Travel

 My room faced a street inhabited by feral dogs. At night, feral dogs bark loudly to express alarm, anger, interest, a desire to communicate with other dogs, joy, curiosity, fear ... anything. The dogs were quiet in the morning, which probably emboldened the roosters outside to begin crowing at that time. -- Eurotrash or Eurotreasure

It's exciting to discover new blogs about travel -- there are so many different voices, so many styles of travel, so many ways to tell stories. It's always fun to take a spin through the travel blogs on BlogHer, to find new writers and meet new travelers. In case you're wondering what catches my eye, I'm always attracted to photos that capture a place, stories that take me there, and voices that sound real. On the practical side, I like information that's easy to navigate, authoritative, and fun to read.

I'm fairly confident that US Airways doesn't, as an entity, hate families and kids, contrary to what this post might tell you. I'm also fairly confident that flight attendants would rather not seat your child next to strangers when perfectly related parents are on the same flight.

With Valentine's Day around the corner, my inbox is a swamp of cliched press releases, each one of them attempting to sell me the idea of romantic travel -- a trip to Paris, perhaps, or exotic chocolates from far away places, or little extras that you can pack to transform the sturdy beige interior of your hotel room into a rose colored tent in the desert. Yeah, okay, maybe.

Police in Peru say they have airlifted the last of the tourists stranded near the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu after floods destroyed road and rail links. Nearly 1,300 travellers were flown out by helicopters on Friday, a local policeman told the Associated Press. A total of nearly 4,000 tourists and local residents have now left the area following last Sunday's heavy flooding. --BBC