Mexico: Swine Flu Fears

Outbreak in Mexico sets off pandemic in cyberspace impacts travel to Mexico

Associated Press headline: "Mexico swine flu deaths spur global epidemic fears." About one thousand cases (and 81 deaths) in Mexico, mostly in Mexico City, the capital, "where authorities closed schools, museums, libraries and theaters in the capital on Friday to try to contain an outbreak that has spurred concerns of a global flu epidemic.The worrisome new virus — which combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before." Eight cases, more or less (but no deaths), in California and Texas.

• People photographed wearing face masks.
• Caution to "avoid hospitals" in Mexico City, since they are breeding grounds for contagions. Caution against handshaking or cheek-to-cheek kissing as a greeting.
• Pasesengers at Mexico City's international airport questioned to try to prevent passengers with flu symptoms from boarding airplanes and spreading the disease.
• Concern at the World Health Organization, which is "convening an expert panel to consider whether to raise the pandemic alert level or issue travel advisories. It might already be too late to contain the outbreak, a prominent U.S. pandemic flu expert said late Friday. Given how quickly flu can spread around the globe, if these are the first signs of a pandemic, then there are probably cases incubating around the world already, said Dr. Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota," according the AP report.

For travelers, where's the line between reasonable precautions and unreasonable fear? Everyone has to make his or her own decision, but for my part, I can think of a lot of reasons to avoid the congested and confusing airport in Mexico City if at all possible. I traveled to China in 2003, not long after SARS hit there. And, I attended the Society of American Travel Writers convention in Houston last October, where many of my colleagues came down with similar symptoms (mostly fever, vomiting and diarrhea). I didn't contract SARS in China in '03 or turista in Texas in '08, so I'm probably no yardstick.

Travel to Mexico has already been slammed by the recesssion and by reports of drug-related violence in border cities, far from tourist destinations. Now this. Bottom line, again, is that each traveler has to assess the decision, but there are great values to be had. And, for what it's worth, the American Medical & Health Tourism Conference is going on right now in Monterrey, according to a report on the Mexico Vacation Travels blog site. Click here for the New York Times report on steps Mexico is taking to curtail the spread of swine flu.

Cheyenne Frontier Days Evokes the Old West

"The Daddy of 'Em All" provides a lot of rodeo action and bang for the buck

I've been to the National Western Stock Show any number of times. I've also seen rodeo action at the Greeley Stampede, in Steamboat Springs, Snowmass and elsewhere in Colorado and Wyoming. And in late in winter, I've visited the Old West Museum in Cheyenne's Frontier Park with its wonderful carriage collection and celebration of the rodeo lifestyle. But until yesterday, I'd never been in Cheyenne for Frontier Days, the world's largest outdoor rodeo -- which is kind of embarrassing to myself since I live just 90 miles away and have intended to go for years.

Finally, that situation was rectified at yesterday's opening of the 114th Cheyenne Frontier Days, whose slogan is "The Daddy of 'Em All." The day began with a terrific parade highlighted by horses, carriages, wagons, vintage autos, marching bands and more. Elected and appoint officials, as well as the Frontier Days committee chairs, paraded on horseback or in antique carriages to validate Wyoming's nickname, "the Cowboy State."

Then off to Frontier Park for a behind-the-chutes tour and a chance to walk on the soft earth of the rodeo grounds, see the chutes up close and hear a good explanation of rodeo events. Yesterday's rodeo, played before an audience that nearly filled the 17,000-seat stadium featured three rounds each of steer wrestling, team roping and bareback bronc riding. Last night, Brooks and Dunn played during their final tour, and later in the week, the bull riders (below) take over for two nights of adrenalin action.

I was impressed with the Indian Village. The dancers were wonderful, and the emcee, Sandy Ironcloud, a Northern Arapaho who teaches at the Wind River Indian College, not only introduced the Little Sun Drum and Dance Group (many of whom are her relatives), but also explained the dances, the symbolism and the costumes. The Indians (and they don't appear to want to be called Native Americans) bring what Sandy Ironcloud calls "our babies" to dance and carry on the traditions and share them with us too. Her words were very inclusive, embracing and inviting. Click on the arrow below to see a short video, one of a series of eight that I found on YouTube.



From a consumerist viewpoint, I was also so taken with how much at Frontier Days is free or inexpensive that, when I came home yesterday evening, I wrote a post for MileHighOnTheCheap.com, a site in partner, citing all the free and bargain activities and attractions. Click here for that post.
Cheyenne Frontier Days continues through Sunday, August 1 this year. I will have lived in Colorado for 22 years on August 15, and you can bet that it won't be another 22 years before I return to Frontier Days.

RIP: Ski Train

Denver-Winter Park train off-track -- perhaps forever

Click here to read about my trip Riding the Ski Train to Winter Park less than a month ago. Delightful as the ride was, and much as we intending to take it more often, it most likely won't happen again. Surprisingly -- in fact, shockingly -- owner Phil Anschutz either has sold or is about to seel the Ski Train rolling stock to the Algoma Central Railway, a subsidiary of Canadian National Railway Company, that among other excursions runs the Snow Train from Sault Ste.-Marie, Ontario, into the white world of the Agawa Canyon (right).

Jim Monaghan, an Anschutz spokesman, told the Denver Post that the Canadian railroad approached them about selling Colorado Ski Train. The Anschutz organization was receptive because the logistics of running the train to with the upcoming redevelopment of Denver's Union Station were uncertain -- but the costs were certainly rising. During the Union Station makeover, there was talk about temporarily operating the train from a parking lot at Coors Field. That won't be necessary.

One of the Ski Train plans for next winter that will now no longer happen was to offer two-day packages that included a Saturday trip to winter park, an overnight stay at Winter Park and a Sunday afternoon return to Denver.

Anschutz reportedly did not sell the Ski Train name or logo to the Canadians, so there remains a possibility, slim though it might be, for the eventual return of the revered train, which began operating in 1940. No question that it will be missed.

At Home in the Nagle Warren Mansion

Wyoming's best B and B combines hospitality, grandeur, comfort, history  and location

I've toured the public rooms of the Nagle Warren Mansion on previous visits to Cheyenne, and have made a point of driving by every time I've been in town, just like the Trolley Tours and the horse-drawn carriage tours do, just to gaze at this magnificent mansion set in a lovely garden. There was no one named Nagle Warren or Warren Nagle. The turreted mansion was built in 1888 Erasmus Nagle, a super-rich merchant in 1888 and bought in 1910 by Francis E. Warren, an even richer businessman, governor and US Senator. Now, it enables guests to feel like aristocrats on the Western frontier during the Gilded Age. I'm enjoying every minute.

The mansion, one of the few such palatial homes remaining in Cheyenne, occupies a prominent corner at 17th and House on the fringes of Cheyenne's historic core. The mansion is listed on National Register of Historic Places and belongs to Historic Hotels of the Rockies and probably other affiliations I don't know about.

Jim Osterfoss is the genial host. I'm sure that our paths have crossed sometime in the past. He used to own the Roost Lodge, one of the most affordable accommodations in pricey Vail. Now he owns the very best lodging in Cheyenne, a city where hotel and motel rooms are bargains compared with other state capitals.

I'm sitting in the home's tower right now, my little netbook placed on the wicker table in the image below. Whenever whenever I'm fishing for a word, I gaze out the window past the parking lots that I wish weren't here to the tower of the magnificently restored Union-Pacific Depot that I'm glad is here. .

Open the heavy oak doors and pass into a grand hallway with parlors on each side. Wonderful details and interesting antique furnishings (and a few faithful reproductions of old lighting fixtures) load the in with atmosphere and interesting things to look at: a couple of rare nickel-plated bronze mantelpieces, a transition chandelier designed both for gaslights and electric bulbs, a face on a newel post, an elaborate lav off the library that worth going to see even if you don't need to go. The Nagle Warren Mansion hosts special events too -- private receptions with gentle entertainment (top image, below), afternoon teas, murder mystery dinners and the like.

I can't believe my good fortune is getting a room here on the threshold of Cheyenne Frontier Days, one of the biggest rodeos around. My room is an east-facing charmer under the eaves with a an equally charming bathroom and a lucky view of one of Cheyenne's other remaining mansions -- one that happens to be for sale for anyone who wants to be a neighbor of the Nagle Warren Mansion.

Nagle Warren Mansion, 222 East 17th Street, Cheyenne, Wyoming 82001; 800-811=2610 or 307-637-3333.

Travel Babel Named One of the Top 50 Travel Blogs

I just received the happy news that Travel Babel was named one of the top 50 travel blogs of 2010 by Awarding the Web, which was begun in 2002 by two University of Washington students who seem to have hopped on the web-wagon relatively early. I wish I knew who they are, but I don't.

According to their own site, award candidates are selected by their team of "research associates scouring the web" or by nominations from their subscribers. I'm sure mine was the former. Their site further explains that five unnamed judges score each nominated blog "across 20 different attributes" to come up with their own subjective scores. These ratings are combined into an aggregate score, and the five judges' aggregates are then averaged to give the blog its final rating. wards go to blogs in the 99% percentile, meaning just the top 1% of nominated blogs receive awards.

When I look at the other travel blogs in the top 50, I’m honored to be in such good company. The list of award recipients is not numbered, but it's not alphabetical either. Travel Babel is No. 34 on the list of 50, and I have to say that I'm thrilled that five judges cumulatively consider this to be the 34th-best travel blog around.

A Downer of a Day in the Northeast

Amtrak from Washington to New York: easy travel but sad scenery

It has been years since I've taken the train on any but the shortest stretch of the Northeast Corridor. I did this morning for the first time in years. I arrived at Union Station in time for the 8:35 a.m. train, one earlier than my reservation. Amtrak is flexible and changed my ticket -- but charged nearly $30 -- not as a change fee but because the earlier train carried a higher fare. When I asked why, the agent told me it was because more people travel earlier. If more people travel earlier, I would have been the only person on the later train. My car, at least, had an extremely low passenger load -- less than 10 percent. I'm guessing flexible travelers were taking the later train, because it's cheaper, but that's just a guess. The trip was comfortable and punctual.

But too often, the view out the window was incredibly sad -- no surprise to those who travel this route often, but a knock in the eye and a punch in the gut to me after so many years away from the Northeast. Especially in and near our cities, I saw long-shuttered factories, their windows broken, their brick walls encrusted with graffiti. Trackside litter: paper, cans, plastic bottles, old tires, chunks of concrete, car parts, hunk of cable. Weeds. Fallen-down dwellings. It sad -- sadder than I remembered. Decay in the fly-over states tends to be shuttered stores in the small centers of depopulated towns, done in by the Interstate highways, the loss of the railroad and WalMart somewhere down the way. In the urban Northeast, decay is in the middle of densely populated areas. I knew it in my head and on one level what it looked like, but I had forgotten how it hits the eyes and the emotions.

My spirit was further dampened by the weather. The sky was gray, as was the landscape. Most of the trees hadn't leafed out yet. The clouds released fat drops of cold rain. Mud made the litter and trash somehow look even worse. I am reading Anderson Cooper's memoir, Dispatches from the Edge, and as the train traveled through scenes of decades of decay. He wrote about the terrible destruction he reported on in New Orleans the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the US, Lousiana and local governments' unpreparedness and lack of response, calling the American system "broken." Having been to too many war zones and seen entirely too many dead bodies, he wrote that he hadn't expected it in his own country. Likewise, while I am bothered by roadside trash and broken-down buildings in developing countries, it seems inexcusable in our own.

When arrived in New York, I allowed myself the extravagance of a taxi to the hotel, because I wasn't in the mood to drag my bags (a small roll-aboard and my laptop bag) up and down wet subway stairs, and I didn't want to get soaked waiting for the two buses I would have to take just to get close to my hotel.

As the cab crawled through traffic, I wondered which African runners had won the Boston Marathon, what the weather was like in Beantown and whether any Coloradans performed well. I later learned that Deriba Merga of Ethiopia won the men's race, Kenya’s Salina Kosgei was the top woman and Americans placed third in both, with Boulder's Colleen de Rueck eighth among women in a race that started on a cool morning and got worse.

After I checked in, I bundled up in my raingear and went for a walk, because tomorrow will be an indoor day. More gray. More rain. Water-filled potholes on every block. Cabs splashing through the water. Pedestrians who have trained themselves to step back from curb. More gray. More rain. I walked down East 45th Street, where I once worked. Some smaller buildings had been replaced by big shiny ones. Two doors from my old office building, now remodeled and gussied up, a three- or four-story Catholic mission used to shelter and feed and homeless men. The building was now abandoned, probably slated for redevelopment -- once the economy picks up. At the nearby United Nations, the news was that anti-Israeli remarks made by Iran's president prompted delegates to walk out of an anti-racism conference.

Deciding to switch from miserable macro-cosmic new, I picked up a copy of a free lower Manhattan newspaper to see what was happening locally. I read it while I nibbled some sushi. It seems that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and developer Larry Silverman are at odds over the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site. They are tussling about the order in which the new buildings are to be constructed and, of course, who is to pay for the construction -- or guarantee the bonds. The year 2039 was mentioned as the completion date for the WTC replacement.

The rain let up, but the evening remained chilly and damp. I know that before I return to Colorado, the clouds will lift, the puddles will dry, the sun will come out and the street trees will be in bloom. New York will look better, and my mood will improve too. It always does.

Emirates Orders More Boeing 777 Aircraft

Dubai-based airline expands its large Triple Seven fleet

Emirates Airlines, the Dubai-based, award-winning international carrier, has ordered 30 777-300ER aircraft to add to its 71 already on the books, of which 53 of this model are currently in service. The Triple Seven a long-range, wide-body airliner is the world's largest twinjet. Quite unsurprisingly, even before this latest $9.1 billion order, Emirates is the world’s largest operator of 777s. Plus, just last month, Emirates ordered 32 Airbus A380 planes.

The airline's strategy is to become a world-leading carrier and to establish Dubai as a central gateway to worldwide air travel. In all, Emirates already 86 777s (three 777-200s, six 777-200ERs, 10 7777-200LRs, 12 777-300s, 53-300ERs and two freighters, numbers that are mainly of interest to airline geeks. It operates the 777-300ER  in a three-class configuration with eight first class suites, 42 business class seats and 310 Economy class seats, plus offers an additional cargo payload of 20.1 tons. Oh yes, it also operates 79 Airbus A380s, 70 Airbus A350s and seven Boeing freighters.

I didn't do the math because I don't do math, but Emirates did and says that its fleet totals (or will total, I'm not sure which) 204 widebody aircraft worth more than $67 billion dollars. In a lousy year for world aviation and the global economy in general, Emirates Airline recently reported its 22nd year of profit, up 416 percent to close at $964 million dollars over its 2008-09 profits of $187 million dollars. I add this only because there has been so much whining among US and international legacy carriers that I find all this quite remarkable.  US gateways are New York, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Travel writer colleagues who flew Emirates not long ago to a meeting in Bangkok via Dubai reported favorably on the experience.