doing their Silicon […]

Source

The Most Earth-Friendly Travel Destinations

Callie Baker — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 15:17:04 +0000

Across the globe, tourism is booming–well over a billion people traveled internationally in 2017, with more joining in the fun every year. But as the industry flourishes, so does concern about tourism’s environmental impact. One part of the solution: choosing destinations wisely. The six we’ve included here are not only enticing places to visit, they’ve also built sustainability into their infrastructure, so much so that they have reached or will soon reach carbon neutrality. And in many cases, they use […]

Source

The Lost Art of Getting Lost

Sarah Stodola — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:54:27 +0000

On the last Saturday of last August, we got in a fully packed car, at the time parked in Brooklyn, and headed out. North toward Queens, then the Bronx, over the Tappan Zee Bridge to the other side of the Hudson a bit further north. We then settled into I-87, where we’d stay for the next few hours, until turning off onto the small highway toward Lake Placid. We’d done this drive before, many times, at least once a year […]

Source

Booking Ahead: My Evolving Approach To Hotel Rooms

Sarah Stodola — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:30:59 +0000

The summer in the late nineties I spent with a Eurail Pass and the contents of a single backpack, I took pride in never booking a place to stay ahead of arriving. This meant, most often, that I ended up in the hostel that hit the best ratio of not-gross to train station proximity. The approach usually served me well, and it gave me some of my best adventures, a day spent eating baguettes and cheese and drinking wine in […]

Source

A Weird Year for Travel, as It Was for America

Sarah Stodola — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:17:51 +0000

It’s been a bizarre year for travel here in America. People who shouldn’t have been banned from entering the United States were, Americans grew more cautious about venturing to other countries. “Travel Ban” became a contentious phrase. Laptops were banned, phones were searched. All in the name of countering dangers that haven’t done nearly the damage to our country that our homegrown ones have. The new reality has produced a reluctance on the part of foreigners to come here. After […]

Source

Democrats and Republicans Are Even Divided on Travel

Sarah Stodola — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 15:27:34 +0000

In this weird moment we’re living through, United States citizens find themselves increasingly divided by their politics, and those differences extend to our travel preferences. According to a new survey commissioned by The Cashlorette, a finance blog for women owned by Bankrate, our preferred destinations correspond with our political leanings both domestically and internationally. For domestic travel, Democrats most often prefer California, with Hawaii in a close second, while Republicans choose Montana and Alaska more prevalently than their friends across […]

Source

Can Group Travel Work for the Independent Woman?

Sarah Stodola — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 11:01:54 +0000

I love traveling solo. Ever since those three months I spent in Europe with a backpack and a Eurail Pass when I was 22, I’ve thrived on the unmediated adventure, the open possibilities, and even the occasional loneliness that comes with heading to far-flung places on my own. Traveling with a posse was never my thing, and I was always bemused by those who signed up for organized group tours. As a group-travel skeptic, then, I was intrigued to meet […]

Source