I took a guided tour yesterday. I'm not really a guided tour person -- I didn't like climbing in and out of the minivan, I didn't like having someone else decide when I get to stop to take pictures, and I didn't really appreciate the day's agenda. Hey, it was an experiment, every now and then I like to try out something I might not otherwise do. It's good to look at other ways of travel. I don't judge -- if you like guided tours you go right ahead, they're crazy efficient and on good ones, you learn stuff.

I freaked right out when visiting Warwick with my now repatriated friend who was living, at the time, in England. The bowels of that castle were full of horrors, plus, until we moved through history to more genteel times, it seemed like no way to live. I fell in to a giant weeping mess at Toul Sleng in Phnom Pehn and had to be removed to a quiet courtyard across the street where I recovered with a cup of tea. I was less traumatized by Schoenbrunn, Vienna's sprawling palace complex, though I am still mad at Queen Marie Therese for being anti-Semitic.

The "immigrant experience"  is a phrase I usually associate with the U.S., what with people from across the world streaming in here everyday. A travelogue is what I'd associate with literature by foreigners from India. But the blogosphere is telling a different story. Many American and other Western citizens, who have either got on the love train or are riding the global economy wave that took them to India or simply love living there, are blogging about their experiences in a personal way that travel guides are unlikely to offer. Some are there for a few years.

Last year, shortly before Halloween, some pals went on a haunted/spooky/some third adjective tour in Georgetown, a recovering industrial neighborhood here in Seattle. I missed it, I was in Tampa and ended up a bit too close to a Sarah Palin rally for my likings, that's all I needed to set the tone for my Halloween. I wish I'd been able to attend the Seattle tour, those things have a way of sticking with you and now, every time we buzz through Georgetown -- there's a coffee house I like there -- my husband points out haunted brothels and places where other unseemly events took place.

On my flights last weekend, I had the good fortune to be seating next to two totally different, charming, and interesting people. On the way out, I sat next to a lovely woman in her 50s. She was from South Dakota and off to Vegas with her girlfriend (seated somewhere in the back of the plane and oh, get THIS, I sat next to the girlfriend on the connecting flight back!). My seat neighbor ran a day care center, was going to see Bette Midler, worried about health insurance as a very small business owner, was the daughter of a college professor, and rarely gets out of her hometown.

A flight attendant on Oprah Winfrey's private jet filed a lawsuit Friday denying allegations that she had sex on board. In the suit, Corrine Gehrls, 39, claims that fellow flight attendants Myron Gooch and Kirby Bumpus -- who is the daughter of Winfrey's best friend Gayle King and is Winfrey's goddaughter -- made the accusation that caused her to be fired.--Huffington Post

Think ahead to December. Cast your mind to Copenhagen. This December, the United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Unlike the last time there was a conference of this magnitude ( in Kyoto), the United States will take part in the deliberations and agree to abide by the resolutions.

This week is Blog World Expo -- are you going? I'm there, there's a whole day of travel talks including one about blogging that features [shameless promo plug] yours truly and a bunch of smart, smart, smart people. While I'm looking forward to the talks, I have a confession to make: I can't stand Vegas. The noise. The smoke. The waste, oh, the scandalous waste. The green lawns, the drunken 20 somethings on the strip, everything about Vegas makes me crazy, just crazy with frustration. My plan for Vegas? Get in, get out, no one gets hurt.

The 'unsinkable'' British liner Titanic sails out of Southampton, England, at the start of its doomed voyage in 1912. A recreation of the voyage will depart from Britain on April 8, 2012 and head for spot where ship sank on April 12, 1912--The Globe and Mail

Last week, National Geographic Adventure TV published a list of their top adventure travelers on Twitter. I was bummed, the list included ONE woman, @CarolDTravels. The criteria listed at the top of the article -- "our top twitter picks of celebrity travellers, professional nomads and down-right crazy adventurers" -- was sufficiently vague to mean that there's no good reason at all to have such a short supply of women.

On Tuesday, Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga, were hit by a tsunami. There's currently a travel warning suggesting that those intrepid types who are Pacific island bound stay away while the island populations grapple with the aftermath of the big waves. Those warnings don't always work -- plus, those who had planned to do aid work are going anyways. Here's a post from a soon to be Peace Corps volunteer:

Last I sat on the couch and between the gorgeous black and white still photography of Yosemite, I watched harried travelers rush about Tokyo and try to charm their way into first class flights. I listened to catty remarks about the poker girls and complex analysis of the character of John Muir. I was channel hopping between The Amazing Race and the new Ken Burns documentary, America's Best Idea, about the National Parks.