Archive for November, 2006
Nov 27th, 2006
The Pain Of Booking Awards Travel
Last night I spent about an hour and half on the phone with Alaska Airlines booking tickets for our trip to France next year. And although the customer service woman was very friendly and helpful, it was still far more complicated than I was expecting. Eventually, plans had to change in order for us to get tickets at all.
Originally I wanted us to fly in to Amsterdam and then out of Nice. Not possible. And so after going through every possible iteration of date change and arrival/departure city change we finally settled on flying into and out of Paris (not ideal, but we’ll live with it), pushing departure back a week and taking on an additional day at the end.
The net result of all the changes is that we have decided to skip Amsterdam this time and concentrate exclusively on France. This is not entirely a bad thing, I think. After our last hectic trip (to five countries in 18 days) it will be nice to take things at a (slightly) more relaxed pace. Well, at least as relaxed as any vacation I’m planning can be.
I will update the rest of the site to reflect these changes in our plans. Now that we have our departure firmly settled, I’m really looking forward to diving in to the meat of the planning, including booking an apartment for our week in Paris.
Posted in France, Travel Planning | No Comments
Nov 13th, 2006
On Mexico
To date my experience with Mexico has been confined to a trip to Cancun with my family when I was young, and a few border crossings to places like Juarez and Nogales. This is unfortunate because Mexico has long been a place that I would like to explore, but for some reason it’s never at the top of the list when it comes time to plan a trip. What I really needed was an excuse, and now I have one.
Our friends J and W recently decided that in celebration of 10 years together they would tie the knot in Mexico. In Tulu, on the Yucatan Peninsula to be exact. I’m very excited about this even if it is more than a year away (January ’08).
And while a year is a long time, it’s never too early to start planning, I say. And so to that end I have set up a Mexico resource page that I will be updating and expanding as plans progress.
Also, I ordered Moon Handbooks Yucatan guide.
We will most likely only have 10 days, so we won’t be able to see everything and I’ve got a lot of reading to do to see how our limited time can be best spent. If anybody has any suggestions or recommendations please pass them along.
Posted in Mexico, Travel Planning | No Comments
Nov 10th, 2006
Brand New Feature
At long last I have been allowed to upgrade to Blogger Beta. And while there are somethings that will take me a long time to figure out (the new templating for one) there is one immediate benefit: tags (or “labels” as Blogger insists on calling them).
If you are unfamiliar with tagging here’s the deal: directly under each post is a list of “labels” describing the content of the post. When you click on one of these labels you will be taken to a page featuring all the posts with that label.
So for instance, if you were to click on the label paris you get all the posts about Paris. Pretty easy and, I hope, very useful.
Posted in Maintenance | No Comments
Nov 9th, 2006
National Geographic Walking Tours
National Geographic Traveler offers a number of interesting podcasts, one of which is a series of walking tours narrated by Rudy Maxa of PBS’ Smart Travels.
Destinations covered include a wide range of cities including Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.
I haven’t listened to them yet, but I’ll check out one soon and write a little review.
To subscribe to this podcast in iTunes click here.
Posted in Travel Tools | No Comments
