Gadling

I really like photos that don't just capture the essence of a travel destination, but the act of travel itself. Taken in Grand Central Station in New York City, nabil.s' photo gives an interesting perspective on people going about their daily voyages. Makes you wonder where they are all coming from and where they are headed.

Have your own photo that captures the essence of travel? Submit it here and be considered for Photo of the Day.

You might have thought that London was already expensive, but next year you can look forward to budgeting even more money when visiting the English capital. Mayor Boris Johnson plans to raise London Underground train and bus fares next year by an average of 6% above the inflation rate.

What exactly does that work out to? The cheapest London Underground fare which you can get by using an Oyster prepaid card will rise to £1.60, or $2.85, in January from the current price of £1.50. That doesn't seem like a huge change, but for people -- and even tourists -- who use public transportation on a frequent basis, it certainly feels like it.

The current London Underground cash fare for a ticket -- £4 -- is reported to be the highest in the world for a subway system; apparently the city really wants to keep its ranking.

I came to a depressing conclusion the other night: summer is almost over and that means that soon we will return to extended dark evening hours. I do love long summer nights when the sun sets late, but this photo was a good reminder of just how great evening shots can be. Big Ben stands almost secondary to the car lights that whiz by in this wonderful shot by fiznatty.

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About a month ago I wrote about the flight attendant that showed up too work a little too intoxicated for her own good. The flight which she was scheduled to work on August 3 was headed from Aberdeen, Scotland to Faro, Portugal but was delayed for almost seven hours while a replacement was found for the tipsy flight attendant.

Turns out she was more than just tipsy; she was six times over the legal limit. So this Tuesday the flight attendant was forced to resign from her job as well as tacking on a £400 fine. Thanks to the hearing we have learned some of the juicy details of the incident. According to the Press and Journal the woman had arrived in Aberdeen in the early hours of Saturday August 2. She proceeded to go out with the rest of the crew and went to bed somewhere around breakfast time. Later that day she went into town with four colleagues. Two cocktails and two shared bottles of wine later, the woman said she went to bed around 11pm.

Doesn't sound all too crazy, but somehow the following morning something was just a little off... to the tune of six times over the legal limit for her job and three times over the legal limit for driving a car. So she was removed from the plane by police officers... But who knows, maybe a tipsy flight attendant would have made the flight just a little more entertaining... except for the fact they they are there for our safety! Don't drink and fly.

First it was loose change in your pockets, then it was jewelry, and then it was shoes. For Jet Blue passenger Nancy Kates, it seems like bras might be the next thing to go in the airport security line. A big-busted woman, Kates was wearing a large underwire bra as she went through the security check at Oakland International Airport but when it set off the metal detector she was pulled aside by a TSA agent.

Kates accuses the agent of getting a little too personal. "The woman touched my breast. I said, 'You can't do that,' " Kates said. "She said, 'We have to pat you down.' I said, 'You can't treat me as a criminal for wearing a bra.' "

Refusing to be fondled, Kates asked to see a supervisor and then the supervisor's surpervisor. Kates reminded the TSA agents that the Constitution bars unreasonable searches and that "scrutinizing a woman's brassiere is surely unreasonable." She was offered a private room to have her pat-down, but Kates refused. Instead she asked if she could simply remove her bra, to which the TSA agent agreed. This isn't the first breast related TSA incident, but the whole escapade took 40 minutes and caused Kates to miss her flight. Jet Blue was nice enough to put her on another one.

Being a woman, I myself have had the bra pat-down several times, and I'm sure there are other fellow females on the Gadling team that have gone through the same experience. Normally such pat-downs are off limits to fingers; TSA agents only use the side of their hands. But all the same it's still a little unnerving. As Kates said, "If I was carrying nail clippers and forgot about them, I wouldn't have gotten so upset. But here I was just wearing my underwear."

What are your thoughts? Is it humiliating to get a pat-down to make sure the underwire in your bra is what's setting off the metal detector?

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Nothing like a cute monkey running around to spice up your wait at the train station. This monkey in specific wreaked havoc in a Tokyo train station when he evaded 100 police officers trying to catch him with nets... police say he was either a wild animal from the mountains or a stray pet. Either way I am sure the train travelers passing through were amused.

If this photo doesn't scream summer, I don't know what does. The candy-colored shot was taken by PDPhotography at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, Canada. A great snapshot of the season!

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Some people seek out golf courses and gated communities for their retirement; others choose the ocean. That's exactly what Beatrice Muller, an 89 year-old widow from New Jersey, did. She's spent the last nine years living the life on the high seas, cruising around the world on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2. Muller finds this much more pleasant than any old retirement home and she plans to keep up her worldly accommodations, except for one problem: the 41 year old QE2 is retiring in November. What is an old, sea-loving woman to do? Find another ship of course.

Muller says despite her preferred ship's retirement, she refuses to return to land. "What would I want to do that for?" she was quoted asking The Times. Her cabin costs about $7,000 a month, and according to her estimates, that's about the same as a retirement home in Florida, just "far more pleasant."

Actually living on the sea isn't as strange as it sounds. Magellan offers a Residential Cruise Line, where for $4 million and up you can buy your own on-board condo. The World is another "seagoing community" popular with the financially secure crowd.

We'll just have to wait and see what Muller chooses as her next home. As for the QE2, it's headed to Dubai to become a floating hotel.

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The good folks at Grist put together their own list of 15 green cities. Although their thought was probably to showcase the green efforts made by local governments and locals to make the cities more environmentally friendly, in reading it I realized it was a great list of places to chose your next eco-vacation.

If you're looking to take public transportation, play in parks and learn more about sustainability as part of your next vacation, here are the 15 cities that made the list:

1. Reykjavik, Iceland
2. Portland, OR, U.S.
3. Curitiba, Brazil
4. Malmö, Sweden
5. Vancouver, Canada
6. Copenhagen, Denmark
7. London, England
8. San Francisco, CA, USA
9. Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador
10. Sydney, Australia
11. Barcelona, Spain
12. Bogotá, Colombia
13. Bangkok, Thailand
14. Kampala, Uganda
15. Austin, TX, USA

Some of the selections surprised me; Bangkok for example, but apparently it's all about the city's strategy to make things greener. Check out the full list with accompanying explanations here.

What green cities have you visited?

As of Friday, 27 different nations had won gold medals. That means 27 different national anthems have been played in honor of the winning athletes. The New York Times put together a complete list of all 27 anthems, including lyrics, history and music files so you can sing and listen to them to your heart's content.

Here are links to five of them:

China: March of the Volunteers
USA: The Star Spangled Banner
Korea Republic: The Patriotic Song
Italy: The Song of the Italians
Germany: The Song of Germany

Click here for the complete list and the music files so you can start singing away at the next medal ceremony.