Travel Planning
Feb 20th, 2007
The Strange Economics Of Rental Cars
There comes a time when you find yourself at the whims of the strange and convoluted rules of the travel industry, in which logic not only doesn’t apply, but has in fact been taken round the back and beaten into the shape of white is black, up is down and frogs are allergic to the color green. And so the round shape of your trip must conform to fit the star shaped hole provided.
Our original itinerary had us renting a car for four days, but as it turns out, it’s the same price, or cheaper, to rent a car for a week. And so things are set in motion, plans are altered and new schemes are worked out to accommodate this new information.
On the whole, this isn’t entirely a bad thing. Now instead of spending two nights in Avignon and one night in Arles, I think we will be either spending all three nights in Avignon (because there is a definite advantage to camping out in one place and day tripping from there) or one night in Avignon and two nights in Arles (because I’ve read that Arles is more friendly for cars). Right now I’m leaning towards staying put in one place. But that could change.
The other change will be driving from the Luberon to Nice instead of taking a train, which will allow us to stop along the way if we desire and frees up all kinds of time schedule wise.
Posted in France, Travel Planning | No Comments
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.
Posted in California, Travel Planning | No Comments
Feb 5th, 2007
On Travel Festivals and Planning
Twice a year Rick Steve’s hosts travel festivals at his headquarters (located a convenient 30 minutes away from us in Edmonds, WA). Now mostly these are put together to help sell his tours, but one can glean a lot of useful information and ideas even if one as no intention of taking a tour.
This was our third or fourth time going to the festival, and was by far the most helpful. We attended two classes, one on France presented by Steve Smith, the coauthor of the Rick Steves’ France books, and one was an intro to french for travelers.
While I didn’t really learn anything in either class, the France class was nice because I got to see pictures of most of the places I’ve been reading about. I think Irene probably got more out of them than me because she’s a bit behind on the reading and this class helped motivate her to start reading the books.
After the class though, thanks to our friend G, who is an editor at Rick Steves, I was able to talk to Smith himself and run my itinerary by him to see what he thought. I was a little worried that I was trying to cram too much in and that my expectations were a bit unrealistic, but he reassured me that my plan was indeed doable. He also offered a few suggestions for me to mull over. I don’t know that I’ll change anything because I’m pretty confident in my planning, though, and the reasons for scheduling things they way I did.
In other news, I booked our tickets for our flight from Nice back to Paris on EasyJet. It was a little more expensive than I was expecting, but still only cost $80, which, considering the time it’s saving us, is a bargain.
Posted in Books, France, Travel Planning | No Comments
Jan 5th, 2007
Further Adventures in Travel Planning
I feel I should post an update on how the planning is going, so here it is.
Remember last time when I said I thought I had the itinerary pretty well fixed? Well I’ve changed it. After much deliberation, juggling, rearranging and other machinations, I have decided that there is nothing for it but to drop Lyon from the trip. This made me a little sad, but things just fit more easily with it gone, so it went. Also, I have dropped the amount of time we are spending in the Riviera to three days instead of five and added the extra time to Provence.
I have updated the itinerary to the right to reflect these changes.
Now, a lot of this schedule is dependent on the renting of a car for four days, which is dependent on finding a good deal on an automatic (I can’t drive manuel and Irene has expressed a reluctance to drive). And even so, it is an extremely packed schedule (which is a bit of a speciality with me), but should be doable.
The Riviera section is still a bit nebulous, as I am just now reading that section of the book. It should be firmed up fairly soon though.
Posted in France, Travel Planning | 1 Comment
Dec 12th, 2006
Fixing The Itinerary
I feel like at this point I’ve got the basic skeleton o f the trip locked down apart from one point. I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to include Lyon in the trip or if that time could be better spent in Provence or the Riviera.
Right now I’m leaning toward yes, it should be included, even if it is a brief stop (which it most likely will be). Originally I planned on us spending two nights in Lyon, but now I’m thinking one night will have to be enough. We can take the morning train from Paris spend the rest of the day and the night, and the take an afternoon train out the next day to Avignon.
This plan is still slightly in flux but here’s how I’ve got it breaking down so far:
7 days in Paris, 1 day in Lyon, 5 days in Provence, and 5 days in the Riviera.
And EasyJet offers very inexpensive flights from Nice to Paris, which means we don’t have to waist precious vacation time circling back to Paris at the end of the trip.
The itinerary has been updated.
P.S. I should make it clear that my hesitation in stopping in Lyon is not because I don’t think it will be a worthwhile stop, because I’m sure it will be, but because our time is limited and we would be going directly from big city (Paris) to big city (Lyon). If anybody has an opinion on this they’d like to share please feel free to leave a comment or email me directly.
Posted in France, Travel Planning | No Comments
