Books

Souvenir Sunday: Fantastic Cities coloring book

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Fantastic Cities cover

Here’s an activity book perfect for those lazy, hazy days of summer or those crazy days when you just need to take a break, focus on simple, creative tasks and chill out.

Fantastic Cities: A Coloring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined
– out in a few weeks from Chronicle Books – is a coloring book for adults filled with Steve McDonald’s intricate aerial views and bird’s eye perspectives of cities from around the world.

Large (12″ by 12″) detailed images inspired by places in Canada, Tokyo, Istanbul, San Francisco, Sydney and other cities around this world offer a great opportunity to get out the colored pencils, some markers, crayons or watercolors and dream about your next adventure.

Transportation revelations: how fast things go

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Did you know that a sea horse can move as quickly (or as slowly) as a Galapagos tortoise? (.2 MPH), that a hedgehog and a millipede move at about the same pace (1 MPH) and that a swift and a Hughes MD 500 Helicopter can each travel at 125 MPH?

FullSpeedAhead_swift_Hughes MD500 helicopter

I didn’t.

But thanks to a book of ‘transportation revelations’ called Full Speed Ahead!: How Fast Things Go by Cruschiform (an Abrams Books imprint), I now know.

The brightly-colored, large format book is designed for young readers, but is perfect – and perfectly educational – for transportation fact-fanciers of all ages who might be curious about how fast things go – and how fast things go compared to animals.

A peregrine falcon, for example, can go as fast a Formula 1 Racer (217 MPH) but once we get to the tornado (310 MPH), the passenger jet (620 MPH), a Blackbird spy plane (2,175 MPH), the Apollo 11 spacecraft (25,000 MPH) and a shooting star (more than 60,000 MPH), no animals can keep up.

FullSpeedAhead_passenger jet

Buy it for the kids you know. And get a copy for yourself.

Playboy: airplane reading material?

Books, ,

airberlin playboy

Magazines are one of those on-board amenities that disappeared from domestic flights in the U.S. a long time ago. But many international airlines still offer a selection of reading material that includes newspapers, business, fashion and sports magazines, especially in business class.

On a recent airberlin flight I was a bit surprised to see Playboy on the counter as one of the options and asked about that when I visited the company’s headquarters in Berlin.

My hosts were a bit surprised at my surprise but told me that the cover of the issue I saw on the plane is a special airline cover that stays the same for each issue – and that Playboy is the magazine they need to replace most often.

Monkey spotted at Reno Airport + SFO Contest

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Monkey spotted at Reno-Tahoe International Airport

RENO CURIOUS George

About 80 kids and their parents showed up at Reno-Tahoe International Airport on Wednesday for activities in celebration of International Children’s Book Day. (The holiday takes place each year around Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, which is April 2.)

Everyone listened to an airport fire captain and a police sergeant read Curious George books, learned a little about fire safety, did some dancing, visited with the airport therapy dogs and had some snacks.

Sounds like a great event for an airport!

Fly Irish from SFO contest

SFO DUBLIN

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) now has non-stop service to Dublin via Aer Lingus and is celebrating with a sweepstakes on Facebook.

The “Fly Irish from SFO!” sweepstakes asks participants to vote for one of 17 cities in the Aer Lingus network they would most like to visit. Entries will go into a random drawing and one winner will be awarded two round-trip Economy Class tickets on Aer Lingus to the destination they voted for.

Deadline for entry: April 11, 2014.

Good luck!

Souvenir Sunday at the Future of Flight Aviation Center

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cake for Boeing

It’s Women’s History Month and on Saturday, March 15, 2014, the Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour hosted an event honoring some of the women who have worked at Boeing over the years as pilots, engineers, line workers and leaders.

The day was also a celebration of the publication of a new book: Trailblazers: The Women of The Boeing Company and included a gathering of many of the women featured in the book who represent company ‘firsts.’

I’ll circle back here in a few days with some more information about some of the women featured in the book, but because this is Souvenir Sunday I wanted to share a link to the book and a snap of one of the souvenirs being sold in the Boeing store to go along with the book.

Trailblazers book

trailblazers

Travel Tidbits: sculpture at JFK; bookstore at DEN

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This new sculpture, called “Outside Time,” by Dimitar Lukanov, was recently installed in the Departure Hall of Terminal 4 at JFK International Airport in New York.

JFK SCULPTURE

Part of a three-part project, this 4600-pound steel and aluminum sculpture is 15 feet tall and 11 feet wide and is “a veritable drawing in space, a breathless, effortless, instantaneous gesture in the air [that] aspires to halt, even momentarily, the relentlessness of time,” said Lukanov.

DEN TATTERED COVER

Meanwhile, while we’re sad to learn that Powell’s City of Books will close two of the three branches it has a Portland International Airport, over at Denver International Airport, the second of four planned branches of The Tattered Cover, the iconic line of Colorado bookstores, has opened in the center of the A Concourse.

The other two Tattered Cover branches at DEN will open later this year.

Tattered Cover opens at Denver Int’l Airport

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Great news for book lovers whose travels take them through Denver International Airport:

The first of four planned branches of the iconic, independent Denver bookstore, Tattered Cover, opened this week on Concourse B.

DEN TATTERED COVER

The three other branches will open in the other concourses, and in the Jeppesen Terminal, in the first half of 2014.

Here’s a list of some author-events scheduled to take place in the store this coming week:

Saturday, Dec. 7: 9:30-10 a.m. Graeme Simsion, “The Rosie Project”

Sunday, Dec. 8: 10:30 a.m.Signed copies of Pulitzer Prize-winning historical author Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” will be available for sale.

Dec. 11, Approximately 2:30-3 p.m. Amy Tan, the bestselling author of “The Joy Luck Club,” will sign her new novel, “The Valley of Amazement.”

Souvenir Sunday: Free books at Sea-Tac Airport

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Sunday is Souvenir Sunday here at StuckatTheAirport.com, a day to take a look at some of the fun, inexpensive and local things you can buy while you’re waiting for your flight.

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Saturday we spotted a few of these kiosks, sponsored by the King County Library System, and they were all stocked with – free! – books and magazines. What a great idea!

SEATACKIOSK

Travel and read: titles to consider

Books

Here are some of the travel-related books that have shown up on my doorstep recently.

All are on my ‘must-read’ list for the next few weeks.

Former flight attendant and great writer, Tiffany Hawk, has written Love Me Anyway, a novel about the “complexities of love, friendship and family – and the excitement and loneliness that comes from living everywhere and nowhere, and the surprising detours life can take when you set out to discover the world.”

Author, artist, songwriter (and more), Julia Cameron has written Safe Journey: Prayers and Comfort for Frightened Flyers and Other Anxious Souls :

Pilot and air travel writer Patrick Smith debuts Cockpit Confidential – Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel in early May and it’s jam-packed with information about the nuts and bolts of flying as well as lots of behind-the-scenes information and even a handy glossary. I’ll be circling back around in a few days with details about my interview with Smith on the book.

And, in the guidebook category, I’m thinking of booking a trip to New York City just so I have an excuse to visit all the cool things and destinations described in Secret New York: An Unusual Guide , by T.M. Rives.

What’s on your bookshelf?