Travel 2.0 - Thing 33

I must confess that this "Thing" was the one I was most excited about. I love to travel and was anxious to learn about sites that I could find useful. Unfortunately, I didn't find any sites that "wowed" me.

As far as travel 2.0 sites, I already use Northwest Airlines' site to check flight status of departures and arrivals and have been using Orbitz for many years now.

Several of the travel blogs were interesting and I did subscribe to My Kugelhopf. This blog combines two of my loves...travel and food, so it seemed like a good fit for me.

I browsed all of the travel review sites. We do a lot of road-tripping, and go to hot travel destinations such as Glendive, Montana; Keokuk, Iowa and Delta, Utah. Our travels have taken us through, and to, incredible locations. Unfortunately none of the travel review sites tended to have any insight into these locations. I also think that the travel review sites are only as good as the number of people who contribute to them and the content that is provided. I did get some good information for our summer trip to the Pacific coast on TripAdvisor.

As far as travel journals go, I prefer the 1.0 kind, which is scrapbooking/ journaling. Since the original "23 Things," I now also use Flickr and my blog as a type of personal travel journal and have set up a field trip wiki for the Minnesota Mineral Club which has an area for journaling. I probably won't use any of the travel journal sites listed, however, I was intrigued by Mapness, which is now called MapVivo and may try it to journal our trip to the West coast, just to see how it works.

Two sites listed under travel mashups caught my eye. I used Cost2Drive on our trip to Glendive, Montana over Memorial Day weekend and was surprised at how close to being accurate it was. I have used Wayfaring before and revisited the site for this "Thing." I created the map featured at the top of this post for our trip to the West coast and plan on adding photos, videos and notes after the trip. It will then be easy to share with the friends we are traveling with.

As for usefulness of travel 2.0 sites in our library, we do have foreign language and social studies classes that have to research countries and then they create travel brochures, plan trip itineraries and make travel budgets. I can see that some of these sites could be useful for this type of project.