2 Great Global Travel Blogs

// November 14th, 2007 // Travel

I am the ultimate armchair tourist, and my bookshelf consists mostly of travel guides, this is partly because I work for a travel publisher, but I always love to research a place in great detail before I travel there. I also love knowing odd tidbits about foreign places. I have recently added a new ‘Travel’ tab to my Netvibes and these two are my favourite online travel resources. A key thing for me in a travel guide- being a cartographer is the link between the editorial content and the mapping, and the quality of the maps.

Gridskipper- The Urban Travel Guide

Gridskipper is a blog about urban travel. These guys cover cities around the world, and cover them completely. In addition to telling you about the newest, coolest, and hottest hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, shops, galleries, events, and other points of interest, Gridskipper notes good deals for getting to and from your favorite city destinations. As urban fanatics in general, they also talk about architecture, urban planning, metropolitan history, maps, and almost anything else related to the urban lifestyle, and they are not scared to cover the seedier sides of most cities too. Gridskipper specialises in maps of certain top cities, currently including Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Sydney, with more to come.

Gridskipper articles usually show a few places, with a great interactive Google map showing the locations of all they places mentioned in the article. Some cool articles include:Get Jacked in the Castro, Reliving 1920′s Paris, Washington’s Cruisiest Bathrooms, and Getting Fed in the Rocks.

Moleskine City Blogs

Moleskine claims their notebook has been used by well-known artists and writers, such as Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway. In 2006 Moleskine produced a new range of City Notebooks. These notebooks are based around one major world city, and serve as a self-written guidebook to that city. The city guides include an overall map of the city, as well as large-scale maps of areas within the city (most maps are produced by Lonely Planet in Melbourne), and an index of streets. There are blank pages for notes, as well as removable sheets for exchanging messages and transparent sticky sheets to use as map overlays.

The Moleskine City Blogs are new meeting places, and open to free participation. They are connected to the City Notebooks, the first guide you write yourself. The blogs are dedicated to the city, its travellers, residents and independent and free thinking people. Each city blog features updates, curiosities, traveller experiences and links to other blogs and communities.

Moleskine City Blogs cover the cities of Barcelona, Berlin, London, Milan, New York, Paris, and Rome

Great examples of posts include A surrealist Autumn, A Haunted City, Sleeping in the sky, and London’s In-Store Eateries.