About the Editors

For locals, by locals, 71Miles covers weekend destinations within a four-hour radius of San Francisco. Our premier guides include the Northern- and Central-California Coast, Wine Country, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Weekly posts focus on specific travel ideas, such as hideaway-hotels for sex, downhill-skiing Tahoe, and best Bay Area beaches for open-fire grilling. Scroll down the navigation bar on the left side of the main page to find them all.

The founding writer-editor for the site is John A. Vlahides, who regrets he hasn’t more time to update. But lately he’s on big adventures, traveling the globe.

John A. Vlahides – Co-founder and Editor John is co-host of the new international TV series Lonely Planet: Roads Less Travelled (screening on National Geographic Adventure), for which he shot the pilot in Morocco, and the first-season’s closing episode in Madagascar, where he cracked a rib wrestling a bull. Watch the trailer.

John is the founding contributor to Trazzler.com. His writing has been published by Lonely Planet, Sydney Morning Herald, Fodor’s, Condé Nast, Sunset, Wanderlust, San Francisco magazine, the Toronto Sun, and various other American and international publications. He has been featured in the New York Times and Outside Magazine, and appears regularly on television and radio. He formerly co-produced a quick-vacations travel segment, called “One Night Stands with John Vlahides,” on San Francisco’s KRON 4 News Weekend. He has appeared as a travel expert on CNN Live Today, ABC7’s View from the Bay, as well as on various international and local radio programs, including ABC Classic FM’s Mornings with Margaret Throsby, ABC Adelaide (Australia), and KALW Bay Area public radio.

A native New Yorker, John lives in San Francisco. He’s a former luxury-hotel concierge and member of Les Clefs d’Or, the Paris-based union of the world’s elite concierges. He holds a degree in classic French cooking from La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris, where he worked as an interpreter and studied with the same chefs who trained Julia Child.

When not talking travel, John sings tenor with the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus, one of the few full-season symphony choruses in America. He spends his free time downhill-skiing and hiking the Sierra, touring the West Coast by motorcycle, and sunning on the beach beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

Follow John on Twitter

Cheri Lucas is filling in for John at the moment.