Hitchhiking by appointment

Foreign Policy magazine was bought today by the Washington Post company, the parent company of Budget Travel. Until now, the award-winning magazine was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Susan Glasser, a Washington Post foreign correspondent who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and ought to be nicknamed Wonder Woman, will be the new executive editor. Personally, I'm thrilled—and not just because I got my start in journalism at FP. The magazine's daily blog Passport is the most engaging blog I know of when it comes to understanding the political situation in other countries. (And the surest way not to seem like the Ugly American when you visit another country is to brush up on its politics beforehand.) But Passport also has a lighter side. Here's a shout-out to some of the blogs amusing recent posts: A man donned a "jetpack" yesterday and flew over the English Channel. No joke! Despite the fact that he calls himself Fusion Man, this is a true story. Take a look at Germany's newest tourist attraction: An upside-down house! American artist Jeff Koons opened a wacky show in Paris recently in the Château de Versailles. "From a gargantuan balloon dog to his famous porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, Koons "redecorated" Louis XIV's former hunting lodge inside and out. He even filled Marie Antoinette's room with vacuum cleaners." You've got to see the photos.

Who can keep up with all the websites that track travel deals? Innovations keep happening all the time. This month's newest deals search engine comes from a company that's been around for a decade: BootsnAll, a collection of 50 travel websites connecting independent travelers and fanatics to places like Italy, Amsterdam, Bali, London, and Paris. (The site also tracks topics like Business Travel and Adventure Travel.) I exchanged e-mails with BootsnAll CEO Sean Keener last week, asking a couple of questions: Why should a traveler go to the new BootsnAll search engine instead of, say, Kayak.com or another meta-search site? The search engine mixes deal reviews by editorial experts and deals posted directly by airlines, metasearch engines like Kayak, and tour operators. Places like Kayak focus date-specific searches. Kayak is an awesome resource, and we link to them all the time. But our deals engine is just that. Deals. Another reason to come, is that shortly, we'll be adding RSS and email of specific searches to the deal engine. For example, if you are going to Maui in the next 6 months, you could search on Maui deals at deals.bootsnall.com and subscribe via RSS or email to the updates of that search. All the deals that pop up in the coming weeks will be delivered in your RSS reader, such as My Yahoo or Bloglines, or your e-mail in-box. Easy Peasy. Are your deals edited to focus on only one particular type, profile or personality of traveler? No - we've learned that, from CEOs to regular Joes, everyone likes a deal! Did you have a search engine for deals before—or is this a new feature? This is a new feature/engine. We have had deals listings before, but we felt and heard from the BootsnAll Community and that an aggregator of sorts would be excellent for dreaming about the next trip or looking for actual deals. We have had a consolidator airfare engine for over 5 years that has deals that Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity, and all the big boyz can't beat frequently as well, but this deal engine is new.

With supplies tight, prices are high Be ready to pay extra for the privilege of a hybrid rental car [New York Times] After dark in the city of czars St. Petersburg at night [Boston Globe] Essential checklist for campers packing kids [San Francisco Chronicle] A glorious day in Venice, on a budget of $40 [AP] New life for Civil War cyclorama The 16,000 square-foot painting reopened at Gettysburg National Military Park. Cycloramas were the "Imax theaters of their day." [San Francisco Chronicle]