Tag: News

Travel news: Glass bridges and space motels

Ginna
Editor’s Observe — Signal up for Unlocking the Globe, CNN Travel’s weekly publication. Get information about locations opening and closing, inspiration for potential adventures, plus the latest in aviation, food stuff and consume, exactly where to continue to be and other travel developments.

(CNN) — In this week’s vacation news roundup, we seem at place inns by the ages, Sicily’s new “Minimal America” and a new glass-bottomed bridge in Vietnam that could just be the world’s longest.

Connection restored

That transpired this 7 days when an report revealed very last weekend assisted two previous refugees come across the kind stranger who gave them $100 on a aircraft extra than 20 many years back. Here’s how it transpired.
In another story back in 2021, we helped remedy the secret of some 60-year-previous photos that experienced been uncovered in an Amsterdam flea market place.
The finder of the pics, Jennifer Skupin of Germany, was showcased in our story. Susanna Stevens-Johnson — a 71-year-aged Yup’ik woman who is aspect of Alaska’s indigenous community — was then astonished to see lengthy-dropped childhood visuals online of her outdated classmates, neighbors and good friends in a village that had due to the fact been deserted. View our video and browse the full story here.

House inns: 1967 to now

Ideas for space accommodations have been floating all over considering that the incredibly dawn of house exploration. Again in 1967, in advance of Neil Armstrong even established foot on the moon, the Hilton hotel chain was organizing a lunar hotel with rooms beneath the moon’s floor.
In 2011, Russian agency Orbital Systems declared its ideas for a hotel floating 250 miles (about 400 kilometers) above Earth. There was no bar or even showers, but you could clean up up with wet wipes.
California-based mostly Orion Span had hopes in 2018 to start $10 million trips to its luxurious Aurora Space Station this year, but the firm shut down operations right before that happened.
Now another California enterprise is reaching for the stars. Orbital Assembly has just revealed new facts and principles for
… Read More... Read More

Culinary gardens provide fresh, local produce for Napa Valley’s food and wine pairings | Local News

Ginna

Napa Valley has marketed itself as a food and wine pairing destination, but behind the carefully-curated plates and perfectly-positioned fruits, veggies and herbs are not only the chefs, but also the culinary gardeners keeping these farm-to-table offerings afloat.

Spending their days plucking microgreens, snipping flowers and watering vegetable beds, these farmers grow produce like leafy greens, fancy herbs and more to supply fresh and local ingredients to their teams of chefs, eventually landing in the mouths of visitors.

You won’t find any grapevines in these gardens — there are enough of those in the surrounding areas anyways — and now that spring has sprung, a lot of change is happening in the Napa Valley’s edible estates.

“Right now is sort of a transitional time,” said Tessa Henry, manager of the Clif Family Farm up on Howell Mountain. “We have spring plants growing, but then we have hot days where it doesn’t feel like spring anymore, so the lettuces and the spinach might not be so happy, but we are also preparing peppers and harvesting fava beans, green garlic, tatsoi and parsley.”

People are also reading…

Clif Family has one of Napa County’s approved culinary garden programs, and since Henry took over as farm manager after working as a gardener for Frog’s Leap Winery, she has been able to experiment with growing fruits, vegetables and flowers on the hillside property.

“Every season has been trial and error with what we can grow and what the kitchen likes and the amounts, because they like pretty much everything we give them, but they also want to make sure that there is room for it on the menu,” she said.

When miscalculations do happen, though, the chef team can get creative. 

Once, Henry and her fellow gardeners harvested far more sunchokes than expected, resulting in some innovation and an added soup item on the menu.

“When it becomes available, the kitchen team figures out what to do with it, and they always turn it into something really delicious,” she said.

Additionally, since Clif Family manages a food truck and sells food retail items

… Read More... Read More

Redevelopment would mean another hotel for downtown Lincoln | Local Business News

Ginna

A hotel is back in the plans for the Gold’s Building.

Mike Works, who bought the building at 11th and O streets for $5 million last fall, said he’s planning a ”limited-service hotel with first-floor restaurant and retail opportunities.”

The hotel will have approximately 100 rooms and will take up the six-story north part of the building.

Works, who has experience developing other hotels in Lincoln, including the Holiday Inn Express at Ninth and O streets that opened last year, declined to provide any other details about the hotel planned for the Gold’s Building.

A redevelopment plan announced for the building in 2019 had originally included a hotel, but that plan fell through because of the coronavirus pandemic. A subsequent plan to turn the building into apartments also fell apart when developers failed to get approval to use historic tax credits to help pay to add windows on the south side.


Downtown Lincoln Gold’s building to be sold to local investor

The previous owner, Gerard Keating, had said he might demolish the whole building after the redevelopment plans fell through.

People are also reading…

Works’ plan would save the northern half of the building, but he does plan to demolish the southern half.

Representatives of Works who spoke to the city’s Historic Preservation Commission on Thursday said the south part, which had housed a number of state government offices, now is completely vacant and needs too much work to make a redevelopment feasible.

Demolishing the building will provide space for some hotel parking, but Works said he does plan to eventually redevelop the site with a mixed-use building that would include apartments.

Works indicated that a formal redevelopment plan will likely be coming forward in the next few weeks that will focus on the hotel plan, which if all goes as planned could open sometime in late 2023.

A potential sticking point is the StarTran bus transfer station on the 11th Street side of the building.

The representatives who spoke to the Historic Preservation Commission, attorney Andrew Willis and Justin Hernandez of NGC Construction, said the hotel plan might not

… Read More... Read More

Joe Jaeger buys historic Chateau Hotel, but isn’t done selling others amid slow tourism rebound | Business News

Ginna

Joe Jaeger, owner of the largest hotel group in New Orleans, has purchased the historic Chateau Hotel in the French Quarter, though he says he is planning to shed other properties in response to the lingering devastation the pandemic has wrought on the city’s hospitality sector.

The Chateau, a converted 18th-century mansion on the corner of St. Philip and Chartres streets, already was managed by Jaeger as part of the J Collection of hotels he has built over several decades.

He bought it this month from a company controlled by longtime collaborator Darryl Berger for $11.7 million, according to Orleans Parish Assessor records, a deal that Jaeger says has been in the works since before the pandemic.



Hanging out near a light pole in front of Hotel Chateau in New Orleans.




The Chateau remains closed for renovations, as is the case for all but four of Jaeger’s 17 hotels. Jaeger said he expects to reopen all the hotels he still owns by the middle of next year but sees only a slow return to normal business for the New Orleans tourism industry.

“For the most part, that’s what we’ve been doing: spending a few bucks renovating these hotels and betting on the future. We’ll have most of them opened by mid next year but I don’t think we’ll see a resemblance of 2019 until 2024,” Jaeger said in an interview Tuesday.

“We’ve gone from zero to something, but we still have a long way to go,” he added.



Blakeview: The Jung Hotel_lowres (copy)

 The Jung Hotel, opened in late 1925 and sat fallow after Hurricane Katrina until developer/hotelier Joe Jaeger Jr. reopened it in 2018.




Jaeger’s hotels were hit hard by the initial pandemic-related shutdowns in March 2020, when he furloughed more than 500 workers and suspended operations at almost all of the properties. Only the Jung Hotel on Canal Street has remained open throughout the pandemic.

In August, Jaeger reluctantly sold the 220-room Bourbon Orleans Hotel for just over $80 million to DiamondRock Hospitality Company, a Bethesda, Maryland-based real estate investment trust.

It had

… Read More... Read More