What a New York City shot! At first, I thought, where is this place? And then, "Aha!"

Taken from a distance by Damon Green, this view of people waiting by a train track is an every day New York experience that is often lost in the busy shuffle of life there.

It's great to have time to see how these three men are sitting on this bench waiting. This reminds me a bit of the Edward Hopper painting "Nighthawks." It's the voyeuristic quality perhaps.

The lines and color tones of this shot are also exquisite. Well, done.

If you have shots that capture an experience where you are, please send our way at Gadling photo pool. It may be picked as Photo of the Day.

You've thought about going to Venice. Come on, admit it. Don't deny it. Of course you immediately talked yourself out of it, considering you absolutely detest crowds and tourist traps. Yet Venice, you must admit, does look magical, like the kind of tourist trap you should see at least once in your life. But the problem is you can't stand crowds and tourist traps. And that's a problem. A very big problem.

For me, too!

When a flight attendant takes a vacation, the flight attendant will do everything possible to avoid anything that resembles a layover. Layovers equate to work. Yeah, I know, work ain't so bad when you're laying over someplace nice, but at the same time, laying over somewhere nice usually means you're at a chain hotel surrounded by chain restaurants, not too far from the airport. Of course, life could be worse, I know. But when you've been doing the layover-chain-thing for thirteen years, it doesn't matter where you are - New York, Paris, Rome - it all starts to look the same. Which is why a flight attendant looks for something different, someplace unusual, somewhere special, when it comes to a vacation - wherever that vacation may be.

The Middle East is proving to be the mad-architect's dream come true. Saudi Arabia has announced the launch of a new cultural center, and this is what it's going to look like:



Just out of this world. It will have a library, museum, theater and cinema. When a country has an unimaginable amount of money to spend, anything is possible. This project is being sponsored by Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company.

In the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait -- the money is ample, the vision is extraordinary, but the reality is hollow. I suppose, as an increasingly higher caliber of people get recruited from all over the world to execute the Middle East's vision, the reality will soon be seen.

If you are on the way to Essaouria, Morocco and you need to find a toilet, no problem. Could this sign be any more travel friendly? This shot by mce323 interests me for other reasons as well. See the man and the child in the background? Plus, there's the coffee cup painted on the wall. What's that about?

If you notice, the pink building has a crack in it. There are so many details that catch my eye. I'm also drawn in by the multiple textures. Don't you know exactly how that wall would feel if you could reach in and touch it?

If you have an image of what you've seen in your travels, send it our way at Gadling's Flickr photo pool. It might be chosen as Photo of the Day.

The post about the eight abandoned hotels reminded me of the glory days gone by hotel where I worked one summer during college. Wildmere was a wondrous expansive wooden hotel that first opened in 1887.

Perched on the top of the limestone cliffs of Lake Minnewaska in upstate New York near New Paltz, it was a regal testament to monied folk.

When it was in its prime, the hotel gleamed white from fresh paint. When I worked there, it was at the tail end of fading. As with the hotels in the abandoned hotel post at ProTraveller, as the economy shifts, keeping up with beauty is not easy.

Paint flaked. Dripping pipes in the basement created puddles one had to gingerly step through on the way to the laundry room.

Over at ProTraveler, there is a read worth noting about eight abandoned hotels in various parts of the world. They once had glory days, but didn't hold onto it for financial woes or pestilence.

These are the places that chronicle shifts of time. Hot destinations that don't stay hot or where the owners made bad decisions. You've probably come across examples of these types of places in your own travels.

"What was this place?" you might say to your traveling companions. You wonder if anyone important stayed here or what the building looked like when it was brand spanking new.

One example is this picture of the Palace Hotel in Jerusalem. I love this shot. The hotel reminds me of John Everett Millais's painting of Ophelia still clutching flowers, dead, floating face-up in a pond.

The photos are haunting, I think. Chairs with no one sitting in them, debris scattered across the floor, and an old sign that once flashed its neon. These are reminders that nothing gold can stay, but if lucky, can be resurrected into a new life.

For example, the Palace Hotel is to be reopened as a Waldorf-Astoria luxury hotel in a few years. The Diplomat Hotel in the Philippines may be turned into a museum. The folks who are going to do the project better hurry while there is still a building worth saving. It's thought to be haunted, so hopefully, the ghosts will be happy with the change.

I've seen many a digital camera die a slow and painful death while on the road. Sand that got caught in the lens mechanism. LCD screens cracked by bumper-car-joyrides. Accidental drops on unforgiving pavement. Not to mention those of us who abuse our cameras in adverse situations involving water, dust and extremes of temperature.

For anyone who's ever risked their digital to get a great shot but lost a nice camera in the process, I recommend checking out the Olympus Stylus 1030SW. According to the reviews I've found at Travel Gear Blog, as well as on CNET, the 1030W is one of the sturdiest cameras on the market. In addition to being waterproof and dustproof, the Olympus is also shockproof, crushproof and freezeproof down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

How durable is that exactly? According to specs, you can drop it from up to 6.6 feet and crush it with up to 220 pounds of pressure. While the 1030 SW can't match the optics of some of the top-of-the-line point-and-shoots out there, it does offer a solid 10.1 megapixels and the standard digital camera features like panorama stitching and image stabilization we've come to expect from most consumer point-and-shoots these days.

All you skiiers, snorkelers and adventure-travelers take note. Although there are better cameras on the market for image quality, this Olympus packs some great features into a highly durable package. Sometimes avoiding the aggravation of a ruined camera is worth that small sacrifice in functionality.

"Want to go to Italy?" The husband asked.

"Umm...I don't know...Yes. As in YES YES YES!" I exclaimed. And then I added, "But I'm not flying standby." Because I wasn't. And I was ready to stand my ground.

"Yeah, well me neither," he said, and that was that.

When The Husband and I decided to go to Italy on our vacation last month, we actually purchased our tickets, even though I can fly standby for free. Why? Because we wanted to go to Italy, remember? We actually wanted to make it to the land of wine and cheese and olives and pasta and prosciutto served with a loaf of crusty bread.

What we didn't want to do was get stuck sitting around an airport for days praying that two people wouldn't show up for their flight. Oh no, we wanted to get fat from drinking wine and eating cheese and olives and pasta and prosciutto with a loaf of crusty bread in Venice, Rome, and Positano. Not from cheeseburgers and pizza at the JFK food court. And not only did we have plans to eat our way through Italy, we also planned on getting back home when the vacation came to an end. Oh the joys of stand-by travel...

St. Maarten is the greatest location in the world for aviation spotters, and we've featured a number of those pictures here. But this one from matt.hintsa stands out for me because of the timing of the crashing waves.

I'm dying to bring my camera to that beach someday. While I've been there a number of times, I've never left the airport, so my pictures were only from this perspective.

Well done, Matt!

Are you a Flickr user who'd like to share a travel related picture or two for our consideration? Submit it to Gadling's Flickr group right now! We just might use it for our Photo of the Day!

We've reached the point where high quality digital cameras have become pretty common. It seems that every few months or so the minimum number of megapixels going into cameras goes up a notch. I saw a 12 megapixel camera in the store the other day. What does the common tourist need a 12 megapixel camera for? And why doesn't anyone seem willing to put greater than 3 megapixels in a mobile phone camera?

Many people don't think of it, but that high resolution and extra large LCD is good for more than crystal clear photographs of the sunset in Maui. You've essentially got a photo and storage database inside of your camera that you can use to store and reference all sorts of info while you're on the road. This can cut down on weight and logistics while navigating a busy street or on your own for a daytrip in a foreign city.

1. Map and guidebook page storage: Say you're heading out to Soho in London and you want to take the map from your Lonely Planet along. The London book is so huge that you don't want to carry it around and you don't want to rip a page out because you borrowed the book from your cousin Eddie, so you're buggered on bringing a map with you. But you can take a high-resolution photo of the map page then replay the photo during your travels, use the zoom tool and scroll around the map. Similarly, you can take photos of small sections of your guidebook to reference them later. Of course this only works if you have a few small articles that you want to bring with you -- if you want to bring entire neighborhoods of data, you'll want to bring the guidebook.

Photomaps also work for pictures taken on LCD screens. So if you Google map something back at the apartment and want to bring it with you, take a photo instead of tracking down a printer and wasting the paper.

2. Makeshift binoculars: Can't see a sign three blocks away? Take a high resolution picture of the sign, go back to the image and zoom way in. Even the lower (5-6MP) cameras have better resolution than the human eye.

3. Data storage: Unless you've got some hifalutin software that downloads and posts your pictures off of your camera, most interfaces work by plugging in a supplied USB cable to your computer where you can open a folder and copy over your images. If you've got a fairly large memory card, you should also have a fair amount of space left over on the rest of the chip. This space can be used like a USB flash drive where you can copy trip essentials over like MP3s or a resume or even pictures from another person's camera. You'll just have to plug the camera back in when you get to your laptop or home computer to copy the files off.