OpenRoad.tv - it helps you imagine and plan your own journeys

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edit - The Traveler's Video Guide to the American West

We hope you enjoy OpenRoad.TV and that it helps you imagine and plan your own journeys in the American West, including Alaska and Hawaii. We’ve spent many years traveling the West and telling stories of our trips on video for KRON Television in San Francisco. We’ll give you our best stories and recommendations and ask you to send us your ideas, experiences and tips in words, pictures and video. Together, we can build a rich resource for anyone interested in following the OpenRoad wherever it leads, and we can create a large and dynamic community of fellow travelers. Most of all, we can have a good time while appreciating and caring for this spectacular place on earth. We’ll be starting in northern California and also in and around Las Vegas and the desert Southwest. We’ll soon add material from Hawaii and elsewhere in the West. But don’t wait for us. We’d love to hear from you wherever you travel. If you’d like to know more about who we are and our operating values, take a moment to watch our "What's OpenRoad.TV?" video or read more About Us below. In any case, have fun on the OpenRoad, online and in real life.

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What's OpenRoad.TV? <<---Video Introduction to OpenRoad.TV

A note from the site's co-founders Doug McConnell and Carl Bidleman:

Who We Are

In the spring of 1993, we began a friendship and working association, and they both have grown pretty strong over the years. We love to explore roads, alleys and paths less-traveled in search of great adventures, terrific characters and memorable stories. We've found literally thousands of them producing a twice-weekly television series for KRON-TV in San Francisco. While Doug continues to happily host Nissan's Bay Area Backroads on KRON and hopes you watch it if you can, (BayAreaBackroads.com) we've long wanted to build a global online travel community that grows out of the interests we and millions of others share in discovering unexpected treasures hidden, often in plain sight, along the OpenRoad.

What This Website Is About

We are excited about OpenRoad.TV. We are stocking it with all the video, knowledge and insights we've compiled over the years and continue to collect. We're putting it into easily accessible geographical and categorical contexts, and we invite you to vastly enrich it by adding your own stories, photographs and videos. Between you and us, we can develop a website that's extensive, deep, entertaining and informative, and becomes a terrific resource to help us all imagine, plan and book our travels and get to know intriguing fellow travelers in the process. We're looking forward to learning from all of you and having a very good time, too.

What This Website Covers and How It Will Grow

We've started OpenRoad.TV with about 100 of our favorite stories and destinations close to our home base in northern California and also in and around Las Vegas and the desert Southwest, as well as Alaska. The videos are drawn from the vast library we've generated while producing Bay Area Backroads. We'll continue adding new videos, notes and useful links every week from California, Hawaii and throughout the American West. That's our area of special expertise. Doug has spent a lifetime traveling, living and working throughout the region from Alaska to Arizona, and Montana to Hawaii. Doug's a fifth-generation westerner, but both of us have a deep affection for this immense, beautiful and fascinating region. In time, we'll cover hundreds and hundreds of western locations with our videos and related content, and we hope you add many thousands more. We can hardly wait to see and read your stories about travel in the West and get the benefit of your suggestions and ideas for places to go, people to meet and things to do in the West ... and beyond.

Although we'll concentrate on the West, we won't be limited to it, and you shouldn't be either. In the months ahead, we'll add fresh material of our own from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Costa Rica, and other nations and regions we enjoy exploring, and we hope you do as well. OpenRoad.TV will be as much about a state of mind and an approach to travel as it will be about a specific region. We believe in slowing down, looking around and being open to what the world has to offer no matter where we go. If we take the time to listen, people everywhere will always tell fabulous stories worth hearing. Life is short, the world is large and we don't want to miss a thing. The OpenRoad can lead down the block or around the world, and we encourage you to send us your tales from near and far.

edit Video Travelogues

Explore by Interest Category:

Explore by Geography:

Alaska

edit Sample Video Story Pages

Cruising Alaska's Inside Passage

Canyoneering near Zion Park

Monterey Bay Aquarium Inside Look

Santa Cruz by Historic Rail

edit About OpenRoad.TV's Host Doug McConnell

Doug McConnell is a television journalist who has focused on environmental issues, with programs on the air continuously since 1982. He has created, produced and hosted many series, special programs, and news projects for local, national and international distribution. His broadcast awards include multiple Emmys, an Iris, and a Gabriel.

Since 1993, McConnell has been the host and senior editor of the Bay Area Backroads television program in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has also authored a book by the same name. "Backroads" explores the paths less traveled in northern California and beyond. "Backroads" is consistently the highest-rated locally produced, non-news program in the nation's sixth-largest market.

In addition to "Bay Area Backroads," McConnell's TV programs include:

Mac and Mutley, Producer and Host, KPIX-TV, Discovery Channel USA, Discovery International, and Westinghouse International
The Adventurers, Host, Discovery USA and Discovery International
Wild Things, Host, Discovery USA
Wild Guide, Narrator, Westinghouse International and Discovery’s Animal Planet Channel
Petline, Co-Host, Discovery’s Animal Planet Channel
Preview Vacation Bargains, Co-Host, NBC stations in eight cities
Pacific Currents, Producer and Host, KPIX-TV
KING 5 Magazine, Producer and Reporter, KING-TV in Seattle

McConnell’s national specials and mini-series include:

Discoveries of a Lost Voyage, Co-Host, Discovery USA
Secrets of Alcatraz, Producer and Host, Discovery USA
Secrets of Alcatraz: Return to the Rock, Producer and Host, PBS
Secrets of the Gold Rush, Producer and Host, PBS
Secrets of the Wine Country, Producer and Host, PBS
Big Cat Tales, Host, Discovery USA
Prime Time Primates, Host, Discovery USA
The Crusaders, Pilot, Producer and Reporter, Buena Vista Television

McConnell received an Master's degree in Political Science from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University (1968), and a Bachelor's degree in Government from Pomona College (1967).

Since 1983, McConnell has lived in the Bay Area with his wife, two sons, and a bevy of pets. He maintains a busy schedule of community activities and has been honored recently by the Marin Humane Society as "Humanitarian of the Year," by the San Francisco Bay Trail Project as "Volunteer of the Year," and by California State Parks as "Honorary Ranger of the Year."

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Featured on 26 September 2007

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