The Oatmeal offers a candid look at working from home
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I’d have to say it’s pretty accurate.
Shenandoah weekend
Aug 25
We spend the weekend camping in Shenandoah National Park, which happens to be just up the road from our new home in Charlottesville.
Nice country.
After a killer weekend in New Orleans, I wrote quick travel story for culturemap.com that went live here.
There’s not much for visiting travel writers to say that their readers can’t find already in dozens of books penned about the soggy city’s hidden delights. Instead, I offered an argument: New Orleans beats the craps out of over-hyped Las Vegas for adults planning a bachelor/bachelorette party or a weekend away from the kids. I think the piece came together well, and I also cut a video of a few highlights, embedded here.
Ad-free flight search
Aug 11
Kayak, Orbitz, Bing and every other online travel agency all pull flight information from the same handful of databases. A company called ITA powers many of them, and it now offers travelers the same information it feeds its clients, ad and commission free.
Although you can’t book from the site directly, Matrix 2 now gives the savvy searcher yet another way to compare prices when planning flights. The results shouldn’t be that much different than, say, Kayak, but its interface is a little more flexible. The biggest advantage I can see is that it can find prices for multi-stop trips (sometimes called “open-jaw” itineraries by travel agents), which can be difficult to plan on other sites.
Looking ahead, the next big advancement from online flight booking is likely to come from a startup called Everbread that claims its search tool will access low-cost carriers that currently don’t allow online travel agencies to access their flight data. Theoretically, that would allow an American to book the cheapest transatlantic flight possible to a European city paired with a $30 Ryanair ticket to his or her final destination on the continent. I’d be interested to see how they pull that off, though, given that Easyjets of the world tend to depart from smaller airports that service fewer large carriers.
Ahh the joys of living, once again, in a college town.
My piece pointing out the true costs of owning a free tract mansion went live this afternoon on culturemap.com. The online magazine has covered closely the construction of a new “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” project for a charming Houston family of seven that was living in a two-bedroom house.
In just a week the show’s toothy celebrities, sponsors and hundreds of volunteers erected a 4,500-square-foot manse that towers over the working-class neighborhood below it. While it’s hard to thumb your nose as anyone giving free stuff to a deserving family, my editors and I wanted to know how much it will actually cost to live in a house that size once the camera crews leave. The total, including taxes maintenance and insurance, turned out to be roughly $22,000 per year.
Check out my videos
Aug 4
Since investing in some decent video-editing software last winter I’ve been able to offer videos with some of my culturemap.com columns. You can find all of them them 
on my youtube channel.
During my bloggin’ hiatus, I got behind on posting links to some of the more interesting stories I’ve written this year.
Probably the most notable (from a name-dropping perspective, anyway) is a Q and A with Bill Maher I wrote for Houston magazine’s January issue. You can check it out here.
As you might expect from a professionally opinionated comedian, he’s a good interview. In the 15 minutes of phone time I had with him, we managed to touch on Houston nightlife, Twitter and the evils of plastic.
New contact info
Jul 29
For those of you out in RSS land, or who don’t already know, I’ve moved.
If you need to get in touch, my e-mail and cell number remain the same. My new business line and address are:
Peter Barnes
P.O. Box 2784
Charlottesville, VA 22902
(434) 293-7783
I’ll be sure to post some pictures of C-Ville and the Blue Ridge Mountains I now call home. Meantime, have a great afternoon.
Anyone who’s ever endured hours of snoring in an hostel dorm or haggled for 15 minutes over a the price of a 5-minute cab ride understands that international travel is not all beaches and Wold Heritage sites. Often, time spent on the road is dirty, stressful and downright tedious.
Things I hate about backpacking dares to cast its witty scrutiny on the travel topics that don’t make it into the photos we share back home.
Don’t get me wrong – backpacking is a worthy pursuit and then some. But every so often, it’s liberating to commiserate with the author’s descriptions of insufferable bragging bunkmates, intestinal crises and drunk Australians.