Some people, companies, or services just stand out as being a cut above. They’re the people who are so wonderful to work with that you just want to run home and tell all your friends. Well, a blog is the next best thing. We’ve run across a few of those in our travels, so we’d like to record their coolness in the hard ephemerality of magnetic spins and TCP packets for whatever future travelers may find such reviews useful. Plus, it may help the PageRank of some of these companies. ;-)
- Rafting down the Grand Canyon is truly one of the “do before you die” experiences in life. If you’re going to do it, Canyon Explorations is the group to do it with. Full review.
- Finding housing in a foreign country when you don’t speak the language can be horribly intimidating. If you’re ever headed to Spain for medium-long term, and you’re looking for an apartment in Madrid, please look up Mike Leppard at Innova Property Group. Full review.
- Pembrokeshire, Wales is beautiful country and the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail is fantastic and wonderful — a hiking experience to savor if you ever have the chance. And if you do so, it is hard to imagine a finer or more hospitable place to stay than at Borders’ Bed & Breakfast. Full review.
- Hawaii is an unbelievably beautiful place, but many tourists never get beyond the resorts and the “high profile” islands. The “Big Island” of Hawai’i proper is widely overlooked, but amazing and wonderful. Our base of operations while we were there was My Island Inn Bed & Breakfast, near the Volcanoes National Park. It is a beautiful, historic house and grounds, but, best of all, the proprietors are treasure troves of local history, information, and culture. Oh, and they serve killer breakfasts. Full review (coming soon).
- If you want to go exploring the beautiful US Virgin Islands, but you want to avoid the tourist kitsch and man-swarms of the big cruise liners, you can try an eco-tourism “resort” alternative. We highly recommend Maho Bay Camps. Staying there was a strangely exhilarating blend of pampering and roughing it, with concierge-booked diving trips and lizard-laden trees outside your mesh-walled cabin. And some hints of Myst thrown in to establish etheriality. Full review (coming soon).
Anti-recommendations
And occasionally, you run across something so awful that it deserves an anti-recommendation. This is not a blog about being gratuitously hateful, so we’ll try to reserve our vitriol for those who really deserve it.
- Western Sizzlin’, Valdosta Georgia. Simply the most stomach-turningly awful meal I’ve had in my life. shudder