NEW YORK

Fourteen American Eagle flights were stuck on the tarmac at Chicago O’Hare for more than three hours on a single day in May when thunderstorms led to hundreds of cancelled flights.

The Department of Transportation said Thursday that a total of 16 planes waited on runways for more than three hours that month, the most recent for which statistics are available. That’s four times the highest number of any month since the rule threatening huge fines for such delays was implemented on April 29 of last year.

Before May, there were only 20 tarmac delays of three hours or more. No airlines have been fined yet because the government hasn’t determined that any of the delays were warranted one.

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Thanks to HAL guest Carol for sending in some fun pictures of her recent Veendam voyage.

The Veendam looked beautiful in Hamilton. Some of our party of 15 loved Bermuda more than the rest of us. – Carol

The internet has liberated travellers. It makes us more independent; it enables us to cut out the middle man, hunt for bargains, and check the latest information on sights and hotels that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. But it also makes us more vulnerable. We can’t always be sure that a site is legitimate, that our booking will be honoured, or that we won’t be overcharged.

One of the most basic problems that I, and I’m sure many other travellers face is trying to track down official websites. If you don’t know the correct address, you are reliant on the results thrown up by Google or a similar search engine.

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If you’ve ever done a working holiday in an English-speaking country, you’ve probably had loads of fun and perhaps even met people from your home country.

There’s not much of a culture-shock and it’s fairly easy to adapt to your new environment (apart from the intense cold winter nights in Toronto, where you think an appendage or two may freeze and snap off).

Doing a working holiday in Central or Eastern Europe, is a very different experience however. There’s a much bigger cultural divide, which makes it more challenging but more interesting as well.

In 2006, I applied for a Working Holiday Visa for the Czech Republic on a whim.

My working holiday in the UK was almost up and I didn’t want to go home yet. So I looked

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Ice hotels, underwater luxury and hotels built into tiny Dutch harbour cranes not float you boat? Between us, Travbuddies have certainly tracked down an extremely impressive selection of the wacky, inspiring and downright bizarre, but Berlin’s Propeller Island hotel might just top them all for sheer ridiculousness.

Described as an inhabitable work of art, the purpose of the hotel is a dual one: to offer incredibly odd accommodation, and to provide a space for audio and visual artist Lars Stroschen to display his art in the most public of arenas.

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