Sleeping

Do shrunken heads snore? Sleepovers at museums & attractions

If you’re curious about what happens in museums, zoos, aquariums and offbeat attractions after hours you’re in luck.  For a slide show on Bing Travel – Critter Campouts – I found plenty of places where you can camp with critters, sleep with fishes and dream with dinosaurs.

(Courtesy Georgia Aquarium)

Since then, I’ve found even more. For example, it turns out you and your friends can spend the night at the Titan Missle Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona.

(Courtesy Arizona Aerospace Foundation)

For the Bing Critter Campouts show, I was able to squeeze in 11 sleepover sites.  Some of them are just for kids. A few set aside a few nights for adults-only overnights. But most are open to families, making them an unusual alternative to at least one night in a hotel during a vacation.

Here are just two of my favorites:

Do shrunken heads snore? Do two-headed taxidermy cows moo in their sleep?

Brave souls can find out during a night inside Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Extreme Sleepover at the Times Square Odditorium in New York or at the Bedtime with the Bizarre overnights at Ripley’s outlets in Williamsburg, VA, Gatlinburg, TN, Grand Prairie, TX and several other locations. Make it to morning and you’ll get to take home a “Survivor” certificate.

And on June 30th, after the San Francisco Giants play the LA Dodgers at AT&T Park, 400 fans will get to race into the outfield to pitch tents for the 8th annual San Francisco Giants Slumber Party.

Evening activities include baseball, of course, as well as movies, peanuts, popcorn and pizza, games, goody bags, photos on the field and a chance to get autographs from former baseball stars.

For more surprising sleepovers, see my Critter Campouts slide show on Bing Travel.

Flushing out the truth about travel legends

From getting stuck-by-suction on an airplane toilet seat to discovering that your credit card number is stored on your hotel key car or that the strange smell in a motel room is a dead body entombed under your box spring, there are some strange and spooky stories circulating in the world of travel.

Are they true? Some are.  But which ones?

In Travel legends: Separating fact from fiction, my column on msnbc.com this week, experts help flush out the truth.

For example:

Is it possible to get stuck to the seat of an airline toilet if you flush while seated?

This one has been swirling around for years, fueled by a widely distributed “news” story involving an SAS incident that turned out to be a hoax.

Regardless, we asked Paul DeYoung, a physics professor who runs the online “Ask a Physicist” column at Hope College in Holland, Mich., if it could happen. “While an airplane toilet really does use vacuum to suck the material out,” he doesn’t believe that anyone’s bottom would make a perfect seal and “if there is any gap at all, you don’t get stuck.”

But it’s possible. “Technically, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility,” said Boeing Commercial Airplanes spokesperson Tom Brabant. “It has happened in rare cases.”

Bottom line: DeYoung and Brabant encourage travelers to play it safe by making sure to stand up before flushing the toilet in an airplane lavatory. In fact, when Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 jets start flying, flushing while standing will be your only option: lavatories on these planes have touchless flush mechanisms that automatically put down the lid before flushing the toilet.

TOO MANY BEDMATES

What they say:

Guests staying in foul-smelling hotel rooms have discovered dead bodies underneath the bed or hidden inside the bed frame.

The truth?

Sadly, it’s true. In March, police in Memphis, Tenn., found the body of a woman missing for two months stuffed inside a motel bed frame. The woman had stayed in the room when she was alive, but it was cleaned and rented out several times after her disappearance.

Snopes.com, the go-to site for getting the skinny on “urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” has long list of documented incidents like this reaching back to the 1980s.

Want to find out the truth about personal information stored on hotel room keys and other travel legends going around?  Read the full column – Travel legends: Separating fact from fiction – on msnbc.com.

And if you’re curious about the veracity of other travel legends, send them along; we’ll ask the experts for advice and let you know.

Tidbits for travelers: YVR’s Olympic rings & Air New Zealand’s Skycouches

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics kick off in just a few weeks and Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is getting ready to welcome more than 230,000 athletes and Olympics-bound visitors. Actually, the airport has been sprucing up for quite a while. In addition to its swanky new Observation Gallery, the airport has had these giant Olympic rings on site since last spring.

The installation is almost 46 feet tall, weighs more than 9,000 pounds and has 20,385 individual LED lights. Here’s a video that shows the installation process and some of the colored-patterns that can light up the sky.

In other shiny news, the folks at Air New Zealand unveiled their “Skycouch” today. It’s a specially designed row of three seats that can transform into a flat space suitable for stretching out and sleeping.  That is of course, if you’re not too tall, you don’t mind snuggling up with your seatmate, and you have purchased the entire row.  (The airline says it will sell you third seat at a discount if you’ve purchased the other two).

(Photo courtesy Air New Zealand)

Twenty-two sets of Skycouch seats will be available on Air New Zealand’s new Boeing 777-300 ER planes, which will arrive in November.

And since this is the airline that sponsored a recent Matchmaking flight and created an adorable “nearly naked” commercial and safety video, I fully expect the airline to offer a program to find travelers the perfect snuggle-mate for these flights.

Otherwise- why bother?

Along with the Skycouch and other new amenities, the airline also introduced upgrades for the Premium Economy cabin, including the cool-looking “Spaceseats” you can see in the airline’s promo video.

So what do you think? “Groundbreaking” or just really darn cool?

Greetings from Changi Airport: butterflies and free coffee

I had loads of fun touring Singapore’s Changi Airport today and wanted to share a few photos of the some of the fun, unusual, and very useful amenities this airport offers.

In addition to free wireless Internet access and more than 500 free Internet terminals, Changi Airport has five lovely and restful gardens, including a cactus garden, a fern garden, a sunflower garden, an orchid garden and, my favorite, a butterfly garden:

Changi butterflies

There are napping areas throughout the airport, including some lounge chairs that include alarm clocks (!)  and I found these ladies enjoying some of the airport’s complimentary foot and leg massage machines.

Changi leg massage

And, in case you’re not quite awake, I guess, this giant coffee cup is around to remind travelers that on Monday mornings through mid-February, there’s free coffee for everyone.

Changi - free coffee

Stuck at Heathrow Airport? Check in and chill out.

A rare working week in London is bracketed by two very different, but equally impressive at/in Heathrow Airport hotel stays.

6 AM arrival: after a long, sleepless flight from the US west coast beside a fidgety, too-tall seatmate, I can’t face heading to town and trying to stay awake until hotel check-in time. Instead I visit the short-stay YOTEL in Terminal 4, where compact and very cozy, ship-cabin-inspired rooms offer just the essentials: bed, TV, Wi-Fi, and bathroom.  Four hours later I’m refreshed and ready for the Tube-trek into town.  Not for the claustrophobic, but a great option for folks with very early arrivals or departures.

yotel

6 AM departure: With such an early morning flight, its just makes sense to stay at – or in – the airport.  In the past I’ve snagged an acceptable rate at the Heathrow London Hilton Airport Hotel, attached to Terminal 4, but this time I’m snuggled in for a short night at the new, ultra-swank Sofitel London Heathrow, attached to the new Terminal 5.

Rooms offer pillow menus and many public areas have themes:  for example the lobby is “Antarctica,” with a cool ice-block-inspired fountain, and there’s a huge, peaceful indoor Zen Garden.

sofitel-spa

There are multiple restaurants, several bars and a fitness room, but it’s the spa that offers a hidden treat for folks stuck – or just worn out – at the airport.  For about the same price as four hours at the YOTEL, travelers can hang out in the Sofitel’s Hydro Suite, which has a shower, steam room, sauna, giant spa tub, and some very inviting-looking lounge chairs.  If you’re nice, they might even let you stretch out in the official relaxation room as well.