My Three Best Travel Secrets

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My friend JoAnna Haugen of Kaleidoscopic Wandering has tagged me to participate in a travel blogger game to share my three best travel secrets.  This game was kicked off by Katie at TripBase.com as a way to unite the travel blogging community and create a list of our collective best travel tips.  The key is that these should involve places that the masses of traveldom do not know about, the places you don’t usually see in the guidebooks or read about all over the web.  Given how widespread travel talk is on the Internet, this is not an easy task!  But I’m game, so here are my three best travel secrets:

1. Tucked away in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in the tiny college town of Lyndonville is the Miss Lyndonville Diner. I’ve eaten at my fair share of diners all over the country, and none of them can hold a candle to the Miss Lyndonville.  Originally built in a train car, the diner has since been expanded and cocooned by an actual building.  If you want to eat where the locals eat, this is it.  You’ll see families here, college students and professors, and blue collar workers–a real cross-section of small-town Vermont.  A cluster of regulars, working class men, will be sitting on stools at the counter, four or five abreast like swallows on a wire, reading the newspaper or trading jokes with the kitchen staff.  Meals are served quickly, hot off the grill or out of the oven, and the waitresses are fast, efficient, and friendly.  You can get a hearty meal for under $10 per person–perfect for poor starving college students and working class folks alike.  The food may not be organic vegetarian fare, but it’s not greasy either.  Here you’ll find comfort food like turkey with all the fixings, open-faced roast beef sandwiches, and breakfast served all day. Their french toast is to die for, and I am particularly fond of their specialty sandwiches.  The Miss Lyndonville is located on Route 5 in Lyndonville, Vermont.

2. The British Museum in London gets millions of visitors every year, and understandably; it has excellent exhibits. But sometimes, don’t you just wish you could see the exhibits minus the crowds?  If Egyptian antiquities are up your alley, try the lesser-known Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology instead, which is located at the University College London, Malet Place. This free museum is small, but it’s not crowded (in fact, I had the whole place to myself when I visited!), and it’s nice and cool when the weather outside is hot. The Petrie is a teaching museum with an extensive collection of 80,000 Egyptian artifacts.  The collection includes hieroglyphs, sculptures, papyrus, amulets, weapons, tools, and textiles so old you would think they would have disintegrated by now.  The museum was named for William Flanders Petrie (1853-19420), a prominent Egyptian archeologist.  A new, larger museum is scheduled to open in a year or two, allowing for the entire collection to be on display at once.  The entrance to this museum is not easy to find, as it’s set back away from the main street, but it is worth the effort.

3.  Montreal is one of my favorite North American cities for its semi-European vibe, it’s excellent dining options, site-seeing, and of course, shopping.  If you are in Montreal to indulge in the shopping part of this, head to the garment district. There you will find a gem of a store called Jeans Jeans Jeans (5525 Avenue de Gaspe, cross street Rue St.-Viateur East) that sells designer jeans at half off the regular price.  If you’re taking the metro, get off at the Laurier station and walk from there.  The neighborhood might feel a little sketchy at first, but it’s perfectly safe.

Jeans Jeans Jeans is located down a narrow set of stairs in an industrial-looking building.  Once down there, it’s like a Home Depot for jeans, but with a twist:  The best customer service I’ve ever experienced in a clothing store.  Don’t even try to find a pair of jeans by yourself.  It will take you forever.  Approach one of the sales people, all of whom are more than willing to assist you and know where everything is.  Tell them what you’re looking for, and they’ll set you up in a changing stall and keep bringing you jeans to try on until you have what you want.  They will also tell you what looks good on you and what doesn’t.  I’ll let you in on another little secret:  I hate shopping for clothes with a passion.  But if every store had this kind of service, I would love it.  It’s like having your own personal shopper with exquisite taste.

And now I’m nominating 5 more travel bloggers to share their best kept secrets:

• Ellen Perlman of Boldly Go Solo
• Shannon Hurst Lane at ShannonLane.com
• Sheila Beal of Go Visit Hawaii
• Stephanie Yoder of Twenty-Something Travel
• Hilarye Fuller of Dotting the Map

Tag!  You’re it!