People who travel in part because of the ready supply of cheap travel deals, such as cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, and cheap vacation packages should consider doing a little research on their destinations before arriving. Sometimes relatively unknown museums in the area have much to offer.

The following are lesser known museums recommended by Christina Ianzito:

€ The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California offers stimulating interactive exhibits and many cool (low and high) tech artifacts, ranging from an abacus to a massive early mainframe to the video game Pong.

€ The National World War 1 Museum in Kansas City, Missouri has an entrance where visitors cross a glass bridge above a symbolic field of 9,000 poppies, each representing 1,000 people killed during the €War to End All Wars.€ Guests can find replicas of life size trenches, dramatic firsthand battle accounts, and an FT-17 Tank battered by German artillery.

€ The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York can be found in a five story brick building at 97 Orchard Street. Here visitors are provided an eye opening look at an immigrant's day to day experience in America. Costumed interpreters in authentically restored apartments stand in for residents from around the world who lived in this crowded tenement from 1863 through the 1930s. Most living there during the early years had no access to running water or electricity.

€ The Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park, New Mexico provides a folk art environment that includes a massive collection of carved wood figures, mechanized dioramas, and funk Americana. It is just a half hour drive from Albuquerque and is a weirdly compelling €must see€ roadside attraction.

€ The Spark Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham, Washington has a light bulb made by Thomas Edison, antique radios, vacuum tubes, telegraphs, a static electricity laboratory and a replica of the Titanic radio room. Its most popular attraction is the Lightning Cage, a screened metal ball which visitors sit in while a Teslacoil bombards them with bolts of electricity.

€ The Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona can be entered through a concrete reinforced belly of the atomic missile launch base. Inside visitors can view a decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missile in its silo. Guests are sometimes offered the chance to turn the actual key that once would have resulted in mutually assured destruction.

€ The Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan is a key stop for auto enthusiasts and nostalgia trippers. The museum is home to 400 cars and motorcycles, including rarities like the 1911 Stanley Steamer, a re-created 1930 service station, a London double-decker bus, and an authentic 1941 diner.
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Should you be Tipping More?

Given how hard the average person tries to keep travel affordable via a careful review of cheap travel options, including cheap airplane tickets and cheap vacation packages, it may seem strange to encourage people to start tipping 25 percent.

Tipping experts are starting to recommend higher tips as a result of salaries of restaurant workers, who often earn a poverty level $2.13 an hour before gratuities.

Some industry watchers want to see tipping go away altogether. The argument is that by withholding gratuity payments a fundamentally flawed and unfair system will crumble. However, unless the cost of the gratuity is included in menu prices, pulling tips will just hurt the servers.

While a handful of restaurants have done away with tipping and raised their menu prices, a Cornell University study found that higher prices would drive diners away. It appears that price sensitive patrons like the illusion that their meals are cheaper than they finally cost when tips are included.

Most servers embrace the practice of tipping, which totaled $40 billion in 2012. Even if the alternative was a higher base pay, many servers prefer tips in part because a portion of them often effectively go untaxed.

Understanding the economics of the restaurant business is a way to understand the need for higher tips. On average almost four in every 10 restaurant industry workers earn at or below the federal minimum wage, even after tips are included. Servers experience almost three times the poverty rate of the total workforce and rely on food stamps almost twice as much as the general population.

Ideally all restaurant prices would include the true cost of the meal, including servers' salaries. The practice of forcing workers to rely on gratuities to earn a living is clearly not working for at least 40 percent of all servers. The current system that allows restaurant owners to legally pay below subsistence wages needs to be re-examined.
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