Web Site Covers Low-Cost Road Trips

By: Charles Bowen In the old days, you stopped writing travel stories after the kids went back to school in the fall -- at least until Thanksgiving brought in the winter holidays. But times have changed. Now, with the graying of the baby boomers and the growing number of empty nests out there, suddenly autumn has become a very attractive vacation time.

Of course, nowadays economic considerations enter the picture too. For many footloose Americans, Vacation 2003 is not a cruise but a low-cost road trip. And a Web site associated with a magazine called By the Way is out to enhance those on-the-road adventures by focusing on little known roadside attractions.

Old-fashioned diners -- now an endangered species on the American landscape -- are the special love of the magazine, particularly those in its native New England. Produced by Road Age Media, By the Way Online finds what it describes as the "gems of the back roads" across America.

The site offers video reports of various interesting topics such as vintage diners on the move. For example, the latest report followed Minella's Main Line Diner as it left its birthplace in Wayne, Pa. The site even has a "gift shop" where visitors can buy back issues of the print edition, postcard booklets and a "Diner Finder" guide. For your travel writers, this site could be a topic for a specific story as well as a reference tool for locating curious side trips all across the country.

To check it out, visit btwmagazine.com, where a busy introductory screen offers text and photos of the staff's latest treks. Scroll the page beyond the top feature to see summaries of other articles inside.

Of particular interest is the site's "Ridin' Around with Joe Manning" column, linked from the front page. The columnist -- author of several books about historic North Adams, Mass. -- offers a personal perspective of rare New England eateries. The site's "Gas/Food/Lodging" link provides a clickable archive of earlier reports on everything from The American Soda Fountain Co. of Chicago to Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor of Pittsburgh to Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum of Orttana, Pa.

And for researchers, don't miss the site's "Approved Links" section, which offers its collection of Web sites devoted to diners, preservation, roadside, "Just for Fun," and "The BTW Community."

Meanwhile, here are some other unusual travel sites you might want to have in your toolbelt for researching fall vacations:

1. Autumn means a growing number of "fall festivals." They're still called that, even though nowadays the schedule for such fairs and exhibitions generally extends right through the holidays at the end of the year. Art and Craft Shows Net is a database of thousands of events around the country throughout the year. Operated by Sunshine Artist magazine, the site lets you search by specific show name, by dates, by cities or states, or by geographic region.

2. Looking for "theme travel" stories? A good place to start is the Web site of television's History Channel, where a feature called History Travel enables you to search for historic sites and points of historical interest in specific cities. For instance, enter Chicago and the site returns a dozen ideas, from Ike Sewell's Pizzeria Uno restaurant, home of the original deep-dish pizza, to the "Untouchable Tours" that feature the city's mobster history, including sites of former brothels, speakeasies, and shootouts.

3. There are many sites that provide maps and driving directions, but for those happy-footed fall hikers, you can provide a special treat if you offer them topographical maps, that is, maps that illustrate the ease or difficulty of a particular terrain. site TopoZone from a company called Maps a la Carte Inc. works with maps from the United States Geologic Survey to produce seamless topographical maps of the entire nation.
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