San Francisco: Street food made simple with Twitter

This may be the best "Readers' Best" slide show to date. From over 1,000 submissions, we picked 20 outstanding photos—including a fabulous Florida flamingo, gorgeous butterflies in Japan, and regal-looking penguins in the Falkland Islands. Check out the images in our slide show. RECENT READER SLIDE SHOWS Rainbows | Hawaii | National Parks STILL IN SEARCH OF… We're now collecting your photos of Mexico. Upload them through myBudgetTravel, tag them, and check back in the coming weeks for slide shows of the best submissions.

New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg announced on Monday that the Big Apple drew more that 45 million tourists from here and abroad in 2009, becoming the number one tourist destination in America for the first time in 20 years. The city beat out competitor Orlando, which was number one in 2008. Although tourism to New York City did drop almost four percent in 2009, it wasn't the dreaded 10 percent that officials had predicted. The statistics are from Tourism Economics, a consulting firm. Just back from New York City? Going there soon? Check out our New York City page for tips and reviews, and leave your recommendations and questions in the comment field.

For the first time, a group of Sonoma County wineries are offering free, self-guided walks, letting you venture far beyond their tasting rooms. Since the start of the New Year, Sonoma Vineyard Adventures tours allow visitors to walk through the vines—an area that's normally off-limits to outsiders—at Balletto Vineyards, Matanzas Creek, Paradise Ridge, and Mauritson wineries. The participating wineries have created paper guides that point out notable details along the clearly marked paths, each less than a mile long. For example, the Mauritson trail winds past rows of various grape varieties, including cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and sauvignon blanc. Other sights include essential equipment, such as a wind machine that protects vines from frost. You'll even spot the winery's crush pad, where more than 20 grape varieties are processed during harvest season. Run yearround, each tour ends in a tasting room so you can sample the final product. The self-guided walking tours are all free; Mauritson offers a complimentary wine tasting, but Matanzas Creek, Paradise Ridge, and Balletto each charge $5 per tasting. The pilot program, developed by the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, may expand to other vineyards. Cheers to that. EARLIER Napa Valley: The CIA's new cooking classes Wine Country Contenders: Four lesser known, well regarded wine regions

A nifty new world map created by researchers points out the most remote places on the planet. Researchers calculated how much time it would take to travel to every location on the planet from cities of 50,000 or more people nearest each location, reports The New Scientist. If a location is hard to reach by train, road, or river because it's steep, densely jungled, or behind tightly controlled border crossings, it is ranked as especially hard to reach. It turns out that less than 10 per cent of the world is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. Take a look at the map, where the darkest spots are the hardest-to-reach places. You may be surprised. [The map was produced by researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank.]