What do you do on layovers?

You can often land up wasting a lot of time in airports during layovers. Because I, as an Indian, need a visa to go practically anywhere (except Jamaica!), I get frustrated by the visa process and try my best not to have layovers where, if I don’t have a visa, I have to vegetate at the airport.

However, I have hosted many friends flying through Dubai and Madrid, with layovers for a day or two, and deciding the “best” things to do with them when they are visiting for such a short time, is definitley challenging.

Conde Nast Traveler held a contest over summer where readers wrote in to suggest cool layover activities in various cities. They received approximately 200 comments from which 6 winners were selected. Now, Conde Nast Traveler writer Michael Kinsley is on a round-the-world trip doing the activities suggested by those 6.

As written in The Perrin Post, his itinerary is: “Seattle-Los Angeles-Auckland-Singapore-Dubai-Zurich-Amsterdam-London-Reykjavik-Copenhagen-Seattle. In L.A. he’ll go to the beach, in Auckland he’ll take a segway tour of the city, in Dubai he’ll hit the Mall of the Emirates for shopping and skiing, in Amsterdam he’ll go to the Red Light District to smoke a joint, at Heathrow he’ll dine at The Fat Duck in nearby Bray, and in Reykjavik he’ll soak in the Blue Lagoon.”

He will be blogging the entire trip, which you can read here.

This trip has unique-value, no? What do you do on layovers?