Slow Europe

A new logo for Slow Europe! We don’t plan to launch Slow Europe until the fall, but I found a graphic artist whose work I really liked, so I thought I would get a logo for the site now. The logo has the spiral for “slow”, surrounded by the elements of water, sun and earth.

The logo designer, Ginés Valera, lives in Spain. I explained to him what the Slow Europe site will be about - finding vacation/villa/holiday rentals in Europe - and showed him the Slow Food and Slow Travel logos with their snail and spiral logos. This is his representation of our idea. I love this logo - I think it will look good on a baseball cap! :)

A new logo for Cotswolder! Cotswolder will be launched in August. Part of the site is available now and the last section, Towns & Villages of the Cotswolds, is almost ready.

The new logo for Cotswolder is a spiral of bluebells. My favorite time of year in the Cotswolds is the spring when the woods are filled with Bluebells and Ransoms Ramsons (also called Garlic Flowers). I sent Ginés some of my spring flower photos and this is what he came up with for our logo. I love the spiral and the colors and being reminded of spring in the Cotswolds.

These logos were designed by Ginés Valera (www.mediacomm.es and www.lumina.es (under construction) - email: info@mediacomm.es). Ginés is Lumina on FeaturePics, a great site for buying graphics and photos to use on your websites.

Both sites will be redesigned over the next few weeks to incorporate the new logos.

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AMC has started season 2 of Mad Men, a great TV series about life in New York City in the 1960s. Back when men were men, and women made the coffee. And everyone smoked!

On a recent BBC radio show that we were listening to on a Podcast they were talking about all the great TV from the US lately. I always love TV in England, but dismiss the US shows. But they have a point - there has been some great TV in the US the last few years. HBO - The Wire, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Deadwood. Showtime - Californication, Dexter, Weeds, The Tudors. AMC - Mad Men.

And my personal favorite: SciFi Channel - Battlestar Galactica (not only because the planet they came from is my old university, Simon Fraser in Vancouver - but because it is just an incredible plot with great characters).

Emirates to do away with paper to cut weight, GulfNews.com, July 20, 2008. They will save over 4 pounds (2 kilograms) per seat (2,000 pounds per plane) by getting rid of the in-flight magazines. 4 pounds of in-flight magazines per seat - those are heavy magazines!

I guess it makes sense to get rid of some of the extras to make the flight lighter, but I think we are getting close to the border of ridiculous. Won’t passengers carryon more reading material if they know the in-flight magazines are gone? Or are in-flight magazines never read and this is just a good excuse to ditch them? (I never read the in-flight magazines.) Let’s see if other airlines follow Emirates on this one.

Many vacation rental agencies realize that they need to provide good travel information to their clients and that a blog is a good way to do that.

Interhome, a large US and Europe based vacation rental agency, is doing that on their Interhome Blog. They asked me to write about some of my travel in Switzerland. I worked with their blog-master Eli and we decided to do a journal from the trip Steve and I did last summer to Leysin, in the Vaud Alps near Lake Geneva. My series of blogs starts with Two Weeks in the Swiss Alps and continues with a journal Pauline in Switzerland - Days 1 through 12.

July is the perfect month in the Swiss Alps. You can get some rain (mountain weather is unpredictable), but you also get sunny beautiful days with fields filled with colorful wildflowers. It was fun to go back through my travel journal and remember what a great time Steve and I had in Leysin last summer. Eli used many of my photos on the blog, but I also posted on Slow Europe some longer photo essays for our favorite hikes.

Sitting here in July, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, I am having a great summer, but I would love to be up in those Swiss Alps right now.

Slow Europe Photos

• Photos of Leysin
• Photos of Leysin Hikes
• Photos of Gstaad and Saanen
• Photos of Gstaad Hikes

Twitter - it’s the latest social networking thing! (Okay, it was the latest thing last year, but I just found out about it.) Twitter is a new type of social networking site based on micro-blogging. Sign up, set up your profile, find your “friends”, and do short 140 character maximum posts. It is strangely captivating.

Twitter was founded by Evan Williams who created Blogger (now owned by Google) and Biz Stone (also worked on Blogger and has written two good books about blogging). Their company is Obvious Corp.

So, follow me on Twitter! You will find some other Slow Travelers there: danamac, divinacucina, dreamofitaly.

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Last month I posted about a new airline - Open Skies starts flying New York to Paris. The travel blog “Gadling” sent one of their writers on an Open Skies flight and he writes in detail about the experience - Gadling flies Open Skies.

Post updated November 8, 2008. I have been making this bread twice a week for months now and love the recipe. I have come up with my own variation of the recipe (posted below).

One of the things that I love in France, Germany and Switzerland is the bread! A basket of perfect croissants in the morning at a cafe in France, a bakery with at least ten types of fresh baked bread in Germany, the wonderful whole wheat breads served for breakfast in a tea room in Switzerland.

We have great quality bread in North America too - it is not all Wonder Bread here! In Santa Fe, Sage Bakehouse produces artisanal, organic bread.

Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan St Bakery in New York City, makes good European-style bread. You can purchase it at their store and other NYC locations. A couple of years ago, he published his recipe for No-Knead Bread on his website. A version of his recipe was printed in the New York Times in November 2006 - No-Knead Bread - and (it seems like) everyone in the US started making this bread.

My friend Chris (Slow Travel moderator) posted about it in the Food Forum on the Slow Travel Forums and many Slow Travelers started making bread and experimenting with the recipe (the Food Forum is for paid members only - they have a lively exchange of recipes). I missed all this because I did not read the food forum; I assumed they were always talking about meat, sugar and wine - which I am not interested in. Boy, was I wrong - my apologies to the Food Forum Followers!!

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I love the “travel dancing” videos by Matt Harding. The first one came out in 2004 and word of it instantly spread through the travel communities. I watched it over and over. He expresses perfectly the joy of travel, the joy of life. Since that first video he has done two more. The most recent video, “Dancing”, is almost at 5 million views today on YouTube.

It will probably hit 5 millions views soon because there was a good article about him today in the New York Times. A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No, New York Times, Charles McGrath, July 8, 2008.

See all his videos - Matt Harding on YouTube.

More information on his website - Where the Hell is Matt? - which is down today, probably because 20 million of us just read the New York Times article and clicked on his website link.

Way to go Matt!! Keep dancing!!