That Travel Bug

I love to travel. Recently, pretty much any free time I've gotten I hit the road. This year, I've traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, Lexington, Kentucky, Massachusetts (I'm not entirely sure that counts as fun vacation travel, but I did go there), Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and all my fabulous cruising destinations. In August, Kim's family is taking me to Mexico!! Whoot. I can't wait. I want to go NOW. But enough about my travel bug.

If you have a travel big too (which I'm sure you do, because really why not?) you should check out Tripbase Alpha. This ingenious site allows you to enter what you like to do or not do on vacation. The categories include nightlife, dining, shopping, nature, and attractions. You simply use a sliding bar to indicate how important these things are to you and Tripbase spits back your top travel destinations. Once you've put this info in, you can hide popular destinations, set the dates and duration of your trip, departure city, budget, type of trip, weather, tourist season, and continents. For fun, I did a test run. I lowered the importance of nightlife, upped the food a smidge, upped the shopping a little more but less then the food, upped nature, and set attractions to the max. Tripbase then tells that 15 places match what I like: London, Boston, San Fransisco, New York, Sydney, Paris, Chicago, San Diego, Washington, Singapore, Rome, Portland, Florence, Auckland, and Beijing. If you weren't happy with these results, you can continue to tweek your sliding bar settings until you get results you're happy with. I think my favorite feature is the hide popular destinations. When I use this feature, my very typical list of major world cities turns much more interesting. Now my 15 results include places like: Kyoto, Japan; Lyon, France; Hobart, Australia; Jerusalem, Israel; Caracas, Venezuela; George Town, Malaysia; and Mumbai, India. I'd be happy to test the accuracy of these results if anyone would like to give me a free vacation. Anyone?