Written by Rosalie Scott

The kids are heading back to school, the weather is still warm and the sun is still shining — making New York City in September an ideal destination. Check out a ball game at Yankee Stadium, have dinner in Little Italy during the San Gennaro Festival, or grab a water bottle and explore the city with one of the many walking tours available.

New York Yankees & Mets Baseball Games

Sports fans visiting the city in September should take themselves out to a Yankee or Mets game, particularly because both teams have moved into brand new state of the art stadiums. Baseball aficionados wanting to delve into the rich history of the game will enjoy the behind the scenes tours available at Yankee Stadium, which includes a visit to the dugout, the New York Yankees Museum, and Monument Park which showcases the greatest baseball icons including Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. New York Mets fans can take in a game at Citi Field which has replaced Shea Stadium. Yankee Stadium is located in the Bronx at East 161st Street at River Avenue (across from the original stadium) and Citi Field is situated at 126th Street and Roosevelt in Queens. For game schedules and information on how to buy tickets, visit the Yankees and Mets official sites.

San Gennaro Festival, The Feast of San Gennaro

With its vibrant parades, delicious food and the renowned cannoli eating competition, this event draws more than a million people from around the world to the streets of Lower Manhattan’s Little Italy every September. Mulberry Street is closed for this colourful festival, which begins the second Thursday of September and celebrates San Gennaro, the Patron Saint of Naples. The event has a long running history, having first been celebrated in 1926 by immigrants from Naples. A mass is held at Most Precious Blood Church on Mulberry Street, which houses the shrine of San Gennaro, and then a religious procession carries his statue through the streets of Little Italy. The festival runs along Mulberry Street between Canal and Houston Streets. A performance stage hosts live entertainment and street vendors offers delicious delicacies at every turn. Visit their official website for a festival map, event schedule and a list of recommended Little Italy restaurants and cafes.

Walking Tours of New York City

The best way to truly experience the sights and sounds of New York City is to simply walk its streets. September is an excellent month to sign up for a walking tour since it’s still quite sunny and warm, but typically less humid than July and August. Guided walking tours are a particularly good way to view Ground Zero, the memorial grounds for those who died in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The Ground Zero/Lower Manhattan walking tour offered by New York City Vacation Packages takes you to the site of the former World Trade Center as well as the FDNY 9 11 Memorial Wall with a licensed tour guide.

Walking tours are great activities for travellers wanting to learn more about neighbourhoods like the famous East Village or the Lower East side but don’t know where to start. New York City neighbourhoods are packed with history that a guide can provide as you stroll through the streets and take in the sights. Some walking tours include Alphabet City, Five Points/Chinatown and even the Gangsters, Murderers and Weirdos walking tour which covers the escapades of characters like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel.

NewYorkJourney.com will give you a comprehensive look at several hotels, attractions, tours and shops in the Big Apple. Get the information you need to know before you travel and make sure you get to see and stay at the best of the best in New York City.

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Sunset in Orlando.

There are many reasons to head to Orlando for the vacation of your dreams. With an amazing array of entertainment options and exciting attractions, not to mention near-perfect weather, Orlando is fun for travelers from all walks of life. The city is a destination in its own right, offering much more than just theme parks – although Disneyland is certainly worth visiting.

With many hotel options to choose from and a very wide range of stylish Florida villas, it’s hard to go wrong in Orlando. Pick one of the stunning options with a sparkling pool and make your spa reservations ahead of time, then get ready to enjoy one of America’s premier destinations.

Once you arrive, go on a private, guided airboat ride through the Everglades, where you’ll see wildlife galore, including alligators, crocodiles, river otters, birds, fish and more.

For evening entertainment, head to one of many dinner theaters where you can see a puzzling mystery solved, or watch a Broadway-style play, all while eating a delicious, multicourse meal.

The next day, get a bird’s eye view of Orlando from a hot air balloon. Rides are offered throughout the day; one option is taking an illuminating trip at sunrise or sunset. Some of these magnificent rides even include a champagne toast or meal, miles off the ground. After heading back down to earth, visit the many art galleries located, or enjoy a leisurely lunch at one of several outdoor cafes.

A sea lion at Sea World.

A hidden gem in the city is Discovery Cove, a park that is truly a holiday destination. Swim with dolphins, unwind while floating or snorkeling on the gorgeous tropical river, and relax all day long in this extremely luxurious location.

Discovery Cove packages can include admission to Aquatica, a Sea World water park, which is another fun and unique destination. The park has state-of-the-art rides, many different kinds of animals and private cabanas, each featuring lavish furniture and premium locations. If you’re getting hungry, head to the Banana Beach Cookout, which features a variety of delectable grilled foods.

Make time to visit Orlando’s museums during your vacation, as well. From sculpture gardens to the Museum of Arts and Sciences, there is something for every interest in this city. The Orlando Museum of Art is especially well-known for having an active events schedule and amazing collections, which include works by John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe and Dennis Oppenheim.

Orlando is full of sites to explore and fun waiting to happen, and if you’re planning a holiday vacation, there is no better option than Florida holidays.

This is a sponsored post.

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Paul V. Stutzman along the Appalachian Trail.

I’ve always wanted to see what lies over the next hill or around the next bend in the road. Traveling is an adventure, anticipating those surprises that wait ahead, those serendipitous meetings or discoveries that you never imagined. I knew hiking the Appalachian Trail would be an adventure. I’d read many accounts by thru-hikers (folks who hike the entire 2,174 miles in one season) of how the hike had changed them. But I never imagined how dramatically it would change my own life. I’ll back up just a bit to tell you that I was running pretty hard in the same rat race that many people run. My wife Mary and I had a plan to eliminate our debt and retire early and do wonderful things together.

Then Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer, and when she died in 2006, all my plans changed. Well, I guess that in reality, after she was gone, I really had no plan. Life as I had known it had been dismantled. I drifted through a year of trying to adjust to life without my wife, but I knew that only something drastic would kick me back into living once again.

I’d been a hiker for many years; the beauty of nature always had a soothing and healing effect on me. One of my dreams had been to hike the Appalachian Trail, and I decided this was the time to follow that dream. I left a good job, strapped on a backpack, and headed for the starting point on Springer Mountain in Georgia. The adventure lured me. I wanted to see what was beyond the next mountain, what waited on the path tomorrow. I admit, before I started I did wonder if I might get bored just walking every day through wilderness and over mountains. Really, what excitement could there possibly be just taking a walk in the woods, all day, every day?

My hike through fourteen states took four and a half months, two pairs of shoes, and forty pounds. I walked through snow and ice and heat and storms; suffered lack of sleep, injury, and loneliness; met bears and kind people and God; and, at the top of Mt. Katahdin in Maine, realized that my hike had not put my life back together as I had hoped. Instead, I had found a new life. In spite of the fact that I had read dozens of books on hiking the AT, I never imagined both the difficulty and the joy of this journey. There were surprises and discoveries almost every day, but the biggest surprise was how this hike changed my life.

If you’ve ever dreamed of hiking the Appalachian Trail—even just a small section of it—then do it! You’ll find your place in a family—the community of hikers and hostel owners and all those who welcome and aid hikers along the AT. You’ll find that there is still much kindness in our country, the close communion with nature will make you more aware of the beauty around us, and you will undoubtedly leave the Trail a different person.

Paul V. Stutzman left a restaurant management career to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail in 2008, after losing his wife to breast cancer. He tells the story of his hike and his changed life in his new book, Hiking Through: Finding Peace and Freedom on the Appalachian Trail.  See more photos from his hike on his website, http://www.hikingthrough.com/.

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Miami Skyline � Juan Vasquez

The photographer shot�this�on�a drive back from Miami Beach.

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On the way home © Juan Vasquez

Driving home, somewhere in the US.

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Two Jack Lake © Mathew Beeton

Two Jack Lake in Banff National Park.

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The cover shows Pulpit Rock in Utah's Echo Canyon, in a photochrom by William Henry Jackson.

The strong economy by the end of the 19^th century, when North America was fully settled, led to affordable popular tourism. Not only wealthy people had the means to travel. Also the less well-off set out to discover the continent — via canal barge, rail, steamboat, automobile, and even horseback.

Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America by Anthony Shugaar, Catherine Donzel and Marc Valter depicts these extraordinary trans-continental journeys and offers a panorama of the North American continent. Excellently researched, the book records a bygone era of travel with fascinating illustrations and engaging prose, as in the introductory chapter “Transcontinental”. The following sections — “Eastern Seaboard”, “Midwest and the Mississippi”, “Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the Southwest”, “Pacific Coast” and “Canada and Alaska” — are accompanied by full-page maps (five in total).

I asked myself, how can I make Coast to Coast justice? Rather than writing a review in the traditional sense, I would like to share my favorite quotations from the distinctive personalities and travelers who so vividly described the places featured in the book.

Paul Morand on New York, 1930:

Unlike London and Paris, New York does not possess a number of good old hotels. The old Fifth Avenue Hotel, for instance was replaced by the Waldorf, which was in turn dethroned by the Plaza and the Ritz… About the middle of the nineteenth century, New York replaced its family boarding houses with the Astor House, and then in 1856 came the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a place of gas-lit luxury, boasting its six floors of white marble and the first elevators; there followed the Commodore, the Brevoort, and finally the Waldorf-Astoria, the opening of which made no less of a sensation that than of the Grand Hôtel in Paris…

The Plaza Hotel, seen from the Grand Army.

F. Scott Fitzgerald on New York, 1925:

(I)f the night was mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives…

Herbert Russell on Atlantic City, 1947:

Just what people do in Atlantic City is a mystery to anyone who comes here to observe. Some undoubtedly come to rest and enjoy the wide beach and the Boardwalk and the sunshine, and to sleep to the sound of surf. Visitors are old and middle-aged and young. To watch their mass comings and goings is like watching a swarm of bees, or rather ants, for they are perpetually restless, and they are everywhere.

Morrie Ryskind on Palm Beach, 1929:

Florida, folks! Sunshine, sunshine! Perpetual sunshine all the year around! Let’s get the auction started before we get a tornado.

Girl on the beach.

Baron de Hübner on Chicago, 1871:

I find myself in a great avenue on the banks of the lake, with a row of magnificent buildings on the other side. This is the celebrated Michigan Avenue, the quarter of the plutocracy of Chicago. In these splendid mansions, all of wood, but plastered over, and built in every imaginable style, Italian, Classic, Gothic, Roman, or Elizabethan, each and all surrounded by pretty gardens bright with flowers, liv the families and men who, in a few years, have realized millions…

Charles Dickens on Cincinnati, 1842:

I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and foot-ways of bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance.

Kate Chopin on St. Louis, 1980:

After a day of close and intense September heat, it had rained during the night. And now the morning had followed chill and crisp, yet with possibilities of a genial sunshine breaking through the mist that had risen at dawn from the great sluggish river and spread itself through the mazes of the city…

William Henry Jackson on Yellowstone National Park, 1871:

We were to enter the Yellowstone from the North, then the easiest route. On the way through upper Utah and across Idaho I took a few pictures. Up in Montana I made a few more picture… From Virginia City and its tired-looking Chinamen patiently reworking old gravel we moved over through Fort Ellis and established our base camp at Botelers’ Ranch on the Yellowstone River…

George Bird Grinnell on Glacier National Park, 1901:

Far away in northwestern Montana, hidden from view by clustering mountain-peaks, lies an unmapped corner — the Crown of the Continent. The water from the crusted snowdrift which caps the peak of a lofty mountain there trickles into tiny rills, which hurry along north, south, east, and west, and growing to rivers, at last pour their currents into three seas.

Olympe Audouard on Colorado Springs, 1869:

Colorado has its summer resort for “la high-life”. It is a spa high in the Rocky Mountains, near a hot sulfur spring. As you arrive in these desolate landscapes, having traveled through grim and barren country, you are astonished at the sight of a darling little house, decorated and equipped with a degree of — dare I say it? – luxe.

Robert Sterling Yard on Zion National Park, 1919:

The valleys bloom. Pomegranates, figs, peaches, apricots, melons, walnuts, and almonds reach a rare perfection. Cotton, which Brigham Young started here as an experiment in 1861, is still grown. Lusty cottonwood-trees line the banks of the little rivers. Cedars dot the valleys and cover thickly the lower hills. And everywhere, on every side, the cliffs close in.

Anne O’Hare McCormick on Reno, 1931:

You soon discover that Reno is Reno, wonderfully and singularly itself… It is a throw-back to the hard, tough, roomy epoch of the gold rush and the mining camp. Its free and easy manners belong to its tradition. Gambling is in its blood.

Jack Kerouac on San Francisco, 1950s:

Then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances… I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air — air you can kiss — and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again, up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across.

Annette Fitch-Brewer on Seattle, 1913:

There are so many fine trips to be taken around Seattle: both by land and by water. Puget Sound, “the inland sea,” with its islands, its inlets, and its canals and bays. I don’t wonder the Scandinavians flock to this country by the thousands for it must make them think of their own country.

Mrs Arthur Spragge on Yoho National Park, 1887:

About half way down the hill a beautiful valley opens out, formed by the north fork of the Kicking Horse River; blue woords recede into purple forests, and these again swell into an amphitheatre of lofty mountains, whose peaks had caught and held the first rays of sunlight, and were glowing in rainbow lines, while all above was mist and shadow.

Arthur Granville Bradley on Vancouver, 1905:

The densely-wooded mountains of the coast range, snow-capped by November and often earlier, rise into the sky, while the leafy slopes and promontories of their foothills relfect their gorgeous colouring in the narrow waters of the fiord… And as one runs slowly into Vancouver and sees the busy city covering the slopes beside the water, the big ships and liners lying off it in the most beautiful harbour in the world, one tries to realise that twenty years ago this whole scene was an obscure wilderness of wood and water.

Other destinations include New Hampshire, Lake George, Niagara Falls, Miami, New Orleans, South Dakota, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, Portland, Los Angeles, and Quebec. You will also find quotations by the New York Times, Franz Kafka, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Jack London.

Travel related ephemera such as photochroms, vintage photographs, posters, travel brochures, inserts of facsimile guidebooks, menus and vintage post-cards with barely recognizable messages follow the quotes from every destination. All in all, the book includes more than 400 color and black-and-white illustrations.

Aerial view of the Banff Springs Hotel.

I particularly enjoyed a photo of turn-of-the-century picknickers at Lake George, Adirondacks, an ad for the new Boulevard Room in the Jefferson Hotel, St. Louis, from the mid-1950s, a picture of Aspen’s The Hotel Jerome, photochromes of Cape Horn on the Columbia River and Oregon’s Mt. Hood, a full-page spread of the Golden Gate Bridge with the San Francisco skyline in the distance, and an aerial view of the Banff Springs Hotel.

Santa Fe railroad conductor amusing his young charges, bound for the Grand Canyon, 1909.

Richard Moe, President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, likens the 320-paged hardcover book to a cherished family photo album. Coast to Coast certainly gives a new meaning to the joyful pursuit of imaginary travel. And when David Owen, in his review, states “I want to travel on those trains, camp in those tents, and spend weeks, if not months, in those hotels. I want to order the crab croquettes at the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1880, and I want to cross Lake Michigan on the S.S. Christopher Columbus in 1893”, I wholeheartedly agree.

More information:

Read sample pages of Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America at issuu.com and find the book profile at The Vendome Press.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of “Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America” by The Vendome Press.

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Baywatch House © Andres Virviescas

 A lifeguard house somewhere along the US coast.

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Brooklyn Bridge © Anja Mutić

The beauty of the New York skyline.

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On the visual travel guide and tour review site Ruba, I recently created a short guide titled ‘Best beaches in New York City, New York’. Ok, so I haven’t seen Long Beach or the Hamptons… yet, but these beaches do make for great day trips from Manhattan.

“If you don’t mind sharing the beach with kids, loud familes, improvised soccer games and portable CD players, you’ll probably like Coney Island as much as I did.”

To read the full guide, just click on the link below.

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At HI SHREDABILITY | North from New York | VBS.TV I came across a motorcycle/surf road trip starting in New York.

The wisest words from the video: “You almost wanna get lost… ’cause getting lost is part of the fun.” Very true. Some of my best travel memories consist of the number of times when I’ve gotten lost.

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Flying Over the Rooftops © Benjamin Earwicker

A new perspective of Mexico City. See more of Benjamin Earwicker’s work on Garrison Photo.

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The tour includes an introduction, Grant Avenue, Historic Portsmouth Square, Eating Throughout Chinatown, Chinatown Alleyways and Places of Worship. I learned about the perfect place to start exploring Chinatown, where to find tea houses and the most fascinating music store, the appeal of quiet, shaded alleyways,  that San Francisco is the widely accepted home of the fortune cookie, and much more.

From the description:

The 24 square blocks of San Francisco’s dynamic Chinatown teem with activity 365 days a year. Beloved Grant Avenue, with its red lanterns and bright facades, brims with woks, kites, and kitschy souvenirs galore. Locals shop at Stockton Street’s bargain-priced open-air markets, or relax and gossip at monument-filled Portsmouth Square. Enticing smells waft through the air: dim sum dumplings, mooncakes from traditional bakeries, and fortune cookies from a back-alley “factory.” Vying for space on the packed thoroughfares and quiet alleyways are old-fashioned apothecaries, incense-filled temples, historic churches, one-seat barbershops, family benevolent associations, serene teahouses, fresh fruit stalls, and worlds more.

The photo + audio concept works surprisingly well and I look forward to seeing more tours by Visual Travel Tours — preferably on location!

<em>Disclaimer: I received a  free trial version of America’s largest Chinatown: San Francisco by Visual Travel Tours. </em>

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Sunshine Friends © Diane Groves

Friends enjoying a sunset at Ala Moana Beach Park in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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