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.

Two summers ago we spent a few days in Minneapolis visiting friends, a visit several years after my first trip here. Both times it struck me how lovely the city is. Minneapolis is one of those gorgeous urban spots in the world that pays attention to how public and private space work together to create an environment everyone can enjoy.

The architecture in Minneapolis is a large part of its visual scene. Its buildings often end up winning awards for their design. Here are a sampling of what you'll find of particular note. These are new buildings that were commissioned as a tribute to Minneapolis's dedication to the arts: Children's Theatre Company; Guthrie Theater, Central Library, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center and Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum.

All featured on the Meet Minneapolis Web site and are places you might consider putting on your itinerary. Here's a link that leads to the descriptions. The Weisman Art Museum was designed by Frank Gehry thus is my particular favorite.

However, my favorite aspect of visual pleasure was when we spent an evening walking among the sculptures at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden outside the Walker Arts Center. This is an eclectic mix of styles set in among flower beds, a conservatory, an arbor and wide open spaces.

This year marks 20th year since the garden has been open. Jaunted tipped me off to the two artist designed mini-golf courses that have been added to the space as part of the celebration. It costs to play the courses but you can see them for free. The rest of the garden is free as well.

Here's another opportunity for a public art feast, you can also tour the University of Minnesota's campus where there is an extensive public art program. Tours are available from May and October. Here's the link for that info.

I have mixed feelings about guidebooks, partially because I hate going to a super lovely secret destination and finding 300 other people there with the same guidebook, but have to admit, I am kind of fond of the Not For Tourists (NFT) guides that have been around for the past few years.

These guidebooks are a library of information, containing extremely detailed maps, overlaid with points of interest, restaurant and other juicy city tidbits -- which is really where they get their name. Not every tourist wants to waste space on the details of the PetCo on the corner of 92nd and Broadway -- they would rather learn about that awesome bistro in SoHo that Ed Norton was seen in once.

To each his or her own.

Fortunately, NFT recently started posting their guidebooks on their website free to download in PDF form. Now, you snark the articles and maps that you want, print them out and build your own frankenbook to take along on your journey.

So how do they make their money? Well, I guess they hope that you'll like the online guides well enough to purchase one of their books. At least give the online version a try and see what you think.

My mother told me this traveler-doesn't-have-a-clue story yesterday morning after I picked her up at the Greyhound bus station in Columbus, Ohio.

I posted about this yesterday, but I'm still shaking my head and wondering where the woman is today and what she has found to eat. Perhaps she's in Missouri?

It has reminded me of other travel stories when there is nothing else to do but keep on keeping on--and hopefully, eventually, you'll get to where you want to go. It's also to make you feel better if you've ever made a travel mistake. I've made mistakes, but not quite like this.

Here is the recap:

"Where are you going?" My mother asked the woman who got on the bus in Newark, New Jersey.

"Los Angeles," the woman said.

"My!" said my mother. "That's far. When will you get there?"

"Tomorrow." The woman, according to my mother, sounded confident.

"Tomorrow?!" my mother exclaimed.

Mind you, they are on the bus on the east coast. The U.S. hasn't shrunk.

The woman nodded, still sure.

In Pittsburgh, the woman discovered the truth. She won't arrive in Los Angeles until Saturday, I think sometime tomorrow night. It is a looooonnnnnng ride.

My mother said that the woman spoke with an accent , so perhaps she misunderstood the details, or she never asked for the details. I wonder if her ticket gave her an inkling that something was amiss? Regardless, she's somewhere the middle of the U.S. by now and by tomorrow night she'll be in L.A.

This reminds me a little bit of the problem when planning international travel that involves crossing the International Date Line. When we lived in Asia I always double checked to make sure I understood exactly what day it would be when I would arrive somewhere. Missing a day can wreck havoc on plans if you're not careful.

Or there are the mistakes where you head east instead of west or the other way around. I know someone who was driving to Washington, D.C., from Columbus, but didn't discover he had gone the wrong way until he hit Indiana or thereabouts. He had recently immigrated to the U.S. which added to his sign reading difficulties and reluctance to ask for directions.

Using Matt Harding's concept of dancing as a way to unify the world in his "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos, Jeff Hoskinson highlighted his home state, Iowa in a spoof of sorts.

He kind of looks like Matt, but he's not Matt. Matt does appear in the video in the "Inspiration" by section. There is a handy reference guide in the YouTube description that lists everywhere featured in the video. As Hoskingson states, this was one way to have a reason to head to all the places he's heard about since he was a kid.

If you can't make it to EVERYWHERE in a state or a country, why not just pick your county or province? How about just your city, village or town? Pick a neat song and go for it. All you need is a camera and a person to film you. It's doable. I'm not doing it yet--but you go for it and let me know if you've posted the results on YouTube. I'm enamored with the idea. Whatever you do, just keep dancing.

One thing this video does make me cognizant of is Iowa's flooding problems. I wonder which of these sites were affected and wish the good folks in Iowa well.

Watch out, binge drinkers and pigeon-feeders! Offences such as feeding pigeons, spitting, urinating and vomiting in the streets will soon be punishable in Prague.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, Prague is trying to lure wealthy tourists. It's sick of budget travelers. That's not exactly how the government officials put it, but I can read between the lines. They want to accomplish this not only by creating commercials that advertise Prague as "the city with beautiful women. Come here and check them out," but it is now trying to figure out how those solvent tourists are going to feel about Prague when they step into dog crap the minute they get out of a cab. And probably get ripped off by the taxi driver at the same time.

Well, you know, those folks don't really see that as adventure travel.

To help things out, Prague City Hall has come up with a new decree that will come into effect this July. According to the Prague Daily Monitor, people in Prague will be fined CZK1000 ($70) for throwing away cigarette butts, chewing gum, food scraps and other waste, feeding pigeons, failing to remove their dogs' excrements, spitting, urinating and vomiting in the streets.

A lot of people consider Prague a dirty city. Those people include me. And I am from here and like it here. However, I honestly wouldn't mind if people picked up after their dogs every time.

The thing is, Prague will never be as clean as Singapore. It's, in essence, a dark, sinister, messy kind of place. How clean is too clean for deal old Praha?

My mom just arrived back in Columbus this morning at 7 a.m. from her trip to New York City on a Greyhound bus. The bus was one minute early. Wow! I thought that she'd be late due to the wicked thunderstorm that tore through here all last night.

When I pulled into a non-parking space in front of the station (there was just enough room to maneuver behind another car actually parked at a meter), there she was with her small pull behind that she was allowed to carry-on. If she had checked it there would have been no charge.

One more point for Greyhound.

As I posted previously, my mom took the Greyhound because it was cheaper and easier than flying at the time she found out she needed to get to New York. That still seems to be the case.

Unless, you are the woman my mother told me about who got on in Newark, New Jersey.

"Where are you going?" My mother asked her.

"Los Angeles," the woman said.

"My!" said my mother. "When will you get there?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?!" My mom wondered how that could be.

That couldn't be. When they changed buses in Pittsburgh, the woman found out she didn't have a clue. She won't arrive in Los Angeles until Saturday.

My mom said she had an accent, so perhaps when someone explained the trip details, she missed something. Obviously.

I hope she didn't have much planned for the next couple of days and thought to bring a good book with her--or several. If nothing else, she snagged the best travel mistake story I've heard in awhile.

(In case you're wondering. If you go from New York to Los Angeles, it will take 2 days, 12 hours and 25 minutes minimum and you would have had to make one bus change. Some schedules take longer with two transfers.You will have traveled 3072 miles. It costs $192 if you don't want a refundable ticket or $215 if you do. There is one ticket left for today's bus that leaves at 11 a.m.)

Perusing your favorite airline's frequent flyer web pages, you may have noticed that many of them offer a service to sell and transfer miles among friends. Points.com is a website that specializes in this task, and many programs from Jetblue to Delta to American Airlines participate in their miles purchasing programs.

Take heed before you get your wallet out and buy miles though: it's a horrible horrible deal. Take a look a these prices for buying miles taken from the Northwest Airlines website:

2,500 = $95
25,000 = $725
30,000 = $865

Now, if you recall from your frequent flyer mile handbook, a domestic ticket costs 25,000 miles -- so this basically equates to buying a ticket for $725. Any ticket, domestically in the US, whether this is between New York and San Francisco or New York and Detroit even if you're having the worst day of your life, shouldn't cost $725. And if it does, you can pretty well be sure that the flight isn't going to have award availability either.

Similarly transferring miles is also expensive:

5,000 = $75
25,000 = $300

With a $25 transaction fee. And the airline isn't even selling miles -- it's just moving them from column A to B in their spreadsheet.

Why would anyone take up this deal? Well, the least irresponsible excuse for buying or transferring miles is because you need to top up your account. You're just short of that 25k or 50k award and need another 5k miles to book your ticket as soon as possible. But it's important to remember the amount of cash you're dumping into your miles just to make them work. If you're dumping $100 dollars into a ticket to get it over 25k and your miles are valued at $0.02/mile (a common market ratio), you've just lost $600 in equity on a ticket. Was the market value of the itinerary that much? Could you have bought the ticket for $200 cash?

If you do find yourself in the above situation, try the following solution: take a deep breath, take your wallet out, hide it under the couch and take a good sharp look at your travel plans and finances for the next six months. There may be a time that you're traveling in the near future during which you can accrue a few more miles and balance out that account.

Or you're short on time and out of money, consider checking Gadlings guide to topping off your frequent flyer account.

After 17 long years of flying America's skies, you've done it. You've almost saved up enough frequent flyer miles for a free ticket to anywhere you want to go in the United States. Nice work. Most people who remember to put their frequent flyer number into the box before departure forget about their miles and let them expire.

But you're just a couple of miles short. And you really really want to go see Aunt Ximena in Palm Springs over Labor Day. Distressed, you check the airline website and see that you can buy two thousand miles for sixty bucks. And you're so excited about In-n-Out and Aunt Ximena's Uruguyan Barbeque that you're just about to cough it up. But you shouldn't.

Hold on fellow passenger! There are ways to accrue those miles without wasting money straight from your pocketbook. At the very least you can use your money practically and earn the miles on the side. Here are a few great ways to do that.

• Check the website for promotions. Several carriers host small promos for new program members to indoctronate educate newbies on the advantages of their specific product. These change every so often, so it's helpful to go back and make sure that you've qualified for all of your excitement.
• Go shopping. Many airline programs have deals with an online (or in air) mall that let you purchase goods from a regular retailer (GAP, Home Depot, etc) and earn miles per each dollar spent. So if you needed to buy dog food for Fido or flowers for your mother anyway, you can get 5 miles / dollar online at petsmart or 10 miles / dollar at FTD.com. Not all of them mark up goods either -- most gateways go directly to the vendor website.
  
• Go out to eat. Sites like Dining for Miles let you enroll your favorite credit card or visa/MC debit card in a program that earns miles per dollar spent at a restaurant. You can peruse about to see if any of the restaurants are near you, then next time you're out to lunch with co-workers, pick up the bill and take cash from everyone else.
• Transfer miles from another program. Points.com gives you a pretty serious shaft when transferring miles among programs (I equate them to the TravelEx money exchange in the airport), but they're good if you're in a pinch and haven't got a ton of spare cash. There are too many participants to list them all, so check the website and see if your favorite points program is listed.

Gas prices aren't the only expense of a vacation that pinch the finances. Admission fees can be a real downer. If one is traveling with young children, huge, expensive museums can be overwhelming.

These are two reasons why the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C. sounds appealing to me.

At $5 for adults, and $2.50 for children, the admission is not even close to the $18.75 amount for adults to the Newport Aquarium in Newport, Kentucky. The Newport Aquarium, the last one I visited, is quite impressive, but sometimes I'd rather opt for a simpler venue for less money.

Last year, when we went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, much of our time was spent finding a bathroom and each other. Due to time constraints, we hurried through sections where I wanted to linger. When mixing children with large museums, it's often necessary to leave out entire exhibits in order to not have a kid meltdown halfway through.

With a smaller museum, like the National Aquarium that claims you can see the whole thing in 45 minutes, you don't have to pick and chose among options. At the end of an hour you can end up at the gift shop satisfied and have time and energy left to take in something else close by. I'd head to the outdoor sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Art for starters.

Along with the aquarium's renovations that include new signage, carpeting and exhibits is a new theme--"America's Aquatic Treasures." Look for alligators, eels, sea horses, a baby loggerhead turtle and more. [see Washington Post article]

If you can make here on August 9, it's Shark Day. There are several activities geared towards kids and talks adults would enjoy.