Watch Out -- He Knows Karate

In the Sandra Bullock film "While You Were Sleeping" -- hey, given that this film features Michael Rispoli as the hilariously innocent yet lecherous Joe Fusco, Junior, this counts as a guy movie -- Bullock's character Lucy Moderatz wants nothing more than to spend her honeymoon in Italy. She does eventually get to go, but not with the man she intended.

Explorer Lisa Dickson harks back to that wonderful 1995 film as she takes us on an Uncharted tour of Rome, Florence, and other points in Italy, showing off the romantic and Romantic splendors of these ancient cities. Makes me want to go there in a terrible way. Also, I want to visit Maude Larrabee's house in Tuscany. She does have one there, you know.

Can You Improve Old Faithful?

If you’ve got a snazzy idea to improve one of the United States’ premier tourist attractions, now’s the time to do it.

Planners at Yellowstone National Park want your help to improve the developed area around Old Faithful, the park’s most famous geyser. The developed area encompasses everything from the Old Faithful Inn to the boardwalks through the geyser complex to the acres and acres of parking lots that spread south of the geyser itself.

The park is also looking for ways to preserve the geyser area for future generations, protect wildlife habitat and more quickly respond to changing visitor and resource needs.

The comment period is open now, and closes at midnight, June 7, 2010. Comments will be accepted electronically through the National Park Service’s Planning, Environment and Public Comment website at http://parkplanning.nps,gov, by hand-delivery at the park’s headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, or by mail at the following address:

Comprehensive Planning & Design
Old Faithful Area Comprehensive Plan
P.O. Box 168
Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190

You can deliver your electronic comment using the link here. The perk service isn’t accepting comments by phone or via direct e-mail.

The park service will also host three open houses on the plan starting in just a few days:

May 17, Old Faithful Warming Hut, 6-8 pm
May 18, Yellowstone Association Headquarters, Gardiner, MT
May 19, Visitor Contact Station, West Yellowstone, MT

All open houses will take place from 6-8 pm.

The trick will be to balance what sound like good ideas with what makes for a wonderful Old Faithful experience. Some kind of stadium seating, for one, might be handy, as crowds around the geyser can be thick and seats are scarce – but then who wants to swim through a stadium to see a geyser, or have stadium seating block long-distance views? Maybe just a few levels?

And picnic areas. Old Faithful needs more of them. They’re always at a premium, so finding a spot that’s not already occupied by someone else is difficult.

I agree that parking at the geyser is ugly, not only from an acres of asphalt perspective, but simply for trying to navigate through the parking lot to get to the geyser. Better directional signs and marked pedestrian paths would be helpful, especially if those paths crossed as few roads as possible.

I’m sure you’ve got better ideas. Send them on.

Cannon Beach Bliss-Out

To think I used to be a homebody.

As a kid, we never went on vacations. Oh, the occasional trip to Salt Lake City for the day, but rarely anything beyond that. We did do the camping thing in Yellowstone National Park. We did fly to San Francisco. But that was it.

Then I got married to a globetrotter. Within a year, she dragged me to Washington, D.C. Within five years we'd visited England and France, not to forget to mention a cross-country road trip in the USA and many, many other smaller, yet still grandiose, vacations, including a cruise to Alaska.

Read here about our latest adventure: A trip to Cannon Beach, Oregon, where we stayed for days under the cloudy -- but never rainy -- Oregon sky and enjoyed playing on the beach with our kids.

Cannon Beach is a wonderful place, and not only because its famous Haystack Rock was featured in The Goonies, one of my favorite films. We visited in the off-season, which I highly recommend. The beaches weren't crowded. The hotels were less expensive. There were fewer people about, so we were able to enjoy the solitude and beauty without having anybody else's laundry flapping in our faces. Go during the off-season, before mid-June and after August ends. That's when Cannon Beach is a wonderful place.