Great Guides From Up-and-Coming Nextstoppers

In our last few posts we've been featuring some of the great contributions from our top nextstoppers and trying to share a bit more background on what makes them tick.

Today we'd like to start a new feature on the blog to feature members who have only recently discovered nextstop but have already created some amazing guides. These are members who have created guides that were "liked" by other nextstoppers, and who have shared some interesting, quirky, or unique recommendations that caught our eye.


ManaliKarma, has led us through beautiful guides for Laos, Nepal, Bhutan, and straight into India:


CHGO2PHXSUE has created a few fantastic guides that have garnered their fair share of 'likes'. One in particular is very popular:


Choochter has introduced us to everywhere from the Scottish Highlands to the Yucatan Peninsula. The following guide gives a picture of true Edinburgh which Choochter calls home:


And last but certainly not least, LouPop13 created a number of incredibly fun guides from Free Summer Concerts in SoCal to Weird and Wonderful Places in California:


To browse additional interesting Nextstoppers, you can visit the "Top Nextstoppers" page where you can see a list of the top contributors. Stay tuned for next week when we'll feature more up-and-coming Nextstoppers in this weekly feature on our blog.

nextstop Q&A with wanderingpops

One of the best parts about working at nextstop is getting to know different members of the nextstop community through their recommendations and guides. We noticed a couple epic guides by one nextstopper, wanderingpops:






Every now and then on the nextstop blog we like to take a moment to do a quick interview with a top nextstopper to get to know them a bit better. The following is a Q&A with wanderingpops:

nextstop: So tell us a bit about you, your background and how you got into traveling around the U.S.

wanderingpops: I grew up in a small town in TN and never really gained a desire to travel until I was married and had the opportunity to travel some for work. Then my wife and I began taking our kids on bigger and better vacations. But the travel bug really grabbed me after we moved to WA state. While living there my wife and I did a 6732 mile road trip loop from WA to TN and back for our 20th anniversary. We traveled through 20 states, camped, stayed in KOA kabins, stayed in a casino near Vegas because 2 storms were coming and Jodi wouldn't camp and a couple nights just stayed in hotels. While living in WA we also visited Canada a few times and just before moving back to TN became certified divers and spent a week at Scuba Club Cozumel in Mexico. The more we see and experience in the world the more we want to explore.

NS: You've got a website barefootroadtrip.com, what was the inspiration? How does it fit with nextstop?

WP: I started barefootroadtrip after Sara, that I work with and is our webmaster, took my suggestions for a couple of trips, had a wonderful time at each place and suggested I start a site. She has the expertise and I have the gift of gab and a lot of stories and photos. She wants me to turn it into a "trip suggestion" blog and I will be glad to if we can make it work. We link my nextstop guides on the front page and on each linked page. Nextstop was really my inspiration. I found the site through the scuba challenge popping up on Facebook and fell immediately in love. I have spent more time on nextstop since I found it than I have traveling.

NS: From looking at all your recommendations, it's clear that you've been all over the country. Do you have a favorite moment while traveling?

WP: That is the easiest of all questions to answer. I LOVE mountain biking and I have hiked all my life, but the single most memorable moment in my travels happened at about 1:30 in the a.m. in October 0f 2002 while on the anniversary road trip I mentioned before. We were camped, in the rain again, at the KOA in Williams, AZ just south of the Grand Canyon. We were sleeping comfortably in our tent when all of a sudden we both sat bolt up and realized that what startled us awake was a bull elk in rut bugling [ns: We didn't know what this was either. Here's a great example] less than 150 yards from the tent. I have never forgotten what that sounded like.

NS: So what's next on your list? Where are the places you can't wait to go?

WP: Mountain biking in Utah, backpacking in AK (the only of the US states I haven't yet visited) and diving off the northern coast of South America (Belize, Bonaire and Aruba for example). And I cannot wait to do all three and get to my laptop so I can post them on both sites. See you on the road.

NS: Well, you just might be able to find a few great places around here for just that sort of thing!

We wish all the best to wanderingpops on his roadtrips, and look forward to checking in to see all his travels in the future. For more on wanderingpops, you can find him on nextstop and at his website: barefootroadtrip.com.

DeborahMcCoy's "My Travel Principles"

[The following is a guest post, by one of our top nextstoppers: DeborahMcCoy:]

Being a tourist means stepping out of the comfort zone and taking a chance on the kindness of strangers. Money and miles cannot buy the satisfaction that results from traveling to a new place and figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B when I “don’t speak the language” or when I am clearly “not from here.”

The following Travel Guides most embody my travel principles:

In late November 2008 an out-of-town friend called to ask if I could take a Japanese reporter around Chicago to visit Obama sites. My itinerary for a whirlwind Obama Tour: Hyde Park on public transportation, an Operation PUSH meeting led by Jesse Jackson, and a service at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Church. These places and leaders gave my new friend a sense of Barack Obama as a community organizer and exposed her to a part of Chicago that would have been less accessible without a guide. I found myself visiting churches and leaders in my hometown as destinations and realizing that they deserve to be destinations.

Three years ago the college I attend on weekends relocated from Waukegan, Illinois to the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In between classes I would walk around the neighborhood with my camera and my notebook and discovered an abundance of cultural treasures and history hiding in plain sight. The department of tourism ignores 80% of my fair city. That 80% is where I want to continue my explorations.

My first preference when traveling abroad is to travel to countries that seem challenging to many. Africa and India are on the top of the list. In 2000 my daughter agreed to visit Africa with me over spring break. After carefully considering time and money limitations we chose Morocco and booked an escorted tour. What a wonderful time and an amazing country. But we concluded that the best way to experience another country is to encounter as an independent traveler on its own terms.

I'm a walker. The world looks different as a pedestrian. I’ve walked the four miles from my home to my job downtown – it takes an hour at a comfortable pace. Biking takes half an hour. The more I bike the easier it gets and the better I feel physically. I smile at pedestrians, drivers and other bikers, and save money that is better spent traveling further afield. Friends see me biking and know that the only special qualifications I have are a commitment to putting one foot in front of the other and following my curiosity.

Back to the subject of communicating, me do speak bad French and bad Spanish. I try to learn a few sentences in the local language. My proudest moment occurred in Beijing in 1999. The first night I traveled down a side street to a little storefront café. I pointed to an entrée. Then I looked at the proprietor and uttered the sentence I had been practicing for a month. "Please may I have a beer thank you.“ He smiled and brought me a beer."

[To see more of Deborah's guides, visit her nextstop profile page]

What a day!

Now that things are quieting down a bit, I just wanted to give a brief update on our launch.

First and foremost, welcome to all the new nextstoppers! We've seen some great new guides, from an art tour in New York by Artchick1 to a great round up of all the best places in Baltimore by LaVieEnCharmCity. We're really looking forward to hearing more about the places our new members love.

Second, I wanted to congratulate all of the nextstoppers who were featured in some of the great articles that were written about the launch, and thank the reporters who took the time to talk with us and write about nextstop.

• Josh Lowenson at cnet took an in depth look at nextstop, featured a screen shot of troy's Hidden San Francisco and made a nextstop profile of his own.
• Brad Stone at the New York Times mentioned troy's Hidden San Francisco as well as juliej's Exploring the Mission.
• On Mashable, Ben Parr included screen shots of troy's Hidden San Francisco and DeborahMcCoy's profile.
• Lifehacker's Azadeh Ensha mentioned dougnboston's Best Beer Bars in the World and bonjourdoll's Go Play Portland.
  
• On GigaOm, Paul Bonanos wrote about JenniferFerris's guide to Denver vegan hangouts, sharon's guide to the Basque coast, and troy's ever popular Places to Get Mugged in San Francisco.
• Anthony Ha at VentureBeat featured a screen shot of sallycat's Buenos Aires guide, and mentioned juliej's Exploring the Mission and izzy's Bay to Breakers Spots.
• Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb gave some link-love to our our Salt Lake City and Vegetarian in New York challenges.
• pbarry's recommendation for Lindeman's was featured in Joe Tartakoff's story in paidContent.
• Nancy Blair over at USA Today discovered sallycat's BA guide as well -- double points for sallycat!

As you can see there was some great coverage for the launch, which was only possible because nextstoppers like those mentioned above took the time share some of the places they love most. So thanks, and congratulations again to troy, juliej, izzy, pbarry, bonjourdoll, dougnboston, sallycat, sharon, and JenniferFerris!

As I said in my last post, a launch is just the beginning. We're excited to have reached this point, but even more excited to keep working to make nextstop more useful every day. Keep the feedback coming!

nextstop: Launch!

It was just over a year ago that Adrian, Charles, and I started nextstop with a simple idea: If we built a service where people could easily share the things they really love to do where they live and where they've been, the combined result would be a fantastic resource for discovering authentic experiences -- close to home, or when traveling to the other side of the world.

It's been a great year working with the nextstop community to better understand how to make this idea a reality, and watching people create some of the most amazing guides to the things that they love to do. Whether it's sharon's guides to Basque villages (and architecture in Sydney, and Venice, and ...) or DeborahMcCoy's guides to every Chicago neighborhood I never knew existed, or dougnboston's definitive guide to the best beer bars in the world, it's been so much fun to see our community help each other and the world discover hidden gems that too often get missed. Already we've had contributions from nextstoppers in over 100 countries around the globe!

Today, after many iterations and lots of feedback from our early members, we're excited to be officially launching nextstop to the public.

What does this mean?

Existing nextstoppers will be seeing a few new faces around, so please say hello. You may also want to take a look at some of the new personalization features that we're launching today.

	On your profile page, we now suggest nextstoppers who have recommended some of the same places as you, with the thought that you might be interested in other things they recommend. If you follow them, you will get updates on their new recommendations and guides.
On pages about a recommended place, we now show other similar recommendations that you might enjoy, based on the recommendations of other people who recommended the place you are looking at. In addition, nextstop shows you nearby recommendations that you might want to explore when you are in the neighborhood.
	On location pages, you can now browse recommendations and guides by nextstoppers that you are following. This makes it easier to hone in on recommendations from people you trust.

If you're discovering nextstop for the first time, welcome! We're still just getting started on this ambitious project in many ways, and we're excited to hear more about the places and experiences you love. If you're looking for more information, you can take a look at our overview or check out the resources in our community section. Members of the press may be interested in our press FAQ.



As always, if you have feedback -- comments, suggestions, complaints -- we'd love to hear from you in our forum. nextstop will always be growing and changing, and the more we hear from you about what's working well -- and not so well -- the faster we can improve.

Featured nextstopper: Sharon

Every now and then, we notice a nextstopper who has made significant contributions to the the nextstop community. Sharon is one of our earliest users, and to date, has created some of the most visually stunning and worldly guides on nextstop. Whether she's detailing the ins and outs of small Spanish Towns like Trujillo or cataloging Sydney's diverse architecture, you can always count on Sharon for a great guide. We sat down with Sharon (over email, of course), to ask her a few questions so we could get to know the Sharon we see on nextstop every day:

nextstop: Everyone on nextstop has such an interesting story about where they came from, and how they got to where they are now. What's yours?

Sharon: I grew up in Australia, in a small town in the Blue Mountains a couple of hours west of Sydney. I spent most of my teenage years plotting my escape, and moved to Sydney when I was 19. I spent the next 15 years or so living in Sydney, which i loved and will always be my home town, and then I decided to try my luck in London... Between Sydney and London I spent four months traveling around Europe and it was at this time that I met my future husband in San Sebastian, Spain. I moved to London, we kept in contact and after nearly 2 years in London we decided to give married life a go and so I moved to his part of the world (Basque Country, in the North of Spain)... and so here i am, in the small town of Arrasate-Mondragon, learning Spanish, grappling with the fact that there's also another indigenous language in this region (Euskera), and generally trying to assimilate!

NS: From your guides, it's clear you love to travel all over. What got you traveling so much?

S: Why does anyone travel? Probably for me it was the urge to see for myself those places that I'd only ever read about in books. It's an opportunity to take a peek into lifestyles different to your own; do new things; discover new food, new places, new people; get a sense of history. And the thing about Australia is that it's so far from anywhere, and I still get a childish kick out of how small Europe is, you can go to a different country for lunch!

NS: Ok, so you've been to all these places, and seen so many interesting sites. What is your favorite place you've ever been?

S: Hmm... does it have to be just one?

A month in Peru and Bolivia doing things like hiking the Inca trail to Machu Pichu certainly stands out. Also doing the Camino de Santiago (walking across Spain from France to the west coast) was pretty incredible. (I haven't done any recommendations about either of these yet) and anywhere in Portugal is a good destination in my mind.

NS: And what's one place you've never been, but would love to go?

S: I would love to spend a good chunk of time traveling from Mexico down to Argentina (once they've cleared up that little issue with the swine flu of course). And a month sailing around the Greek Isles wouldn't be bad either. Oh and Turkey, must get to Turkey one day...

For more of Sharon's Travels, you can view her favorite spots around the world by viewing on her profile, or perusing one of her guides:

Nextstop Challenges Raise $1000 for Charity

Today we had the great pleasure of donating $1000 to two charities: The Farm Sanctuary and The Humane Society of the US as part of our challenges program. We've been truly excited about how passionate nextstoppers are, and how the community came together for these great causes. Its been amazing to see people all over the world work together to create such great resources for others. Here are quick summaries of the two challenges and a selected guide from each:

Places Dogs Can't Resist
Here's one guide we thought was particularly good!:



Great Spots for Vegetarians and Vegans
Vegetarians and Vegans from all over the U.S. came together to recommend their favorite spots. Here's one of our favorite guides: