Imagine you had eccentric British relatives who lived in an enormous 18th-century London townhouse, who were veracious collectors of antiques, and who stuffed their house full of every painting, sculpture, mirror, book, armoire, clock, chest, candelabra, and exotic curio they ever obtained. The hypothetical townhouse you are imagining probably looks something like the very real Miller’s Residence. But you needn’t be a relative of the Miller’s to stay there. The Miller’s Residence is a hotel.
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Next time you fly out of Stockholm’s Arlanda International Airport, spend the night on an airplane before boarding your airplane. On the airport grounds there’s an old Boeing 747 has been converted in a hotel, the Jumbo Hostel.
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Conjure an image of what’s it is like to go on a cruise. Are you picturing buffet dinners? On-deck spinning classes? Retirees playing shuffleboard? Many cruises really are like that. But if you’re looking for a different sort of cruise scene consider traveling by cargo ship.
Cargo ship travel is the un-cruise. There’s nothing fabricated about it. Every day thousands of freighters ply the high seas. Some of them have extra state rooms and accept passengers to tag along for the ride. This is as “real” as travel gets.
Of course, cargo ship cruising is not for everyone. Cargo ships don’t have swimming pools, evening entertainment, rock climbing walls or organized mixers on Lido decks. Go on a cargo ship cruise and there might be as many as four or five other paying passengers like yourself. Or, you may be the only one. And while cargo ships often have comfortable sleeping quarters they’re unlikely to be luxurious.
To book passage on a cargo ship you can go directly through some shipping lines. But we recommend working through a travel agent that can vouch for the quality of the food and accommodations and can make sure your itinerary includes sufficient shore leave time. One of the best agents for cargo ship cruises is Intrepid Travel. Here’s a look at their five cool cargo cruise ship itineraries:
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When in Harlingen, on the Dutch coast an hour’s drive from Amsterdam, you’ll need to crane your neck upwards to spot two of the three coolest hotels in town. One of those hotels is atop an actual working crane. The other is in a lighthouse. And the town’s third cool hotel? That’s on street level—or, more accurately, water level—inside a lifeboat.
Our reviews of each . . .
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Once upon a time, fishermen off of the Greek island of Siphnos noticed a glow under the Aegean Sea. When they trolled the spot they were amazed at what their nets brought up: a statue of the Virgin Mary.
The fishermen brought the Virgin Mary icon to Chryssopigi, a small seventeenth-century monastery church on Siphnos located at the end of a spit of land jutting out into the sea. The Virgin of the Golden Spring soon came to be regarded as the protector of the island.
The Virgin’s protective powers were evidenced several years later when pirates, who regularly made life miserable for residents of islands in the Aegean, stormed the Siphnos shore chasing a group of nuns who were on their way to the Chryssopigi monastery. The nuns prayed as they ran with the pirates close behind. As the nuns reached the church containing the Virgin there was a great rumble, the neck of land connecting the church to the main island split open, and the pirates fell into the sea.
And that’s how Siphnos came to be known as The Island of Miracles.
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Here’s a restaurant theme you didn’t see coming: darkness.
The concept of purposefully eating in complete pitch-black dark originated with Jorge Spielmann, a blind clergyman from Zurich. When guests ate dinner at the Spielmann house some would wear blindfolds during their meal to show solidarity with their host and to better understand his world. What Spielmann’s sighted guests found was that the blindfolds heightened their sense of taste and smell and made their dining experience more enjoyable. That gave Spielmann the idea to open a dark restaurant, which he did in 1999.
Today you can stumble into dozens restaurants around the world where that question made famous in an American commercial in the 80s — Where’s the beef? — takes on a whole new meaning. Most dark restaurants employ blind waiters, offer a single set menu, and ban anything that could give off light (like cigarettes, cell phones and cameras) from the dinning area. All of them also have normally lit bathrooms though you’ll need to ask your waiter for help in finding it.
Here’s our illuminating look at some of the world’s dark restaurants:
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The Pavilion Hotel, near London’s Hyde Park, calls itself a Fashion Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel. That description fits some of the hotel’s clientele better than the property itself.
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