Students fly discount standby on
AirTran has this cool discount standby deal for the 18 to 22 Tribe called AirTran U. How does it work? Go to the site and sign up for their A+ Rewards frequent-flier program. Decide where you want to go. Say, Baltimore. Hop the Blue Line to Logan two hours before takeoff, ask the guys at the counter to put you on the list, proudly show your ID, and then hang out. If there's an empty seat, you score. What's the cost? It's $69 one way for a short flight, which means if you need to make a connection it's $69 x 2. A longer nonstop, like to the left coast, is $99.
Remember: You can only get these seats if there is one available ands there are mondo blackout dates -- like many Spring Breaks.
PAUL MAKISHIMA
Get the shows on the road
Renting a car on your next vacation? If you've got the kids in tow, avoid those dreaded boredom meltdowns by keeping them occupied with a media player preloaded with 40 hours of Nickelodeon shows. Hertz is offering the media player, called "Nick on the Go," for $17 a day. (If you rent for five days, you get the sixth and seventh days free.) Hertz offers the media player at Logan Airport and airports in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago (O'Hare), Dallas/Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Oakland, Orange County, Orlando, Palm Beach, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Tampa. Programming runs the gamut from "Blue's Clues" and "Dora the Explorer" for the preschool set to "Drake & Josh" and "Zoey 101" for older kids.
CHRIS MURPHY
The world in hand
If you have read and relished Ryszard Kapuscinski's "Travels With Herodotus" (Knopf, 288 pp., $25), you should know about its little sort-of-siblings. Penguin's Great Journeys series is 20 books (4-by-7-inch paperbacks, $10 and about 100 pp. each). Marco Polo, Herodotus, Richard Burton, Isabella Bird, the writers are scientists, pirates, merchants, soldiers, settlers, and they span millennia and describe places on the planet, astonishing, disturbing, dangerous, beautiful, mysterious places, now utterly changed by exploration and exploitation. One conjures up a fellow reader in some other time marveling at these amazing tales and never dreaming how much would vanish.
JULIE DALTON
