The Shores Resort & Spa is offering luxury front row seats to the last-ever night launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor on February 7, 2010 at 4:39am. Guests of The Shores Resort, which is located 70 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, will have shoreline seats and enjoy the following perks for the blast off:

• - Overnight deluxe accommodations
• - “Shores Coffee”, a variation on Irish Coffee or “Shores Hot Chocolate”
• - “S’Mores at Four” at oceanside fire pits
• - Breakfast treats, including Tang
• - Champagne toast at launch
• - Memento photo

The “Shuttle Launch” package starts at $169 per room.

To reserve visit The Shores Resort & Spa website.

From now until January, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are offering a holiday gift of free wifi at 47 airports around the country. Flight delays seem to happen more often during the holidays, so on the off chance that your flight gets delayed, you can at least stay connected.

I ran across a handy wifi guide for airports on the Kayak site and was surprised how many of the smaller airports already offer free wifi year round. Very few of the major airports offer free wifi – so its nice that the big three search giants corrected this Scrooge-like behavior by the airports with their free holiday wifi promotion. Happy holiday travels!

Airport wifi guide

On Veteran’s Day (Wednesday, November 11), Cosmo will drive around New York City collecting kisses for our boys overseas. Participants can kiss a postcard with Maybelline-provided ColorSensational lipstick, and then add a note of support to a deployed soldier.

For every kiss, Cosmo and Maybelline will donate $1 to the USO organization.

Via: Cosmo

If you haven’t already booked your flights for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, you may want to do it soon. There are fewer flights offered this year, so holiday ticket prices are going up fast. Just within the last week Thanksgiving airfares have increased by 10%.

For those of you who still need tickets, here are some tips for getting the best Thanksgiving fares.

Via: NYTimes

Wondering what you’ll be this Halloween? How about a zombie? Every year, Thrill the World hosts a global event, inviting the world to dance to Thriller at the same time. The 2009 event is scheduled for this Saturday, October 24 in the U.S. (8:30pm EST, 5:30pm PST) and is expected to be the biggest event yet.

The goal is to set a new Guinness World Record, so to participate, register at the Thrill the World site, learn the dance and show up as your favorite zombie for the event in your area.

Via: Thrill the World | zombie make-up tips

It’s not often that a movie comes along and in its wake you see visible differences in those who watched it. Julie & Julia is about two true stories of Julia Child and a blogger who attempts within a year to make every recipe in Julia Child’s 752 page classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julie & Julia has generated new interest in the culinary arts and everyone - especially the tasters of these culinary creations – is benefiting. After almost 50 years of its publishing, Mastering the Art of French Cooking has jumped to #1 in its category on the New York Times bestseller list.

I’m not a serious cook, but I do love to bake. I belong to a Meet-up group called Iron Cupcake (the Iron Chef of the cupcake world). Every month we’re given a challenge (theme or required ingredient) and then competitors bake mini-cupcakes which are judged and the winner is announced. Since the movie, group attendance has tripled in size to over 100.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s definitely worth watching. And if it inspires you to improve your skills, grab some girlfriends and stop by a free Williams Sonoma class, check-out Yelp for an informal cooking class , or take a culinary vacation. But don’t stop there – host a simple get together using your new found culinary skills. I just did and I’m reminded how happy people are when they can relax and enjoy good food together.

Bon appetit!

For those of us who are avid bargain hunters there’s a new travel site just for us. Voyij (pronounced “voyage”) comes from the creators of SideStep and scours the web for the best travel deals. Other sites send out travel deal alerts but most don’t tell you what days you need to travel to actually get the advertised specials.

I tried out Voyij by looking for all the roundtrip flights for the next 2 weeks that originated from my home airport and cost less than $200.

After I used the filtering options to indicate the most I wanted to pay, it quickly filtered thousands of initial deal results down to 11 sales that fit what I was looking for. Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Chicago were some of the destinations – so many fun places to visit! With each sale I could see the dates I would need to travel to qualify for the deal. Voyij is free, easy to use and includes deals and specials on airfares, hotels and vacation packages.

See: Voyij.com

Flagstaff is one of those towns not many people know about, but is definitely worth a visit. Located just an hour and half north of Phoenix, Flagstaff is a quaint college/ski town set in the mountains. Because of its high elevation, its summers are much cooler than Phoenix and it offers good skiing in the winter.

A group of us spent the 4th of July weekend in Flagstaff and we knew we’d made a good choice when we arrived on Friday evening. Although the downtown is small there are plenty of restaurants, hotels and activities to choose from. The town’s central park was our first stop, where the lawn was filled with people relaxing and listening to a rock band performing. Since it was the first Friday of the month, the art galleries were hosting ArtWalk where people are encouraged to go gallery hopping and can enjoy refreshments along the way.

After a Mexican dinner at San Felipe’s we walked around the corner to a Michael Jackson dance party tribute at the Orpheum. Hundreds of people were there, some in full Michael Jackson attire, and all were dancing to his greatest hits.

On Saturday morning, after stopping in at Late for the Train for much needed coffee, we made our way to the town’s 4th of July parade. It was a perfect small town parade, featuring a dog drill team, vintage tractors and several distinguished veterans including the Navajo code talkers from WWII. That evening the symphony played in an outdoor amphitheater followed by fireworks at dusk. All in all, a great place to spend the 4th of July.