Recent content by jamesdeluxe

No mention of Sandpoint, Idaho approx. 25 minutes from Schweitzer? A dozen years ago (just after my first visit there), there was a big profile about the town in a NYT article that I linked to below my report. I'm curious if/how things have changed since then.

How does Bend compare to Boulder? Seems to be a similar population and geographic size with ski areas approx. half an hour away. Obviously, Bachelor is bigger and better than Eldora.

As you know, I always opt for small and atmospheric rather than big and hectic: "a pleasant town near a ski area" rather than an official "ski town." My favorites are in Quebec: Magog in the Eastern Townships with Mont Orford five minutes away Saint Sauveur in the Laurentians with several fun...

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'm not denying EWR's longstanding poor reputation, just that it doesn't square with my personal experience.

Here it is: my home airport has been declared by an Australian travel insurance comparison company to The Most Stressful in the World! I'll put aside how I feel about travel insurance in general (a monstrous racket) and take the results at face value because I know that EWR has a bad reputation...

The new Best U.S. Ski Town thread reminded me of this video posted 2.5 years ago, which is before I started using helpful "YouTube to transcript" sites like this (then you run the resulting text through ChatGPT to format it into proper paragraphs). Here it is in written form -- a great article...

OK, I've shared enough about this trip. Time to dissect someone else's plans!

$683 per person was the best I could find for those shoulder weeks around the Feb school holidays, which I know would definitely not meet your requirements for cashing in an award. For us, minimizing outlay is the overriding priority so we're using FF miles and the Indy Pass throughout...

I was asking more about signage with real-time lift waits, which you pointed out are generally on apps these days. That didn't occur to me because I tend to go to obscure/smaller places without the need for that type of thing.

That's possible; however, for my needs the issue is that over the past two years United has jacked up its FF award levels. Just for laffs, I checked Delta from JFK to Zurich and if you're flexible with dates, there are roundtrips for as little as 40K, same with Milan. Unfortunately, those are...

I share that SOP but always look for Lidl: better and cheaper.

From the "first-world problems" department: United's Cyber Monday sale offers no big award discounts on nonstops from EWR. 60K miles to Munich 60K miles to Geneva 70K miles (seriously?) to Zurich The only quasi deal is 49K miles to Milan. I booked our flights to Munich for early March. With...

Posted in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/travel/snowbird-ski-resort-utah-mountain-preparations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.hr1y.zyi11Opgb6lH&smid=url-share

I've mentioned before that when I lived on the Front Range in the 80s, Texans with oil money were the cliched "cultural villains" who inspired the inescapable bumper stickers. I'm trying to think of the indie ski areas that are popular with them. In addition to Wolf Creek, I'd say Monarch, Red...

Are there other ski areas in North America with real-time displays to help people strategize around sizable lift queues? I've mentioned my memory from many moons ago of @Marc Guido and crew at Alta having a pro-level discussion on a chair about how to avoid "map readers" that entailed several...