This Weekend: D.C. hosts a massive family reunion

Labor Day is the official end of summer. We've dug up two events near Mendocino in northern California that'll keep you busy. Three words: Ugly. Dog. Contest. At Fort Bragg's Paul Bunyan Days festival, check out the ugliest, smartest, and best-dressed dogs in the crowd. Bonus: a dog and master look-alike round. Organizers say that this is the original Ugliest Dog Contest (don't be fooled by impostors!), established in 1967. The rest of the festival features a "Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Show," a classic car show, a tricycle race, a "King of the Log" pillow fight for kids, a parade, and the "Paul Bunyan Logging Show and Expo," where you can learn about sustainable forestry practices. Friday 6 p.m. to Monday (parade is at 11 a.m. on Monday). Admission to the festival is free; expo is $5. N. Main & Laurel Fort Bragg, Calif. Enjoy more of California's coast with the Studio Discovery Tour. The tour starts just 13 miles south of Fort Bragg on Highway 1. More than 40 local artists will open their studio doors, from oil painters to potters. Download the catalog (which opens as a PDF) to plan your road trip (the studios are located along 60 miles of coastline). Saturday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. EARLIER Don't Let It Fade: Summer Lake Towns Real Deals: Labor Day Getaways, From $89

Five years from now, travelers may smile at old photographs of today's bar code labels for luggage. In addition to Las Vegas, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam using new “smart” baggage tags, London (at Heathrow's terminal 3), Paris, Milan (at Terminal 2), Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo (Narita), Beijing, and a few small airports around the U.S., are currently trialing this technology for full use in the near future. The goal is to make sure every passenger arrives at their destination with their bags—which doesn't happen for about eight of every 1,000 passengers in the U.S. right now. Here's how the technology works: A disposable paper luggage tag is implanted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, which is a microchip that's the size of a pin and as thin as a sticker. When this RFID tag passes within several feet of an antenna, it "wakes up" and acts like it's a transponder for a major radio station, beaming out radio signals. By broadcasting its location, a smart tag makes it easier and cheaper to track a bag. Right now, it's common for bar code labels to get torn or folded, making them very difficult for scanners to read automatically. The new smart tags could reduce errors in reading baggage tags from the current 10 percent estimate to between 1 and 0.5 percent, says Pankaj Shukla, Director, RFID Business Development for Motorola. Let's say an airline worker needs to find a bag in a giant pile of luggage. Under the current bar code tracking system, an employee would have to hand sort the bags and scan each bar code individually. But using the new chip-based technology, workers can use a device like a beach-combing metal detector to beam out a signal for faster tracking of a lost bag. If the bag is in the pile, the hand-held scanner will make a noise. The smart tags also prevent the loss of luggage. Under the previous bar-code-based system, luggage tracking through airports was limited to just a couple of points, such as at a check-in counter, at an airplane's cargo hold, and at a baggage carousel, because of the high cost of the equipment. In-between these distant points are "black holes" where many bags go astray. The technology provides a more affordable means for covering the gap with a series of new checkpoints. Each time a bag passes an antenna—such as at a check-in counter, in a storage room, in a plane's luggage compartments, and at a baggage-claim carousel—it will be recorded in a computer database. These computer records will allow airlines to precisely find a bag—or figure out where a bag was last seen—by checking when and where a bag's tag was last "read" by a machine. The technology, while not new, is becoming cheap enough to allow airports to install antennas throughout an airport. Today's tags cost about 15 to 20 cents a piece on average, says Shukla. In comparison, the cost of dealing with lost and mishandled luggage is estimated to by other organizations to be about $100 per bag on average. McCarran airport, in Las Vegas, was one of the first airports to use this technology to track checked-in bags and make sure bags make their flights after being screened by L-3 explosives-detection machines. Officials at other airports look to Vegas system for its increase efficiency in handling and tracking bags. In addition, this improved “smart” baggage tracking system helps to centralize all the explosives-detection equipment in one place. Unlike other airports, which clutter the floor next to every airline's check-in counter with the security machines--Vegas uses the freed-up floor space to host slot machines and other money-making businesses. Hong Kong's main international airport has already installed the system. You can check your bags at counters at the downtown train station or at the front desks of a few major hotels. Another perk: Hong Kong is a major transfer hub for passengers. In addition to the airports’ efficient check-in benefits, the airport provides a speedier connection time because bags are more efficiently tracked, sorted, and placed onto connecting flights. The result is that passengers are able to enjoy shorter wait times between transfers and trust that their bags will meet them at their destination. One of the main things delaying the switch-over from bar codes to RFID tags is money. As the industry faces rising fuel costs, airports and airlines may put off the investment. EARLIER ON THIS JUST IN Theft from baggage: The TSA reponds to our readers (and their 127 comments)

Riding 100 miles in 100-degree heat? In Texas? For fun? Believe it. Wichita Falls, Texas, will be invaded by bicyclists doing just that in the 27th annual Hotter'N Hell Hundred endurance bike race this Saturday. Begun in 1982 as a way to celebrate Wichita Falls's centennial, the event now draws more than 11,000 cyclists—the largest single-day, 100-mile bicycle ride in the nation. In past years, the heat has exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, weather.com predicts a 90-degree high in Wichita Falls on this year's race day. (Phew!) The ride starts at 7 a.m. on Saturday and features a trek through neighboring towns Charlie, Burkburnett, Electra, and Iowa Park. Other activities include a 10K bike race, a 10-mile off-road area for mountain bikes (this single track has short climbs and drops), plus a spaghetti dinner and a chance to buy official Hotter'N Hell clothing, bike paraphernalia, and other items from community vendors. The event is free to watch. Registration for riders is $25; late registration opens at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday.

Everyone knows that airlines make it difficult to redeem frequent-flier miles for free travel. Yet you may not know that they're making it expensive, too. As of October 1, American Airlines will charge customers a fee of at least $50 to use their miles to buy a one-way upgrade on many types of tickets. (AA didn't charge a fee before.) US Airways has chosen to charge a $25 quick-ticketing fee to customers who redeem their frequent-flier miles for travel within 14 days of their departure. Delta isn't charging a fee, but it is watering down the value of its miles by raising the minimum number of miles you need to earn to redeem for tickets for many types of tickets. In light of these changes, are credit cards that promise free flights worth it? Fortunately, long-time personal finance writer Ron Lieber has come up with five quick questions to help you figure out the answer: Do you pay off your balance each month? If so, then a rewards card might be good for you. If you don't, you should cancel your rewards card because it probably charges a high annual fee and a high interest rate. (To find a low rate alternative, visit bankrate.com or kiplinger.com.) Are your kids in school? "If they are, you'll be fighting everyone else who wants to travel at the same time," says Lieber. "The airlines, knowing your desperation to get out of town, may make fewer free seats available during school vacations, since the airline will probably sell all the seats on those flights anyway." Do you have elite status? If yes, you should probably keep your rewards card. The major airlines, such as American and United, make it easier for passengers with elite status to redeem miles, boosting the value of the miles you earn on your card. Do you own your own business? If so, you can probably charge up a lot on your credit card. Once you start charging more than $100,000 a year, you'll be earning enough miles to earn premium-class tickets. The airlines make sure that "miles are worth a lot more if you redeem them for this sort of travel" because they want to retain the loyalty of big spending customers. Do you value upgrades? "It can be easier to get upgrades from coach using miles than it is to book free seats." So if upgrades matter to you, then a rewards card may be the best value way to get upgrades. But watch out for those increasing redemption fees! FROM BUDGET TRAVEL Don't Let Reward Miles Vanish