Go Local with Bike & Tour Websites

Indie travelers strive to get beneath the surface of destination, beyond the middling attractions the tourism bureau is paid to promote. They also want to connect with locals. A couple of new websites are here to help.

* Liquid (www.doliquid.com) - Connects bicycle owners with visitors who want to rent a bike. Owners submit photos and details of their sweet chariot; Liquid verifies the offer, and then posts it online. Visitors search by location, bike size and type, then deal with the owner directly to rent their wheels. It's like AirBnB for pedalers! So far Liquid is in the US only, but it plans to branch out to 400 cities in 80 countries.

* Gidsy (www.gidsy.com) - “Gids” is the Dutch word for “guide.” The service matches locals who lead offbeat activities - say, mushroom hunting in an Austrian forest or snowboarding on a Washington mountain - with visitors looking for novel experiences of a place. Tour/activity prices are cheap compared to their professionally led counterparts. For details, read this article about a Gidsy guy who leads a food scavenging tour through New York City. Ashton Kutcher is an investor in the Berlin-based company (he also invests in AirBnB, by the way).

Obama's Election Day Ritual in Chicago

If you're Barack Obama, today is a pretty stressful day. Will I be president for another four years, or won't I? He has decided to stick to close to his Chicago home, play basketball in the 'hood, and maybe get a haircut to take his mind off the matter.

His barber, Zariff, at the Hyde Park Hair Salon was coy when asked by local news reporters whether Obama would be dropping by. The prez would, presumably, get the "Obama Cut" ($21, as per the price list), though he won't be able to sit in the original presidential barber chair, which is now encased in bulletproof glass.

It's one more thing to add to the day's drama: if Obama stops by, and if he wins office again, perhaps we'll have a second enshrined barber chair....

Road-Tripping on the Lincoln Highway

It has been 99 years since the Lincoln Highway - christened on October 31, 1913 - made it possible to drive coast-to-coast in America. The road beat a path from New York City to San Francisco, unfurling 2900 miles of pavement through the nation's heartland.

But today the highway is fading. It doesn't appear on most maps, because it's no longer an official road, but rather a patchwork of federal and state byways. The Lincoln Highway Association works to preserve the route. Pez museums, fried-chicken diners, giant coffee pot statues, and other Americana reward road-trippers who follow it.

In Illinois, a series of murals also marks the way, denoting hot spots such as Rochelle, where Emily Post honed her admirable manners in 1915, and University Park, where the Van Buren sisters  revved motorcycles for their historic cross-country journey. See more on the Illinois artworks in my AAA article here.

Reflections on the Guillotine

Think "guillotine" and an image of Marie Antoinette comes to mind, all poofy haired and silk gowned, maybe wielding a dessert fork (though she never really said, "Let them eat cake"). Marie lost her head to the timbers of justice 219 years ago today.

You can see the guillotine that decapitated her in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London. (Remember, Tussaud got her start making wax death masks for victims of the French Revolution, including Marie Antoinette.)  Other places for guillotine tourism include:

*  Paris, at Rue de la Roquette and Rue de la Croix Faubin (near the 11th arr) - Indents in the street mark where the guillotine stood outside the Prison de la Roquette, where 69 beheadings took place. Atlas Obscura has more here.

*  St-Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland in eastern Canada - The guillotine sliced just once in North America, and it was on this French island-territory. The blade remains in the L'Arche Museum. Its bloody backstory is here.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin would surely be appalled to know the device that bears his name ended up with such a nefarious reputation; he meant for it to be a humane way to die. The last guillotine dropped in 1977.

World Zombie Day

Prepare the prosthetic pustules, and bring on the braaaaains. It's World Zombie Day, celebrated the second Saturday of October each year. Fans gather in crusty, dusty solidarity around the globe. Some groups organize blood drives, others grunt over drinks during pub crawls, while others gather for communal screenings of Shaun of the Dead.

Zombies have become a $5 billion-per-year industry. In addition to literature like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and TV shows such as The Walking Dead, zombiephiles can take hatchet-throwing lessons, "walk like a zombie" acting workshops and run in races while being chased by the undead. Zombie tourism is big business.

Personally, I'd go to Indianapolis if I was a zombie, to the Indiana Medical History Museum. It's an old insane asylum with a whole room filled with brains in jars - a zombie version of just opening a can of something for a quick dinner.

Elegy for the Baseball Season

If nothing else it's historic: two 100-loss teams playing a baseball game against each other. The Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros will have piled up 207 losses between them when they meet today for the season finale at Wrigley Field. That's 101 losses for the Cubs vs. 106 losses for the Astros. The last time such crappiness collided was in 1962, when the NY Mets - with a still-standing MLB record of 120 losses - whiffed against the, er, Cubs (103 losses). Attendance for the game was 595 fans.

On a related note: remember Adam Greenberg, the Cubs rookie who got hit on the head by the first - and only - pitch he ever saw? The concussion he suffered in his first at-bat derailed his career. That was 2005. Flash-forward to Oct. 2, 2012. Greenberg returns to the majors. Steps to the plate. Squares off against RA Dickey, the Mets' 20-win knuckle-baller. And this is the subsequent headline: Greenberg Strikes Out 7 Years After Beaning. And this: He's Back... And He Whiffs.

A white-haired gentleman named Fred van Dusen watched from the stands and felt the pain. Greenberg, you see, wasn't the only player to have his career halted by one hit-by-pitch plate appearance. Van Dusen is the other member of the dubious club, after he got nailed as a Philadelphia Philly in 1955.

Museum Day Outcast #3: Fluorescent Museum

The world's first museum of fluorescence is a hippie-trippy treat. It's called Electric Ladyland, and it radiates in Amsterdam. Even if you didn't eat a space cake before arriving, you're gonna feel like it, as grey-ponytailed artist and owner Nick Padalino takes you to his gallery/shop's basement and shows you all kinds of glow-in-the-dark objects, from psychedelic sculptures to luminescent rocks.

Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles' 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and other tunes play on the stereo while you learn about the naturally fluorescent rabbit, and wow your friends with the fact that the most fluorescent place on earth is…drum roll…New Jersey, USA (lots of incandescent minerals in the ground there).