When I moved to Chicago, I instantly became a Cubs fan. It’s pretty hard not to when you live on the north side and you visit the historic house of the Cubs: Wrigley Field. But as I traveled around the world, no one cared, let alone had ever heard of the Cubs. There was one team and one team only I encountered everywhere I went. It was one of the most common logos seen all around the world – The New York Yankees.  And in most cases, it was just a highly marketed logo or hat, many people I asked didn’t even know the team…just the New York part.

It’s only fitting that I share this photo essay with you now as the Bronx Bombers slide into the American League Championship Series and are once again that much closer to a spot  in the World Series (yes, it’s not really the world…just North America).

This is probably not the first image that came to your mind when seeing this post’s title. But there it is — a blazing sunset over the Hudson River taken from the New Jersey side looking east toward New York.  Yes, just north of the city, is a gorgeous green state that goes for hundreds of miles all the way up to the border with Canada.

What’s special about this photo is that I snapped it when I was in high school.  That’s right, this was before digital, before Photoshop, and before sex (well, for me).   Got your attention?   ‘My first SLR’, my high school sweetheart and I were wandering around the New Jersey coast and lo and behold, the sky was really that ‘on fire’.  But what I always liked the most about this shot was the little tug boat and its tiny lights.

Red Dusk

New York 1990

Last week, the new gourmet Italian mega-store known as Eataly opened in Manhattan.   At nearly 45,000 square feet, the gluttonous foodie-heaven is like a Macy’s of Italian culinary goodness.

“This isn’t a giant food court,” said co-owner Mario Batali to the Wall Street Journal. “This isn’t a selection of restaurants under one roof. This is a retail store where we peddle the greatest of Italian gastronomy to people who want to eat it and know how to appreciate it. You ask any Italian and all of the smart Americans where the best meal they ever had in the last ten years was, and it was never in someone’s restaurant. It was always in the house. And with these products, and this ideology, we’re hoping that’s what we’re going to bring to New Yorkers.”

When I was in Italy last year I visited the original Eataly just outside of the city center from Torino.  This Whole Foods meets an Italian food-mecca was far more unique in Italy than it will be in the foodie-centric and upper-class hipster haven of Manhattan.  Before now, Italy didn’t have a Trader Joes or Whole Foods type market.

At Eataly, I drooled over the enormous selection of cheeses, meats, breads, pastas, fish, chocolate, and olive oils. Stark white shelves heaved with perfectly aligned jars of oily, salty anchovies, a plethora of pestos, tasty tapenades, freshly made pastas, and so much more. Luckily there are cafes sprinkled throughout the store where you can sit down and chow on some of the delights right before your eyes.  And for dessert, of course, there is a gelato stand from which part of the proceeds go to charity.

Here are some photos from my tour of Eataly in Torino. If you are in New York, head down to the Flatiron District. Or better yet, hope a flight to Milan and train in to Turin to check out the original.

For more food and travel stories, check out WanderFood Wednesday.

Has a movie ever inspired you to travel?  This is not that uncommon, in fact, my friend Mark and I visited Tokyo after seeing Lost in Translation. He called me up and said, “Want to go to Japan?”

“Sure,” I said. And we were off…well, not that same day, but you get the point.  Basically if I have the opportunity to go anywhere, I will. All you have to do is ask. Ask me…go ahead…I am waiting…oh, okay, I guess I’ll get on with the rest of this article.

It turns out, we are not the only ones traveling to far off lands after being inspired by a film. Nowadays, a growing vacation trend is themed trips focusing on popular books and movies such as the Harry Potter series, The Da Vinci Code and science-fiction favorites such as Star Wars.  Some statistics show that thirty per cent of under 20-year-olds are likely to visit a place after seeing it on film.

There are definite areas that have seen particular success as people opt for ‘location vacations’.

• New Zealand – thanks to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (NOT why I went there)
• New York City – It’s said to be a character of its own. And has been featured in countless films such as: Woody Allen movies, When Harry Met Sally, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Superman, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and most recently, Sex and the City which also treated it as the 5^th character.
• Italy – Under the Tuscan Sun, Roman Holiday
• Thailand – The Beach (I did visit THE beach…not too shabby, but, of course now very touristy—case in point)
• London – Always a popular destination on it’s own and thanks to movies like An American Werewolf in London, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Love Actually, Notting Hill, Sliding Doors (love this movie), Bend it Like Beckham (love this too), and period films like the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and Sherlock Holmes.

Bob Atkinson, travel expert from travelsupermarket  said: “It’s hardly surprising that travelers are taking their inspiration from films, we’re a captive audience and the big screen often captures locations at their best.  People might also look to recreate the experiences in the films.

“From bored housewife Shirley Valentine ‘discovering herself’ on a Greek Island or gorgeous period dramas with the backdrop of some of the UK’s most stunning stately homes, to fun and frolics in hits such as Mamma Mia!, or films from best-selling novels like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, when a destination gets picked to feature in a film the tourism office there should really capitalize on it.”

And locations around the world do capitalize on it. The New York ‘Sex and the City Tour’ became a huge success especially after the release of the first movie in May 2008.  Just as the “Sound of Music Tour” just outside of Salzburg is still extremely popular with American and British travelers.

“Undoubtedly the modern ‘tour de force’ behind movie tourism however is Dan Brown – demand for tours in Paris and Scotland increased after the release of The Da Vinci Code, Vatican Tour requests rose by 20 per cent in the months following the release of the Angels and Demons, so we have high hopes for Washington DC, which must be hoping to revel in the same success, having been the setting for Dan Brown’s latest novel – The Last Symbol.”

With the summer movie season on the horizon, here are some films and possible ‘location vacation’ destinations for 2010:

Recently my step-sis, Beth, and I were doing what a lot of people in New Jersey spend a lot of time doing: driving. It was late one night and we were returning from dinner and heading north on the infamous New Jersey Turnpike. We were near Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and a bastion for industry. You’d think growing up in New Jersey as I did, I would have visited here, but nope. It really wasn’t a destination for several reasons…it wasn’t known to be very safe, I didn’t really have my driver’s license until my last year in New Jersey (before I left the state for university) and the fact that New York City is just 8 miles east…so why mess around in Newark?

As we sped passed a large power plant of some kind, all lit up against the night sky, I began to wonder what was really going on there. I caught the name and in modern technology fashion, Beth proceeded to punch it in to Google on her Blackberry and away we went into the world of interesting facts and knowledge (well, for us at least).

According to Wikipedia and various other websites, the gas-fired (natural gas and butane), 940-megawatt Linden Cogeneration Plant was built in 1992. It is owned by El Paso Energy (the nation’s largest natural gas pipeline operator, with more than 43,000 miles of pipe in service) and operated by G.E. Energy Services.

The way in which the facility generates power is intriguing. It burns natural gas, which while not entirely clean is certainly better than a few other sources. But it takes the process one step further.

It uses the heat generated by its five gas turbine generators to pressurize heat recovery steam generators—hence “cogeneration.” The plant is making sure to harness every drop of energy it creates, even heat.

Apparently a percentage of the power produced by the facility is sold into the New York City market in the form of steam.

From a small dry cleaner on Manhattan’s East Side to Rockefeller Center to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the United Nations, along with some 2,000 other customers and 100,000 buildings, from residential low-rises to commercial skyscrapers, the City of New York is one of the largest consumers of steam. The Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter in lower Manhattan began using steam to warm its sanctuary in 1882, the year the first steam generation plant went into operation in New York. The church has used steam ever since.

Some 30 billion pounds of steam every year flow beneath the streets of Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. While it is unknown to most New Yorkers (even though years ago David Letterman talked of the ‘radioactive steam’ wafting up from the city streets), Con Edison’s subterranean steam system is the biggest steam district in the world boasting an annual steam production more than double that of Paris, Europe’s largest system.

The New York City steam system carries steam from central power stations under the streets of Manhattan to heat, cool, or supply power to high rise buildings and businesses.  Cogeneration significantly increases the efficiency of fuel usage and thereby reduces the emission of pollutants and particulate matter and reduces the city’s carbon footprint.

So now I know this super steam system is the reason for the steaming manholes we see all over Manhattan. We did learn this is usually caused by external water being boiled because it came in contact with the freakin’ hot steam pipes, rather than leaks in the steam system itself.

A bit of history:

By the early 1900s, regulations emerged across the U.S. to promote rural electrification through the construction of centralized plants managed by regional utilities. These regulations not only promoted electrification throughout the countryside, but they also discouraged decentralized power generation, such as cogeneration.   By 1978, Congress recognized that efficiency at central power plants had stagnated and sought to encourage improved efficiency with the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA), which encouraged utilities to buy power from other energy producers.

Cogeneration plants proliferated, soon producing about 8 percent of all energy in the U.S. However, the bill left implementation and enforcement up to individual states, resulting in little or nothing being done in many parts of the country.

In 2008, Tom Casten, chairman of Recycled Energy Development, said, “We think we could make about 19 to 20 percent of U.S. electricity with heat that is currently thrown away by industry.”

Cogeneration, also called combined heat and power (CHP), is, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “an efficient, clean, and reliable approach to generating electricity and heat energy from a single fuel source.”  Combined heat and power can greatly increase a facility’s operational efficiency and decrease energy costs. And it is said that CHP reduces the emission of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change.

Outside the U.S., energy recycling is more common. Denmark is probably the most active energy recycler, obtaining about 55% of its energy from cogeneration and waste heat recovery. Other large countries, including Germany, Russia, and India, also obtain a much higher share of their energy from decentralized sources.