Pet Airways, An Airline Just for Pets

A new airline is set to launch next week... for Pets only! Instead of under your seat or, worse, down below in the baggage hold, your pet gets to fly first-class in the main cabin on Pet Airways. Although service is only currently available to a handful of US cities, this has the makings of a competitive alternative to the services provided by the major airlines. We hope it catches on. Fares begin at $149 one-way. Read more here.

Turtles Shutdown a New York City Runway

About 80 diamondback terrapin turtles delayed traffic today at JFK airport in New York for about 90 minutes. You can read more here. I guess not such exciting news, if you live in Hawaii or Ecuador, but this is New York City! Who knew that we had anything approaching a sea turtle here! OK, so technically, diamondback terrapin live in brackish water, so they are not sea turtles, but still impressive nonetheless. (For the curious, it turns out we actually do have sea turtles here in the New York area, but they prefer to not hang out at the airport.)

I wonder how many folks were on flights at the moment to places where they planned to view sea turtles? Having gone on a few supposed sea turtle viewing adventures that turned out to be a bust, this might be the only turtles that they actually get to see in the wild on their trip. Hope that they took some good photos.

A New Cure for the Fear of Flying?

To overcome his fear of flying, Mark Malkoff is living on a plane for the month of June! He is also doing a great job of documenting his journey with frequent videos and tweets on twitter. It sounds like he must be cured. Are we witnessing the birth of a new, effective (and extremely expensive and time-consuming) form of therapy?

You Just Won the Lottery.... Now What?

In what can only be described as extreme laziness, a woman in Australia discovers 10 months after a lottery has ended that she is a 10 million dollar winner! Hard to fathom that she could be so absent minded. Since she was a university student, perhaps she was just immersed in her studies and working on a term paper (which was likely also long overdue). We wonder what she will do with this windfall, once she gets around to actually collecting it. We sure know what we would do... go around the world! ... and, likely, several times.

Best Job in the World?

Lucky Brit, Ben Southall, beat out 34,000 other applicants last week to win, what has been dubbed, "the best job in the world" -- to "explore" the sands of a tropical island in Queensland, Australia for 6 months and earn an easy $110,000. It won't be all milling about in the sun for Ben, though, as he will have to "report back" on his findings in a weekly blog, collect the mail (not a strict requirement), occasionally feed the fish, and clean the pool -- the latter two appearing to be thinly veiled nudges to not neglect to "explore and report back" on the island's water offerings. Other perks include a three-bedroom home overlooking the tropical island's Great Barrier Reef, return airfares to and from the nearest capital city, transport on the island and to other nearby islands, and computer and camera gear. The only downside is that the job has a built in layoff.

Seriously though... it is a stretch to call this a "job" as it essentially is just some very slick advertising. The real winner here is Tourism Queensland who has managed to garner a great deal of attention for their islands and will probably see a spike in tourism this year. The Great Barrier Reef isn't on our travel wish list, but it is, at least, now on the radar and probably is for many other travelers as well.