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IT—Inside Traveler
By Jessie Johnston and Emily King

November 23, 2006:

Light IT Up: Holiday Light Festivals

After the end of Daylight Saving Time, festivals that light the longer nights in various ways proliferate, starting with Halloween, and continuing with the likes of Chanukah and Diwali. Besides these holidays, unspecified "holiday light festivals" are known to spring up throughout the United States. It's far beyond our capacity to detail them all here, so we offer up one festival on each coast to whet your appetite for illumination.

The day after Thanksgiving, Riverside, California's Mission Inn will kick off its 14th annual Festival of Lights. The celebration—lasting until January 7—will fill the inn's 2.5-acre (1-hectare) grounds with two million lightbulbs illuminating the hotel's turrets and buttresses, cloisters, and gardens, as well as "Dickens' Carolers" in 17th-century costume and horse-drawn carriages. Hot cocoa will be on hand to help spectators brave the California winter.

A week later, New York will eschew such old-school aesthetics for the Grand Central Terminal Kaleidoscope, in which multicolored light projections set to music will wrap the main concourse like an extravagant gift. The seven-minute shows will run 21 times daily from December 1 through New Year's Day.

Let there be light!

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Insiders Cabo

While we bloggers prefer colder climes for Christmas (Ogden and Vancouver), many of you are gearing up for holiday travel to warmer weather. Matthew Dexter, a freelance writer living in Cabo San Lucas, sent us some insider tips from his popular getaway hometown:

"Play on the beaches. Along 'tourist corridor'—the 21-mile (33.8-kilometer) stretch of shoreline between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo—there are miles of unpopulated beaches. All beaches are public in Mexico, so if you see a spot you like, you are free to drive, hike, or swim. My favorites are Chileno and Santa Maria—both have spectacular natural scenery and marine life. If you like quiet beaches, I suggest Twin Dolphin, about five miles (8 kilometers) out of Cabo.

"Shop at Puerto Paraiso. This upscale and beautiful shopping mall is an excellent place to buy Mexican art and other home decorations. Afterward, head to the adjacent Cabo San Lucas Marina where you will find lots of bars (try Baja Cantina or Nowhere Bar for free sushi), restaurants (I like Lorenzillo's lobster), and hundreds of luxury yachts worth ogling.

"Dine at Mi Casa. Located across from the main square and Iglesia de San Lucas, Mi Casa is a must eat place for vacationers and locals alike because of its scrumptious mole.

"Splurge at the nightclubs. People come from all over the world to party in Cabo, so if you're not averse to crazy reveling, I suggest you check out the scene at El Squid Roe, Cabo Wabo, Zoo, or the Passion Club—the newest and most sophisticated nightclub in all of Baja California Sur. Prepare: The club-goers are beautiful.

"Visit San Jose del Cabo. This small town is adorable. Walk about its streets and drop into the shops, cafés, small inns, and galleries like Pez Gordo. Enjoy an elegant if expensive dinner at the Tropicana Bar and Grill or, for something less fancy, try Taqueria Rossi [Carretera Transpeninsular, Kilometer 33; +52 142 6755], which serves the best fish and shrimp tacos in Baja."

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November 21, 2006:

Wired Wanderlust: Video Passages to India

Far be it from IT to say anything against doorbells, sleigh bells, or schnitzel with noodles, but our list of favorite things veers more than a little from the one proposed by a certain former novice as a comfort to her sweet-voiced young charges. Though still susceptible to brown paper packages tied up with strings, we currently incline toward the following: videos, blogs, and (thanks to Traveler's recent special section) India. Put those favorite things together, and you know what you get? Our new favoritest thing: vlogs about India.

Ryanne Hodson recently returned from a monthlong visit to the subcontinent, during which she posted a number of videos on her blog. Check out her footage of Mumbai traffic, mehndi, Pune, and a party featuring entertainment by puppets, a snake charmer, a conjurer, and a monkey.

Want more? We did. And were amply satisfied with our discovery of Deirdré Straughan's Indian vlog from a trip with her daughter a year and a half ago. Straughan, who lives in Italy but went to school in India, posted about 20 clips, including an elephant ride to Jaipur's Amber Fort, a demonstration of Rajasthani hand-block printing, a turban-tying lesson, and an exuberant parade that had us tapping our feet and checking Orbitz for fares to BOM.

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Lightning Field of Dreams

IT loves both nature and art, so when Bryan Lavietes, the senior Washington producer for Court TV (and onetime Harvard English major), suggested a piece combining the two, we lent him our ears…then, gave him a pen:

"I don't remember the first time I heard of The Lightning Field (near a one-street town called Quemado, New Mexico), but it's been on my 'things to see before I die' list ever since. A fall wedding in Tucson last week finally gave me the opportunity. The Lightning Field is a work of land art by Walter De Maria, commissioned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation. DeMaria spent five years trying to find a suitably isolated spot with high lightning activity before settling on a sparsely populated patch of high desert in western New Mexico—and then he set about planning, building, and installing 400 lightning rods perfectly spaced in a one-mile-by-one-kilometer stretch of land. He finished it in 1977 and The Lightning Field has been hosting visitors since 1980. It's open May through October, but you should call ahead for reservations since only six people can visit at any one time. You have to stay overnight, in a cabin you share with the other five people.

"The hope, of course, is to see lightning strike the poles. However, that occurs rarely. The surer bet is that you'll be treated to a dazzling sunset and sunrise and an unnervingly quiet star-filled night. Walking amidst the rods is a moving and humbling experience. The poles and their pointed tips gleam and shimmer with the movement of the sun. And when the sun gets too high in the sky, the poles all but disappear. Nothing moves, but everything changes."

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Emily King, Traveler's assistant to the editor, wants to visit the pyramids of Giza before they're just a suburb of Cairo. Researcher Jessie Johnston hopes to see Machu Picchu before it becomes an Angkor-style jungle gym.

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