Blogs

This week Gumbo made it to the West Coast with a visit to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Holland America received 10 perfect United States Public Health inspections in 2015

Denmark's wildlife is getting a bit wilder, some on its own, and some by careful intervention.  The big news (anything about an elk is big) is the re-introduction of elk to Denmark after a 5000-year absence. Five young Swedish elk have been given a new habitat on Denmark's Jutland peninsula, in an area that is the largest raised bog in Northern Europe. They'll hopefully become part of a self-sustaining ecosystem in the area. Recently, a beaver was spotted building a dam on a golf...

This is the weekend that no one can escape news about Star Wars; it's all the media, social and otherwise—and TravelGumbo is no exception. Since we're a travel site, that's the focus of our round-up. Last month we reported on Air France's plan to premiere the new movie, The Force Awakens on Paris trans-Atlantic flights Thursday night, just as the film was opening in major cities. The special trip with the tiny-screen film included tickets to a giant-screen showing in Paris the next...

It's clearly winter now at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, with only a few days left until Christmas, and only the hardiest of crops remaining—but those include lovely piles of scallions with their roots showing, and plenty of turnips, beets and carrots. Not to mention lots of apples of many varieties (no, those aren't tomatoes in the boxes) as well as meats, baked goods and specialty foods. And, of course, it's the season for some non-edibles as well, in the form of holiday...

Antigua is one of Guatemala's oldest cities, and has some of its best-preserved colonial buildings—at least in part because after 1776 it was nearly-abandoned for 150 years. LestertheInvestor shows us around.

"There's an app for that" was the big tagline not long ago, but for some things there just wasn't—and FLIO neatly fills one of those gaps. If you have an iPhone; no Android version for a couple more months. And it's free. FLIO is "all-things-airport," with the kind of information you could otherwise find only by searching airport websites, or at best, by downloading individual airport apps. The publisher has worked with over 180 airports, and is adding more, to allow app-users to...

This week, Europe's first T-Rex skeleton takes the stage, and Berlin's Natural History Museum is hoping he'll be as popular a performer as his relatives have been elsewhere. In an interview with TheLocal.de, museum director Prof. Johannes Vogel said that Tyrannosaurus Rex specimens  "have this funny effect of transforming the perception of museums, and this will be no exception." The museum is well-known in Berlin, and Vogel thinks the exhibit may be the ticket to world status,...

This picture was inspired by a 1930s Berenice Abbott photograph of lower Manhattan from the waterfront that I used in a blog about changing Manhattan views.

Grey seals from Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve, U.K.

Bombardier CSeries gets certified Airworthy.

For tourists from Europe, England and Canada, who have been traveling to Cuba for years, the big change anticipated when Americans start to arrive has already started to happen. A report by Claire Boobbyer of Skift, the travel industry news and analysis site, says that visitors are already seeing price rises, shortages of rooms and crowding at popular spots, even before the expected changes in the U.S. ban on "normal" tourism ends. During the first 11 months of 2015, Cuba played host to over...