Thursday, March 20, 2008
I finally broke down and bought our tickets to Italy this week so it's time to start planning in earnest. And just in time for our trip, I see that Rick Steves has put up a series of
iPod tours for Italy. Excellent.
I have recenty started reading his Italy book, and we've been working our way through his Italy shows. I've got a vague outline for our itinerary and should be firming it up in the months to come. I do know that our trip will start in Milan and end in Rome, it's the middle bit that is still fuzzy.
Labels: audio_tour, iPod, italy, travel planning
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
I don't know why I love audio tours so much, but I do. I've written about them extensively in the past and will continue to hunt them down for whatever upcoming trips we might have.
Today, while browsing around on
Audible I came across various audio tours of sites on the Yucatan Peninsula put together by a company called
TekTrek. I'm glad I found them through Audible first and not just by stumbling across their web site, because if that had been the case I never would have been able to figure out where to get them as there is nothing on their site even indicating that they are for sale. Now I don't want to tell them how to run their business, but it's an oversight they may want to correct.
Anyway, when I start to research our Mexico trip, I will have a better idea which tours are for us, but I'm sure we'll try out a couple of them if they fit into our itinerary.
Labels: audio_tour, iPod, mexico, travel planning, yucatan
Thursday, January 11, 2007
I'm very excited to see that
Soundwalk has some new Paris walking tours.
Five of them,
to be exact. I am a big fan of both this concept in general and this company in particular (as you can see from my
review of two of the New York tours).
I all ready plan on getting at least two of them (the Marais and the St Germain tours), and may break down and get them all. I know we won't have time to do all of them, but they will be fun to listen to anyway.
Labels: audio_tour, france, iPod, paris
Thursday, November 09, 2006
National Geographic Traveler offers a number of interesting podcasts,
one of which is a series of walking tours narrated by Rudy Maxa of PBS' Smart Travels.
Destinations covered include a wide range of cities including
Paris,
Amsterdam,
New York,
Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.
I haven't listened to them yet, but I'll check out one soon and write a little review.
To subscribe to this podcast in iTunes click
here.
Labels: amsterdam, audio_tour, california, dc, europe, france, iPod, new_york, paris, san_francisco, united_states
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
I can't remember where I first heard about the
Soundwalk audio walking tours (although I suspect it was probably
Gridskipper), but I was immediately interested. I loved the idea of a walking tour that I could load onto my iPod and do at my leisure.
So last year when I was in New York to see
Spamalot I bought three of their tours to take with me (the
Brooklyn Dumbo,
Lower East Side, and
Meat Packing District walking tours). In the course of my visit I managed to do all three, and thoroughly enjoyed them. I even got to meet the narrator of the Meat Packing tour (at one point she instructs you to ring her bell, and you can go up to her gallery and talk to her). Of the three I liked the Lower East Side tour the least, all though that one was still pretty good and the Dumbo tour the most.
So how do they work? Every tour comes with an audio file and a pdf of the tour route, but really you only need the pdf to find your starting point, and I suppose, if you get hopelessly lost along the way, to reorient yourself. But the directions are usually pretty clear and I mostly always found myself ahead of the narrator, and had to wait on the corner (like they suggest) until they could catch up. One problem I ran into, was with both the Meat Packing tour and the Dumbo tour, the areas are changing so quickly, that some of the mentioned locations were gone, or inaccessible. Although this only happened a few times and didn't ruin my enjoyment.
For our upcoming trip, I purchased the
Wall Street and
Little Italy tours. I don't know if we'll have time to do both, but I'm sure we can squeeze at least one in.
The company also offers a walking tours of Paris (which we will definitely be using on our trip next year), India and other locals in and around New York.
Overall I think this is a brilliant concept whose time has come. I've found a few other companies offering similar things and those links can be found on the resource pages.
Labels: audio_tour, iPod, new_york, paris, united_states
Thursday, June 08, 2006
There are a number of different guides available for downloading and storing on your iPod to make your travels better. Some of them use the
Notes section of your iPod, and some use the
Photos section. Here are a few that I have come across:
Rough Guides Podscrolls—I just found this one today and downloaded the guides for Amsterdam, Paris and New York. It uses the Photos section of the iPod, so you have to create albums in iPhoto and sync them through iTunes. Only a few cities are offered at this time.
Pod CityGuides—This one has a ton of cities on offer and stores them in the Notes section, so they take up relatively little space. Pod CityGuides updates frequently too, so it’s a good idea to check the site to make sure you have the most current version before you travel.
iSubwayMaps.com—The guy that runs this site has chopped up subway maps from various cities and formatted them to fit on the iPod screen. There are versions for both the iPod Photo and iPod with video. I'm not sure how useful they are in the field as it's hard to get a sense of overall position, but if you know where you need to go you may be all right. Great idea anyway.
There are more of course. I know that the
Seattle Weekly offers a dining guide for the iPod and I've heard tell of one that lists pizza places in New York. Or you could always
make your own, of course.
Labels: guide_books, iPod, maps
Monday, April 24, 2006
This site offers a couple of walking tours of Amsterdam.
I'm particularly excited about the Rembrandt tour.
Labels: amsterdam, audio_tour, europe, iPod
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
One of the things that I like to do when planning for a trip is to seek out shops that pertain to my areas of interest. For example I am a great fan of comic books so, when in another city or country, I will find a local comic shop to visit and then I will write down it's location in my little
Moleskine
so that I can reference it while traveling. I've been doing this for all my trips since my first trip to France in '03. The only problem was that sometimes I would have difficulty finding the address if I had not written down nearest cross streets and all that.
About a week ago I stumbled on to a solution to this problem. It came to me while perusing this
site, which has chopped up subway maps for various cities for storing on an
iPod. I realized I could do something like this for the various stores and restaurants I had made note of.
So I went to
Mappy.com and entered the addresses of the places I was interested in, made a screen capture of the map, took it into
Photoshop and sized it down to fit on my iPod screen. The resulting map looks something like this:
I then load this into iPhoto and sync it with my iPod. And voila, ready to roll.
I know this probably seem terribly anal, but as should be obvious from this blog, I like to use the tools and technology available to me. You should see the detailed itineraries I make for the trip. Now those are anal.
Labels: iPod
Friday, March 17, 2006
Rick Steves' is finally producing Audio versions of the walking tours in his books. And lucky us, he's starting with Paris!
The first two up are audio guides for the Louvre and d'Orsay museums along with maps.
They can be downloaded from his site
here or you can
subscribe to the podcast through
iTunes.
Next up is are tours of Versailles and an historic Paris walk.
This is great. I love to do the walking tours in his books when traveling, and it will be so much nicer not to have to carry around the books and stop to read every few minutes. This way is much more inconspicuous.
Labels: audio_tour, europe, france, iPod, paris
