Phoenix

My Best Restaurants, Bars and Taprooms of 2021

It’ll take travel guide books a while to catch up with all the restaurants and bars closures caused by the COVID lockdowns. To help fill that gap, here are the best places I’ve ate and drank at during my 2021 travels. I’ll update this after each trip, so keep it bookmarked. Chicago NoodleBird at Fat…

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Podcast #160 — Disappearing Seatback Screens; Shrinking Difference Between Ride-Share and Taxis

Is this the IMAX seatback screen? Trying to watch the Super Bowl while flying from Durango, CO to Chicago via Denver got me thinking about the fading away of seatback entertainment. We also talk about the continuing evolution of ride sharing. Uber and Lyft are looking more and more like the taxi companies they fought…

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Podcast #159 — Planning the Trip of a Lifetime in Southeast Asia

Just put my dragon’s den on Airbnb January is a big travel planning month; people thinking about about the places they want to visit, spending days on the Internet researching itineraries, and putting in their week’s vacation requests. But what about a 9-week sabbatical you’ve worked 7 years for? In this episode, we talk about…

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Podcast #158 — Travel Potpourri for $400, Alex

Good End to 2019 Skipping the Chicago winter with trips to Phoenix and Sedona, Arizona, and a Christmas morning flight to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Talk about those trips, my good and bad Hertz experiences, and then gather up odds-‘n’-ends from my travel notebooks to see off 2019 in this New Year’s Eve episode. All…

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Podcast #86 — Fun with Layovers; Story Behind the Closing Tune

Finishing up the year in front of a warm fire in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago after a couple of warm-up trips to Phoenix.  I carved myself out an mini-vacation during one of the trips and worked at the summit of Squaw Peak for part of an afternoon. My MacBook Air — my perfect…

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