The Oatmeal offers a candid look at working from home
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I’d have to say it’s pretty accurate.

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.

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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.

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.

If there’s a bright side to neglecting my professional website, it’s that I was too busy writing stories during the first half of the year to notice.

The work keeps rolling in, including two features for Executive Travel and another for an in-flight magazine in the coming months. I’ve also been contributing travels stories for culturemap.com and features for more of Dog Fancy’s specialty publications.

More on those later. For now, check out the overhauled reporterbarnes.com. With an updated credit list and a new layout, it looks a lot better than basic design I put together almost three years ago.

Stay tuned for more travel tips, random links and updates on my work. Stephanie and I moved to Charlottesville, Va., over the 4th of July. Now that we’re settled in, I hope to post here on a regular basis once again.

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We departed for South America two weeks ago. Four cities, 13,000 feet of elevation gain, 4 ceviches, countless pisco sours and two guinea pigs later, I’m happy to say we’re back and had a great time. I’m still playing catch up following our red-eye flight Thursday, so I’ll post details later. Meantime, I hope you enjoy the pics.

Check it out here. This issue was a lot of fun, and I wrote stories ranging from the FOB philanthropy timeline, to the feature on private art collections on public view, to the blurbs in the main story on international art, Galveston’s gallery scene and other topics.