Whoa, tiger. Take those skates off. Put those brakes on.
Slow down!
Whistle-stop tours don’t get you anywhere but worn out and ticked off. There’s something to be said for radically simplifying your itinerary. Base yourself in just one or two places – hang out, find a favourite place to buy fruit and have coffee, get to know the locals, live a little.
The movement is growing – more and more people are seeing the sense of getting off the carousel, listening to the senses again, savouring, taking time. Find a rental instead of a hotel, get off planes and cut down your carbon footprint, or just take a good, long quaff of the roses.
What’s your travelling speed?

Some pets are so worldly they have their own pet passport. Others are lucky to just get a ride around town on the back of their owner’s bike. Here Lonely Planet dog-lovers give us the low down on taking your canine companion for a ride:

• Convert a little kid tote into a doggy tote
• Dog bike trailers
• A milk crate with a wire cage over the top, sitting on a small trailer thingy
• Milk crate + chicken wire + broom handle + skateboard = pet transport system
• Get a sturdy back basket and a car harness from the pet shop. Attach the ’seatbelt’ bit to the bottom of the bike basket. Put a blanket down and strap her in – it works really well because the harness means they can sit/stand up but can’t move far enough to get over the edge of the basket.

Got any other ways to get around town with the pooch?

In this age of food snobbery, airline food is looked down upon as the toothless, penniless guttersnipe of the gourmet world. Many travellers abhor it, although there are a number (me included) who actually dig the stuff – the anticipation, the surprise/shock/horror, the little containers, the comedy bread bun that is impossible to bite. I had my first crab stick on a flight to Hawaii as a fourteen-year-old and it felt like the height of glamour.

If you have an in-flight food fascination, airlinemeals.net covers all bases, even taking you behind the scenes of airline catering or showing you what the crew eats. Travellers the world over send in photos of their meals. Get depressed by a miserly vegan breakfast! Long for the campy delights TWA were serving up in the 50s! Mourn the loss of a post-dinner Baileys on Swiss Air!

So what’s been your worst in-flight meal?

If you’re planning a trip to New York and have a desire to uncover the city’s best street art or are off to Berlin to shop for spring, check out Gridskipper, an award-winning travel blog that combs the web for the latest happenings in the coolest cities around the globe. The self-confessed urban fanatics behind the venture publish daily posts covering a vast range of themes under the broad umbrella of ‘urban lifestyle’.

Some great recent posts include: indie pop/rock summer concerts in Paris, an overview of London’s best design shops and a guide to drinking in Berlin’s Friedrichshain.

It’s by far and away one of my favourite travel blogs. What’s yours?

Is there any bigger pain in the arse than flying long haul on your own and getting the crummy middle seat? The Jan Brady of plane seats. There’s no window to lean against, no aisle to stretch your legs into – you’re forced to sit upright like a goody two-shoes at the front of the class. So, what are the tricks to getting a good seat? First up, you can look at SeatGuru, which has a layout of planes, rates the seating and tells you which ones have power-port access or immovable arm rests. Doing the early internet check-in can also help you snag the seat you want (window seat, near the exit, close to the john). Of course, none of this will guarantee you don’t get sat in front of the hyperactive two-year-old who kicks your seat during an entire movie – the day you can check that box will be a day for aviation progress indeed.

What’s your preferred spot on a plane?

I still hanker for the Hungarian version of the Magnum ice cream that had sour cherry folded through the vanilla, and the guys at Gridskipper have recently been rhapsodising about the classic hot fudge sundae at LA’s Twohey’s Restaurant. An old friend who travelled in Poland during the late eighties reckoned there was nothing to top their luscious, lavish cones, although I’d back the creamy gianduia I had in a quiet, sunny backstreet of Venice to give them a run for their money.

What makes great ice cream great? Is it fudge-covered peanut butter-filled pretzels in vanilla malt ice cream rippled with fudge and peanut butter US-style abandon or the subtle, one-note pleasure of a bitter lemon gelato? And where’s the best ice cream you’ve ever had?

So, your big trip is finally here. Yay! Your passport’s in order, you’ve managed to reduce your vital hand-luggage necessities to 100ml of liquid in a plastic bag, and your credit card’s topped up and ready to bolster a foreign economy – it’s lift-off time. Now you just have to endure that hellishly long flight to the other side of the world.

If, like many travellers, you can’t sleep on planes no matter how many pills you pop, you have a real issue. Who wants to touch down looking and feeling like an extra from Night of the Living Dead? Well, sorry – can’t help you there, but look on the bright side: this is your chance to catch up on all that long-overdue reading you never get time for in the hubbub of your daily existence. So ditch that predictable in-flight entertainment, keep your eyedrops close, and get booked!

Which raises the question: what’s your preferred reading matter on a long-haul flight? Do you like to study up on your phrasebook, or get under your destination’s skin with a novel that’s set there? Does light-weight, easy-to-read fluff make the hours fly faster than a dense literary masterpiece? And do people really read those airport blockbusters?

My scientifically unproven theory is that the compressed cabin atmosphere and enforced upright position make it difficult to concentrate on anything too challenging. A brief survey among friends and colleagues seems to back this up, revealing long-haul reading choices ranging from celebrity biographies to police procedurals, Marie Claire magazine to, ahem, The Toyboy Diaries.

Not a War & Peace in sight.

At home I’m pretty organised, but when I’m travelling it’s like I become some bizarro dimwit version of myself who has had half her brain sucked out at 30,000 feet and I seem incapable of doing the most basic things like getting out of a cab with all my belongings.

So if you do ditz out and lose your camera while you’re travelling, check out this website dedicated to reuniting found cameras and orphan photos with their rightful (if slightly embarrassed because they post some of the pictures) owners. And if you find a camera, you can email in a couple of shots off the memory card to post.

There’s even been a hilarious internet furore associated with a lost camera being found and some kid with diabetes getting attached to it and the kid’s parents refusing to give it back. Smellin’ kinda hoaxy?

P.S Charlie’s blog has got a good tip about adding a text file to your memory card with your contact deets on it so it can be returned to you if you lose it.

The Chinese government’s recent crackdown on violent protests in Tibet has had global effects. In India, ex-politicians are calling for a boycott on all Chinese goods, while Reporters Without Borders is demanding that every nation shun the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Meanwhile, Beijing has criticised the efforts of the Dalai Lama to quell the anti-China actions.

Will these developments affect your travel considerations? Are you considering – or reconsidering – a trip to the Summer Olympics or Tibet? More philosophically, should politics be a factor in deciding what parts of the world you want to visit?