April 2007

Hotel Granduca, new Houston luxury hotel

Recently, we stayed at the Hotel Granduca in Houston, a new luxury hotel which is inspired by the best in Italian architecture. We were very impressed with the overall hotel design, the grounds, and staff. Read our new feature with video and photos online now.

View from our 6th floor room.

Continental breakfast included a wide selection of fresh fruits, cereals, and breads.

Attention to detail is evident throughout the hotel. The larger suites include a balcony overlooking the palm tree lined courtyard and pool.

RV Road Home: Review of the new HGTV show

A new show by HGTV, RV Road Home is a four-part series that seems to be geared towards the ulta high end market. After watching the show, I view it as eye candy more than anything else, presenting the biggest and latest gadgets and gizmos being offered in certain custom RVs. The host of the show is an unlikely Chi-Lan Lieu, who is doing double duty as the host and also hosts an Outdoor show.

Some of the features that were highlighted, included ornate wood cabinets, marble countertops and showers, and outdoor flat screen TVs. Although these are impressive and neat, I don't see where it benefits the typical RVer or person interested in going RVing who does not have 1/2 to a million dollars in their budget. An RVIA study found that the average RVer is married, owns their own home, and has a yearly income of $56,000. This is far removed from the budget of many of the RVs featured on the show. To be fair, the show did highlight a few families more in that range. It will be interesting to see how the show evolves, and if it will become geared more towards the typical RVers, and not be just a gee whiz show.

Speaking of RVs, we have acquired another RV for our extended travels, a Mobile Scout. This makes our fifth RV owned in ten years (see some of our archive RV travels here). We now re-join almost 7 million RV owners on the road. For shorter trips, we will continue to expand our features on unique hotels and bed & breakfasts within our guides. We also have many plans in place to add new segments to make your travels more informative and interesting. Stay tuned..

the Virginia Tech tragedy

My heart goes out to the Virginia Tech students, families, local law enforcement, and community at this time for the great tragedy they have experienced.

Answers are few at this time in why it happened, and what motivated the killer to take this henious path. The university is tight lipped, which is natural, given the early stage of events and for legal concerns.

What is needed are more stringent security policies and practices that need to be enforced on all college campuses to notify students more immediately about such events through campus-wide alarm systems, instant messaging, and other means and to help prevent it from occuring in the future. There was almost a two hour window from the first shooting to the second. Why the university did not do a security lockdown of the campus after the first shooting is not known at this time.

The area has some of the finest people one will find in the country. Please pray for the families and friends who experienced loss today, and for the community in their grieving and recovery process.

New Travel Destination video service

Today, we announce a special partnership with Brightcove to provde a new Internet TV channel on the net for Travel Destinations. This will allow Southpoint to offer superior quality travel videos via our website. We will be updating our existing videos to the Brightcove servers. Founded by Internet pioneer Jeremy Allaire in 2004 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brightcove is the market-leading Internet video partner for international news and entertainment businesses, including British Sky Broadcasting (Sky), Discovery Communications Inc., Dow Jones & Company, Inc., MTV Networks, The New York Times Company, Reuters, Sony BMG, Time Life, Warner Music Group, and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. We look forward to enabling more videos via our features to enhance our visitor experience.
We are also allowing our visitors to upload their travel videos free for consideration to be featured on Southpoint, and are introducing a video service for travel related businesses and properties to advertise via our site pages. For more details, and to upload a video, visit http://www.southpoint.com/videos.html

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