Today is Groundhog Day, which always seems the unofficial point at which most people take a look at Old Man Winter, shake their fists, and say, okay man, enough is enough. It’s clear to me, however, that none of those people have been to Mammoth Mountain, set in the Sierra Nevada, where the fun of winter is very much alive, embraced, and holding sway.

When the news broke last week that a flight was diverted due to a suspicious passenger engaged in a prayer ritual, I couldn’t help but remember a trans-continental flight I was on, many years earlier, to Jerusalem. At the time I was a very nervous flyer, the kind who has to stay awake all flight long to make sure “nothing happens.”

It is with heavy hearts that we at the Window Seat have been watching the coverage of the disaster in Haiti. Political instability, economic poverty, and a series of natural disasters have kept many would-be tourists from experiencing the rich culture and beautiful shores of this small country--but this has not kept the travel industry from responding with donations and acts of charity. Here’s how a few travel companies have stepped up to help.

Travelocity: As of Tuesday, 1/19, Travelocity/Sabre Holdings and its employees have already committed $30,000 to relief efforts.

Pity the poor Florida traveler right now. Maybe this is their one beach vacation for the year, the one they’ve been saving up for, and instead of frolicking in the warm waves and pulling up fish from the sea, they’re shivering on the beach in a scarf and wishing for mittens. The current cold wave gripping much of the country is treating Florida especially hard, threatening staple crops like the state’s ubiquitous oranges, and keeping the fishing charters tied up in harbor due to lack of interest.

But all is not lost if you’re a tourist on a Florida vacation right now. Yes, if you were planning on beaches and suntans, you may have to call an audible, but there is much you can still do in the Sunshine State that doesn’t require warm temps and, well, sun.

With the start of a new year and a new decade, Dubai unveiled what is now the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, which stretches to a height of 2,717 feet. To put that in perspective, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Mt. Tamalpais reaches a height of 2,574 feet, which means that Dubai’s new building is taller than a mountain.

In addition to apartments and offices, the world’s highest swimming pool and mosque, and a hotel designed by Georgio Armani, the building will also have something for tourists to add to their “must-do” lists: the observation deck on the 124th floor, which boasts views beyond the cityscape into the surrounding desert and toward human-made islands in the shapes of palm trees.

This weekend, along with a sizable portion of the rest of the country, I saw the movie Avatar. Through my 3-D glasses, I entered into the bioluminescent forestlands of a fictional distant moon named Pandora, where flowers bloomed rampantly, trees stretched into the skies, and rivers glowed. Although the plot was a little trite and silly, the Pandora landscape was a true escape. Much like an avatar, while my body sat in a darkened theater surrounded by hundreds of others in our dorky glasses, the rest of me entered into this forest world for 2 ½ hours. On a year when I’d opted not to travel for the holidays, this movie was my ticket to a realm beyond San Francisco, somewhere exotic and indelible—and not once did I have to step on a plane.

Recently, I watched an episode of MTV’s Jersey Shore. Have you seen it? In the show, a group of housemates spent their days drinking, clubbing, partying, arguing, hooking up, and then getting up the next morning to do it all over again. Permanent residents of the region say that the show is giving them a bad name, that there’s much more to the Jersey Shore than what you see in a snippet of summer when the town’s population practically quadruples.

I’ve never been to the Jersey Shore, but I grew up each summer going to the Delaware shore, which isn’t all that far away. The beach I went to was one of those seasonal towns where summer swelled the local population to unprecedented numbers. And I could see how permanent residents might resent that. Suddenly, their highways were crowded, their stores and restaurants jam packed, and their beaches wall to wall with colorful umbrellas and towels, boom-boxes and beer bottles.

Ten years ago at this time we were worried about Y2K, listening to Christina Aguilera singing “Genie in a Bottle” on our disc-mans, and strolling through airport security with our shoes on and liquids in tow. Much has changed in the past decade, and, as we approach 2010, we face an entirely different travel landscape than we could have imagined at the tail end of 1999.

It never would have occurred to me, for example, that one day, airlines would stop serving peanuts, let alone meals. Peanuts and flights went hand in hand like putting your seat upright and buckling your seatbelt before the plane took off. And airline meals were standard on long flights—and often so bad they became the butt of many jokes. Looking forward to just how bad it would be was part of the fun of the flight experience.

What are some of the most expensive flight itineraries out there right now on planet Earth? As an experiment, I plugged in San Francisco as my departure city and Dubai as my destination (I picked Dubai at random), and did a search for first-class flight tickets over the Christmas holiday. Most flights I pulled up were in the $6,000 range, although one flight actually went for a whopping $19,517! At least it was direct!

Richard Branson is betting you’d pay $200,000 for a direct trip to outer space (which is quite a stretch from Dubai), and so far, he’s found 300 takers, even though the flights won’t even begin until 2011 at the very earliest, will only last for 2 ½ hours each (with less than five minutes of zero gravity), and will require a few days of training beforehand.

This Thanksgiving, after two full days of tweeting from the Denver airport, I went to visit my family in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. It’s an area filled with tourist attractions, from the many esteemed Smithsonian museums and national memorials to the performing arts at the Kennedy Center and live music in clubs all over the city. But despite all this, the thing I almost always do when I’m there is go to the decidedly unflashy C&O Canal towpath and take a walk, no matter what the season.