You might think that the recession would mean fewer people on the slopes, prompting resorts to run specials. But au contraire, mon fraire—that's not the case. At least not in New England.

I checked around on the websites of the best known ski resorts in New England (such as Stowe, Killington, Sugarloaf, and Loon) and found no true drop in prices being offered compared with this time last year. And the Vermont Ski Areas Association is reporting 17 percent increase in the sales of season tickets, says The Economist.

There seems to be two reasons:

1) Many skiers living on the East coast used to fly to West Coast slopes for its broader and more varied terrain. So this winter skiers are trying to save money by skiing closer to home in New England, boosting demand.

2) Resorts have added high-speed lifts and amenity-filled hotels in the past couple of years, and now they have minimum payments to make. They're not in much of a position to cut prices.

What to do? Shop aggressively. Since last season, Liftopia.com, the Web discount lift ticket service, has more than doubled its list of ski resorts to 88 mountains. The site has deals nationwide, with the heaviest discounts for resorts in the Rockies. But as of yesterday I saw discounts of roughly 15 to 20 percent at second-tier resorts in New England, such as Smugglers Notch (Vt.), Crotched (N.H.), and Whiteface (N.Y.).

Booking a package deal is another option. Expedia, for instance, currently has a winter sale. Some hotels that are located in ski villages are discounting un-booked rooms and bundling them into airfare packages—so if you can't save on lift tickets, at least you can save on the cost of transportation.

RELATED FROM BUDGET TRAVEL
Save money by going to low-key, old-school resorts. Here are ten great ones nationwide: "Shut Up and Ski"

London was the only world capital with an iconic bus, the royal red Routemaster, a double-decker, hop-on hop-off, totally British bus that for more than four decades transported riders on routes all over town. The bus wasn't glamorous, but it was as memorable as Big Ben.

Yet in 2005, authorities replaced the classic Routemasters with bendy buses that could carry more people and were "safer" because they no longer allowed a hop-on, hop-off system (which required a conductor to check tickets, an additional cost).

But the replacement bus has been a bust. And the city's recently elected mayor has been trying to fulfill his campaign pledge to bring the Routemasters back.

A new bus design has been cooked up by Aston Martin (maker of James Bond's favorite time of sports car). This design brings back the hop-on, hop-off model, while adding wheelchair-accessibility (which is something the old buses sadly lacked).

The new bus is also is "greener." It has solar panels built into a glass roof and an energy efficient engine and interior-heating system. Frankly, I'm not sure how much sun the solar panels will see in London, but co-designer Aston Martin insists that the buses will prove their environmental friendliness.

The cost of producing the new buses isn't certain. But the mayor insists they'll be installed on city streets by 2011.

See a video of the bus here, via the BBC:

EARLIER
The Paris-London train line will get faster in 2010

A large new rail system is coming to London

Did you know that…

…in Hawaii…
Barack Obama watchers can take a do-it-yourself tour of the president-elects's childhood haunts by using a map from Obamasneighborhood.com; or hop on a two-and-a-half-hour bus tour that passes his grade school, the Baskin-Robbins where he once worked, and several picnic spots that he loved (Guides of Oahu, $40 per person, obamatourhawaii.com). Between now and April 15, the gentleman who runs the tour is offering a 1-hour highlight version for free for up to 25 people once a day. This offer is for people who want to go on the tour but can't afford the fee for themselves and their family. (It is the guide's response to one of Obama's recent speeches saying that people need to give back to their community.)

…and in Washington, D.C.…
a ride-sharing service has been launched to match car drivers with prospective passengers to the presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20. Register at obamainaugurationrideshare.com. A minimum $25 deposit is required to post the offer of a ride or to make a request. "A real human" acts as a matchmaker, reviewing the online listing and helping to put riders in touch with drivers, reports Travel Weekly. Of course, craigslist is another option. (Find more on inauguration travel at Jaunted's relevant page.)

…and in Kenya…
officials are seeing a travel boost due to the "Obama effect." Visits are up 12 percent. And the excellent tour operator 2Afrika has put tours (and safaris elsewhere in Africa) on sale. Kenya, one of Africa's most popular and best-known tourism destinations, made headlines early in 2008 for a contested election that sparked riots in outlying slums of Nairobi and other areas of the country not typically on safari itineraries. But the country has since stabilized enough for tourism, says the U.S. State Department.

In case you missed it, there have been more than 40 million viewings of the YouTube video Battle at Kruger, which was filmed in 2007 by visitors to Kruger National Park in South Africa.

It starts off a bit slow, but then…

Here are some highlights from the blog for the past month.

This is the info that Homeland Security collect on you

Slide show: Holiday windows at N.Y.C. department stores

Hertz starts "pay as you go" car rentals

"American Airlines Now Charging Fees To Non-Passengers"

Evoking Hong Kong: Q&A with the author of 'The Piano Teacher'

A MacNeil talks about a classic celebration in Scotland

More than 900 bands belong to Couchsurfing.com, a network of travelers looking to crash for free on strangers' sofas. Half of those musical groups joined this year, reports Spin. They're among the site's 470,000 members.

Why do musicians like couchsurfing? Spin interviewed The Shackeltons, a post-punk band from Chambersburg, Pa., to find out. The band members say the site has saved them more than $5,000 on lodging costs during 109 nights on the road. But what the band likes best about the site is getting to meet interesting people. Some examples:

A mother and daughter in Billings, Montana, who wanted to increase their "couch-surfing karma"; three art students in Fargo who cooked them a spaghetti dinner; and a father and son in Bismarck, North Dakota, who gave them three bottles of home-brewed kombucha tea.

That would be music to the ears of a lot of budget-conscious travelers.

[Spin]

MORE RESOURCES
Airbedandbreakfast is a site that enables anyone with an airbed (or couch or bed) to rent it out for the night.

We recently published a Q&A with Alex Boylan, star of the upcoming show Around the World for Free.

In response, the female travel writer who runs the blog Less Than a Shoestring had an interesting response. She singled out one of the stories Alex told about how in Kenya he had hitchhiked to a Maasai settlement in a rural area filled with armed men. "I think that is an amazing experience I probably would have passed on," says Hilary, who goes by the pen name PoetLoverRebelSpy. "When faced with a risky choice," she says, "women are more likely to err on the side of caution."

PoetLoverRebelSpy notes "how gendered travel can be." She thinks that many places and experiences were open to Alex because he was a young man, and not a woman traveling solo.

She clarifies:

"This is not to imply that women couldn't do this trip or that women *shouldn't* travel anywhere these men did, or that we are somehow inherently more fragile or weak than male travelers. But at the same time, women do consider the risks of rides or offers of accommodation from strange men, traveling in areas of unrest and even being out after dark differently from their male counterparts. Further, female travelers are harrassed and targeted in ways that men on the road are not. I'm sure it's not possible to quantify the difference that this confidence and access makes, but I believe more effort should be made to note it."

What do you think?

It's the moment that Atlantic City officials have dreamed of for years—no, decades. An express service rail link between New York City's Penn Station and Atlantic City is set to open on February 6. The train will only run on weekends, making only one stop (in Newark). The train cars will be fancier than standard New Jersey transit trains, with leather seating, food and beverage kiosks, and a first-class upper deck with waitstaff.

From the train station in Atlantic City, passengers will be able to hop onto a free shuttle service to Caesars Atlantic City, Harrah's Resort Atlantic City, and the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa. Prices will start at $50 for one-way coach seat and $75 for one-way first class seat, which is about par with service of a comparable length and quality on Amtrak between New York City and Philadelphia.

Schedules for weekend service will be announced soon on acestrain.com.

Greyhound offers bus tickets for about $25 in one direction.

465 TSA officers have been fired for theft since early 2003, reports the New York Times. This year alone, the agency paid out $1 million in claims for missing possessions or damaged bags, says the Economist's Gulliver blog.

See our earlier blog posts on this topic:
Has the TSA stolen from you? (200+ comments)
Theft from baggage: The TSA reponds to our readers (25 comments)

Back in 2005, the Norwegian Dawn was cruising off the coast of Georgia when it was hit with a shock. A 70-foot wave crashed into the bow of the ship, flooding about 60 cabins and injuring about four passengers. The damage "was not extensive and the ship was quickly repaired," according to Wikipedia.

Five years earlier, a 70-foot wave slammed into the cruise ship Oriana, destroying windows.

Dangerous waves like those aren't common, thankfully. A study of radar data from oil platforms estimated that merely 10 waves more than 75-feet-high appeared around the globe during one recent three-week period.

The bad news is that there's almost nothing that a cruise ship captain can do to either predict or avoid these waves, which rise up to five times as high as the waves around them. These rogue, or freak, waves appear to come from an angle that's out of sync with the wind and other sea waves. You'll occasionally find these waves out in the sea but also in near-beach areas, both in sandy and rocky shores. Lots of tragedies occur yearly all around the world.

To learn more about these waves, I did an e-mail interview with Paul C. Liu, who retired last year from his post as research physical oceanographer for NOAA and who blogs at Freaque Waves.

What should cruise passengers know about the frequency of dangerous waves, and exactly what type of waves are likely on the open seas?
I guess all kinds of waves are likely on the open seas, including freaque waves. They are not always happening. Most of the time they are not! But we just cannot rule out the fact that freaque waves can happen at any time and at any place. Cruise passengers should just be mindful that the possibility is there and continue to enjoy the cruise. Even if an encounter does happen, the damage will likely to be not extensive. The kind of fiction as shown in the movie Poseidon will not ever happen in real life!

What is a "freaque wave", what is its most typical origin or cause, and why do you use that nomenclature of "freaque" instead of using the term "rogue" or something more scientific sounding?
Freaque is a portmanteau word formed by the two frequently and synonymously used words of rogue and freak in describing the kind of unexpected and unpredictable waves. Many people in the scientific literature are fond of using the expression "freak or rogue waves." I choose to use "freaque waves" instead.

Are there any particular waters in particular regions that are known to be prone to freaque waves?
The short answer is no. Because of the conjecture that when ocean waves propagating into oncoming strong ocean current field might lead to the forming of large waves, regions along the Gulf stream in the North Atlantic, along the Agulhas currents in South Indian Ocean, and along the Kuroshio in Northwest Pacific, are thought to be prone of freaque waves. But areas that don't have strong ocean currents, such as the North Sea, can also have frequent freaque waves. So the talk of regional proneness is at most covering a part of the story.

What's the essential dispute about freaque waves in the scientific community? And is there something that makes scientists groan when they read accounts of waves striking cruise ships because the statements are misleading or hyperbolic or inaccurate?
Because the study of freaque waves is still relatively new, I don't think there is as yet any "essential dispute" per se in the scientific community. Lack of general consensus, maybe! Different scientists may have different concept of what "rare" or "frequent" means or using relatively different definitions for freaque waves. And there are may be different approaches to the problem. Some treats freaque waves as a part of the study of extreme waves whereas some others do not. (Freaque waves are always extreme waves, but not all the extreme waves are freaque waves!)

What's the most typical misunderstanding of the freaque wave issue, as you've encountered it when reading media reports or talking with others?
Oh yes, the media! I don't have much respect for the present day, so called, "main-stream" media. Here's an example—a paragraph from a New York Times article about freaque waves a couple of years ago:

Enormous waves that sweep the ocean are traditionally called rogue waves, implying that they have a kind of freakish rarity. Over the decades, skeptical oceanographers have doubted their existence and tended to lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters.

Rogue waves are known to happen momentarily. They appear out of nowhere. A wave takes place, and then disappears like nothing has happened. Waves like that never, yes, never, "sweep" the ocean. There is no such thing as "traditionally called rogue waves." Rogue wave is a fairly recent term. The use of the term "freak wave" was started by U.K. scientist Laurence Draper in 1964. There was no firmly established term before 1964. The existence of unusually large, great waves was nevertheless very much on the minds of every seagoing oceanographer. I don't think anyone in their right mind would "lump them together with sightings of mermaids and sea monsters." I just hope your readers beware of this kind of irresponsibility!