Get Outta Here!

This is a special presentation of APs Ground Game: Inside The Outbreak.State and local officials are receiving high marks for how they’ve been handling the coronavirus outbreak, less so for President Donald Trump and the federal government. AP Washington Bureau Chief Julie Pace and Director of Public Opinion Research Emily Swanson explain what this means based on several recent surveys done by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.You can listen and subscribe to all episodes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ap-ground-game-inside-the-outbreak/id1399328854

This is a special presentation of APs Ground Game: Inside The Outbreak.The coronavirus pandemic continues to take a devastating toll on The United Sates economy, with over 6 million Americans filing for unemployment. The disruptions due to coronavirus are causing a ripple effect, trickling into the day-to-day lives of people across the globe. AP National Writer and Director of Digital Innovation, Ted Anthony, has been covering the ripple effect of the virus and breaks it all down for us on this episode of Ground Game.You can listen and subscribe to all episodes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ap-ground-game-inside-the-outbreak/id1399328854

This is a special presentation of APs Ground Game: Inside The Outbreak. Spain has been hit especially hard by the coronavirus outbreak and the country’s death toll remains comparatively high despite a two-week lockdown. With more than 9,000 COVID-19 deaths documented, officials have been forced to convert hotels into hospitals and ice rinks into morgues. Madrid-based AP reporter Aritz Parra explains what is happening inside Spain’s overburdened medical facilities and funeral homes. You can listen and subscribe to all episodes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ap-ground-game-inside-the-outbreak/id1399328854

This is a special presentation of APs Ground Game: Inside The Outbreak. New York has been hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 75,000 cases confirmed so far. In New York and elsewhere, health officials are reviewing guidelines from sources including state governments and medical groups on how to fairly ration limited resources as hospitals prepare for a surge in patients. Central to these guidelines will be figuring out who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t. AP reporter Candice Choi explains what this all means. You can listen and subscribe to all episodes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ap-ground-game-inside-the-outbreak/id1399328854

This week's episode is a fond look back and a hopeful look into our future: traveling to watch baseball. AP Baseball Writer Ben Walker gives us an up close look at visiting spring training camps, and Digital Innovation Director Ted Anthony tells us why he's spent so much time bringing his family to minor league ballparks. On My Favorite Trip, former Top Gear co-host James May gives us an insight into some of the things he found fascinating in Japan during three months in the country last year for an Amazon Prime travelogue.

This is a special presentation of APs Ground Game: Inside The Outbreak - Inside Rural America In rural towns and already isolated communities across the country, the concerns about the coronavirus outbreak range from outsiders bringing the virus with them from bigger cities to economies that normally rely on tourism grinding to a halt. AP Reporter Gillian Flaccus takes us inside rural Oregon to discuss how the pandemic is playing out there. You can listen and subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ap-ground-game-inside-the-outbreak/id1399328854

Former Associated Press Moscow correspondent Andy Katell talks about his travels in Russia as a journalist and a tourist, taking the cover off a vast country largely unknown to Americans. In lieu of My Favorite Trip this week, Andy previews his seminar on sorting real information from fake news in a time of pandemic.

The Covid-19 restrictions on travel have turned the industry upside down and forced us to rethink what travel is all about. That's in the long term. In the short term, what are we supposed to do about getting refunds for what we've already booked? And when is it appropriate to start booking again? To answer those and other questions, we've called on Melanie Lieberman, travel editor at The Points Guy. And on My Favorite Trip, AP sports columnist Jim Litke recalls two of his favorite baseball assignments.

Elaine Sciolino takes us on a trip along what she considers the most romantic river in the world, from its source in Burgundy, through Paris and to the ocean at Le Havre. Sciolino, a former New York Times Paris bureau chief, is the author of The Seine: The River that Made Paris. And on My Favorite Trip: award winning fashion designer Prabal Gurung tells us why he loves New York.

The new coronavirus has turned the travel business upside down,. with quarantined cities and towns, postponed and canceled conferences and public events and uncertainty. A lot of uncertainty. Johanna Read (www.traveleater.net), a travel writer whose piece for Fodor's Travel is called Should You Change Your Travel Plans Due to the Coronavirus?, brings us up to date. And on My Favorite Trip, writer and photographer Susan Portnoy (www.insatiabletraveler.com) takes us to Antarctica and the Falkand Islands.

Even as streaming services cut into movie theater attendance, the number of film festivals around the world is exploding. There are now more than three thousand around the world, from the famous -- Cannes, Sundance and New York -- to the lesser-known -- the DC Black film festival in Washington, for example, and the film festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Our guide to visiting film festivals is Jake Coyle, who's been writing about movies at the AP for a decade. And on My Favorite Trip, actress Lucy Hale ("Katy Keene") talks about location filming in Fiji for "Fantasy Island."

Some commentators refer to it as the rise of Dark Tourism: the desire to visit places that played significant roles in disasters or evil acts. The history of slavery fits uneasily into that category. Uneasily, not because human ownership and forced labor aren't evil, but because visits to slavery sites are usually an attempt to educate, or grapple with a dark past. This week, Associated Press correspondent Russell Contreras takes us to slavery museums in Liverpool, England and Lagos, Portugal. And on My Favorite Trip: former AP travel editor Beth Harpaz recounts some of the singular joys of New Mexico.

Travel writer and former Get Outta Here host Beth Harpaz went to Nebraska to watch hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes linger at their rest stop on the North Platte River, and she can't stop thinking about it. She stops by to tell us why. And on My Favorite Trip: a woman raised in New Jersey reflects on a childhood visit to her grandmother's place in still legally segregated South Carolina in 1962.

A visit to San Miguel de Allende, a Mexican town with a rich cultural and architectural history and a vibrant artistic and international present. And on My Favorite Trip, Hall of Fame pastelist Richard McKinley takes time from leading a nine-day workshop to recall a painting trip to Provence.

The novelist John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden) was a giant of American literature and a peripatetic traveler. He also wrote one of the most charming of travel books, Travels with Charley, about a journey he took with his dog in 1960 to reacquaint himself with the country he was famous for describing. Steinbeck's widow Elaine accompanied him on most of his travels in the 18 years of their marriage. She was a prolific letter writer all of her adult life, and her letters and snapshots of their trips comprise the heart of a Steinbeck auction scheduled for February 27th in New Jersey. Our guide for this dive into Steinbeckiana is Charlie Potters, a consulting archivist for the auction house Curated Estates. And on My Favorite Trip: more Steinbeck. A couple of excerpts from Travels with Charley.

The Super Bowl is back in a familiar spot: Miami, which is playing host to the NFL championship for a record eleventh time But a lot has changed, both in Miami tourism and the hoopla surrounding the game, in the ten years since Miami's last Super Bowl. Our guide to the scene for 2020 is Bill Talbert, CEO of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. And on My Favorite Trip, AP college football writer Ralph Russo takes us from the 2001-2 Super Bowl to the snows of Kilimanjaro.

Former Associated Press Tokyo bureau chief Malcolm Foster was expecting gorgeous scenery when he took his family on vacation in New Zealand. They're big fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, which were shot there. But they were gobsmacked by just how beautiful it was. Malcolm Foster reports on traveling through southern New Zealand with his wife and two teenage sons in the family's first camper van trip. And on My Favorite Trip: an upcoming auction takes us inside the travels of the Nobel Prize novelist John Steinbeck in the 1950s and '60s.

Most of the headlines about Ukraine have centered on impeachment and the war with Russia for control of the eastern half of the country. AP Rome correspondent Frances D'Emilio paid a visit to Chernivtsi, a charming, bustling college town a university campus that's a UNESCO World Heritage site. And on My Favorite Trip, New York correspondent Deepti Hajela reports on a visit to Antarctica.

Associated Press News Director Peter Prengaman, newly relocated from South America to Phoenix, grabs his flashlight, black light and salad tongs — and indulges a longtime fascination with scorpions on a hunt in an Arizona state park. On My Favorite Trip, Bishop Briggs on Hong Kong.

A year ago, the Lonely Planet guide called Sri Lanka the place to go in 2019. We check in with AP New Delhi correspondent Emily Schmall on the tea plantations, the trains, the elephants, the beaches -- and the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings in the commercial capital of Colombo. Plus: In the spot where we usually do My Favorite Trip, we'll look at a new survey of what kind of behavior travelers find acceptable and not acceptable on board a jetliner. Spoiler alert: we don't care for snakes on a plane.