California
Mar 16th, 2007
Winding Down
In two weeks we are headed to San Francisco where we will spend 10 fairly low key days and we are both very ready for a vacation because we haven’t had any extended time off since September.
Planing for San Francisco has been pretty minimal as it’s an entirely different sort of journey than the one we’ll be taking in May. This trip is all about visiting friends and family, relaxing and probably an excursion to Napa and Sonoma with a possible overnight stay in Calistoga. But really there isn’t much required in the way of pre-trip planning apart from the rental car and a few emails and phone calls to people to let them know we’re coming. And since I’ve put Irene in charge of finding us a place to stay in the wine country, my work is done.
Which is good, because most of my attention has been focused on France. And now with two months until we leave, the planning is winding down as the itinerary is fixed, the apartment in Paris and the car for Provence have both been rented, and hotels have been booked for Avignon and Vaison-la-Romaine. It remains only to book hotels for Nice and the Luberon (and I’m in the process of doing that) and to contact the apartment people and arrange the details of our arrival.
One thing that pleases me about this trip is that even though we will be packing a lot in, we won’t be switching hotel as often as we might. We will have a minimum of two nights at two hotels and three and four nights at the others. This allows us to feel like we have a little bit of a base from which to explore the area. The logistics were tricky at first, but I feel like of got everything pretty solidly nailed down.
I really do enjoy the whole planning process and lately I’ve been listening to the A Year In Europe podcast and dreaming about what it would be like to drop out of life for a year and spend it traveling. And although it doesn’t seem feasible right now, some day I would love to do it. Although I think I would probably broaden the scope a bit and make it more of a round the world trip.
For now though, I’ll just have to settle for the two or three weeks at a time we can manage.
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Feb 6th, 2007
San Francisco
With all my posting about and planning for our France trip I have neglected to mention our other upcoming trip.
Yesterday I finally bit the bullet and bought our plane tickets for our trip to San Francisco in April. I’d been holding out in the vain hope that prices would drop a little, but as the exact opposite was happening, I decided we’d better just go ahead and get them before it was too late. We try to go down to SF every year for Passover, and mostly we do. We had to skip it the year we went to Eastern Europe, of course, but you have to have priorities.
No definite plans yet apart from Passover, but we have other friends in the city we will visit. Wine tasting will probably be on the itinerary again, and we will most likely go visit Irene’s cousins up the coast as well. Sadly due to the ridiculously restrictive new airline reservations, we will probably not be bringing back any wine with us.
Maybe we’ll go get a mud bath again, that was lots of fun.
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