Travel Tonic

Bringing you what’s new in travel for June 1st 2011 through June 2nd 2011:

• Hurricane season begins – JoanneG recently posted this over on the Bing Travel Blog:An area of low pressure in the Caribbean is showing signs of growing into the first tropical system as the hurricane season opens officially. If it does become a hurricane, it would be named Arlene, the first name on this year’s list. Of course, it’s too early to tell what might happen. Models also show that the storm won’t grow and will bring rain to the Central American coast or generate breezy weather for Central Florida, according to a report on MSNBC.
• 5 airport innovations worth praising – Sean O’Neill recently posted this on This Just In… Newsweek’s Travel Blog:
  

  Qantas’s new frequent flier card doubles as a boarding pass (Courtesy Qantas)
• Park of the Week: Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, St. Louis – posted this over on Frommer’s : Commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War with a visit to this National Historic Site in Missouri, where Ulysses S. Grant once lived with his wife.
  
• Are Mobile Devices Now Travel Essentials? – Smarter Travel has posted some info about : Smartphones have quickly established an extremely important place in the overall scheme of travel. Ed Perkins shows you how to use your device more productively.Head over to www.smartertravel.com to read the whole article.
• Changing tyres of a passenger aircraft « Cathay Pacific Blog -
  blog.cathaypacific.com
  - Joyce Wong
  They’re not just ordinary tyres.
  They’re big and tough, each weighing 209 kilograms. And, with 16 main wheels and two nose wheels, they bear the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747-400 passenger aircraft as it takes off and lands over and over and over again.
  But there comes a time when all that work takes its toll, with the main wheels wearing out more quickly due to landing and braking than the nose wheels.
  These wheels are checked by the operating captain and engineer before each flight and a  show all text