Travel and Tourism info on the Web

I've done a fair bit of traveling, myself. The furthest points I've been to (from the US) in the four compass directions are:

North: Stockholm, Sweden
South: Melbourne, Australia
East: Stockholm, Sweden
West: Jakarta, Indonesia (although, I went through the Singapore airport which is a little west of there, but I didn't stay)

The furthest I've been from the area where I've always lived is Perth, Australia (while not as far west as Jakarta, it's much further south, while not as far south as Melbourne, it's much further west). In fact, Perth is about as far as you can get from here and still be on land.

I've been to nearly all of the fifty US states (I believe the only exceptions are Alaska, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, I'm not certain about the Dakotas and Nebraska).

Local area information I use

Travel doesn't have to be to distant places. Most of my traveling happens around home. There's a page for Cambridge, where I live and work. Covering a larger area is a page of Boston area local information, part of The New England List. There is also The Boston Restaurant List, which I find useful. Another new (Nov 1995) service that looks interesting, if populated further, is the Hyperlinked map of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.

For getting around in the area, I frequently go "car free" by walking or riding the T. Both the route 74 and route 78 buses go by my house, or close enough. Scott Moore maintains The New England Transportation Site which has lots of general and historical information on area transit.

Info on travel all over

The Rec.Travel Library has a massive collection of stuff, including lots of pointers to useful resources. Additionally my Cartography page has some useful travel-related pointers.

Some places that I've seen tourism info for that I thought I might visit some day include: Nova Scotia, and Sweden. For general tourism lookup, use the Virtual Tourist service or City Net.

A list of other travel related pages:

GNN's Travelers' Tales Resource Center.
Virtual Tourist map of the world.
U.S. State Department Travel Warnings.
The Avid Explorer, run by a travel agency, offers travel information.
GORP -- Great Outdoor Recreation Pages has useful information for seeing the great outdoors all across America.
As a Railfan, I also like traveling by train and use the on-line Amtrak Train Schedules, particularly the Auto Train. I have also found schedules for trains in Germany (by E-mail forms, also available in German), and Finland.
No general airline schedules are available, but you can do lookups on Canadian Airlines flights.

Making arrangements

There are a number of airlines, railroads, and travel agents on the net. Two of the best resources I've found for this are PC Travel (which seems to be well known) and Internet Travel Network which includes a gateway to real-time reservations as well as ticketing through a local agent.

Trip planning

If you are driving from anywhere to anywhere in the US, you might want to check out AutoPilot® which will give you driving directions.

Travelogues

There are several interesting on-line travelogues collected at the Web Travel site. Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory details his travels from Cambridge to Alaska and back. Steven Grimm has written one about his visit to Russia.

Miscellaneous

The combination of my computer and travel interests combines in my interest in Steve Roberts' Nomadic Research Labs.

Another travel-related resource is the collection of Flags of the World. Also, if you're going to be travelling internationally, you may want to check on Exchange Rates between various currencies.

Other personal pages

Overall outline of my pointer pages.
My own home page (which I actually don't use much).
A page about me.
The Mike Patton Cryer, a newspaper created to my spec by CRAYON (CReAte Your Own Newspaper).