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 15th, 2007
Site Maintenance
I’ve taken the map off the blog and moved it to it’s own page where I’ve also added a map that traces the route we will be taking on our trip.
I will also soon be adding a general travel resource page to go along with the place specific ones.
Posted in Maintenance | No Comments
Feb 13th, 2007
Further Love For Audio Tours
I don’t know why I love audio tours so much, but I do. I’ve written about them extensively in the past and will continue to hunt them down for whatever upcoming trips we might have.
Today, while browsing around on Audible I came across various audio tours of sites on the Yucatan Peninsula put together by a company called TekTrek. I’m glad I found them through Audible first and not just by stumbling across their web site, because if that had been the case I never would have been able to figure out where to get them as there is nothing on their site even indicating that they are for sale. Now I don’t want to tell them how to run their business, but it’s an oversight they may want to correct.
Anyway, when I start to research our Mexico trip, I will have a better idea which tours are for us, but I’m sure we’ll try out a couple of them if they fit into our itinerary.
Posted in Travel Tools | 2 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
