See the News section below for links to new updates as the major northeast blizzard develops…many flights have already been cancelled pre-emptively to avoid having travelers—and planes—trapped. Many city and intercity road and rail systems may also be affected.
Here’s a link to the Gumbo News that will be updated through the day.
A visit to the Desert View Watchtower on the eastern portion of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. Constructed in the 1930s, it offers magnificent canyon views and a tie to the Native American history of the Canyon.
I was visiting a friend, and this was the view from their house. I could understand why they built their house facing this direction. I was taken by the beauty!
Samantha shares some street art pictures from her recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia.
A garden in South Wales is the topic of today’s post from ProfessorAbe
DrFumblefinger shares photos of the Fitz Roy Massif, one of the most famous and difficult to climb peaks in the world, situated in Patagonia.
Vienna’s Clock Museum, one of the biggest and best of its kind doesn’t really have 10,000 clocks, but you’d never know that as you get lost in its world of time.
The oldest monumental fountain in Paris has a long history of rebuilding, renaming and relocating
This is all the clue there is: Is it enough for you to name the scene of a future TravelGumbo blog? Email answers by Monday midnight to [email protected]
Estimates of the cost of shutting down for a storm come from the same fiction factory as th estimates of how much money a city will make by spending $100 million tax dollars on a new stadium…
That said, had the track of the storm been only very slightly east of where it went—and there was no way to know it would shift—we would have had 2-3 feet, and the risk of many people stranded on roads. At times in the past, also, when equipment was not properly positioned off line, it took much too long to get going again. It was a prudent decision, made in the wake of a lot of thinking since Sandy.
As to the $200,000,000. Just a sample of the bogus thinking that goes into it. The total includes the huge drops for the day in sales in department stores, groceries, car dealers and more…but all of those sales will take place anyway, just over the next few days. It’s not the same as, say, a restaurant or theater that may not necessarily get the patron a few days later. It also includes the entire cost of clearing the roads and so forth–which would have been even greater if the roads were again clogged with cars, getting in the way of plows, etc.
And by the way, I say all this despite NOT being a fan of mayor or governor…
I just heard that all the “shutting down” of the city is estimated to have cost NYC some $200,000,000. And in the end less than a foot of snow fell, not insignificant, but far from the storm of the century.
PHeymont, you’re on the ground in the New York area, what was it like?