Repetitious Blather - or How to Plan Your Own Four Week Vacation

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, the trips in 2000 & 2001 are history. This is 2009. We've taken trips since then. Until this trip to Vietnam, I've done all of our vacation planning. We took a trip to France in 2004 and another long trip (4 weeks) driving across Europe in 2006. I've only got pictures. I've never created a website. What I did create was a collage of the travel photos. I'll post a picture of that when I'm not a fried banana.

Anyways, I have no problems asking for 4 weeks off for vacation. 5 weeks is done in other countries all the time.

Travel freshens me up. Things go cock-eyed when we travel. You never know what's going to show up on your plate at your next meal, what sights you're going to see around the next corner. Have you ever walked on icy cobblestones in high-heels? How about driven a "two-lane" road which is narrow for one car through the alps? Sat down at a three hour, seven - course dinner? Smelled the scent of freshly cut Andouillette. You're not waking up in the same bed, walking the well-trod path to your bathroom. Sometimes you're lucky you can fit into the shower. Hopefully you haven't run out of your favorite shampoo while you're traveling.

So, travel is a pleasure for me. It's one of the reasons why I work.

Why do you work ?

1) Roof over head = Good Thing

2) Clothes > shivering buck nekkid in the snow

3) If Food In Belly is not null, then :)

after Maslow has been appeased then there's:

4) Paying off Student Loans

5) Paying off remodel (expensive taste not included)

6) *optional* Children (you'll be paying for that one for awhile, but you can still afford Venice!)

7) Shoes, cars, and pet food

But after that, what do you intend to do between the time that:

you are born

go to school

get a job

die

Hopefully something which seems beyond reach, like spend more time with people you like (*may we even say "love" here?) than those whose eyelashes you'd like plucked from their lids one by one until they couldn't protect their eyes from the gnats which would swarm down from the heavens to feed upon their vitreous humour.

I'll start a series of links of my favorite travel planning websites. Expedia is more expensive than most of them. My current fave is kayak. What's so great about Kayak is that they have a charting function on the prices over time (Yea! Charting!) PLUS you can put in options like +/- 3 days from your date of travel in searching for prices.

Current prices now for Seattle-London round-trip are $504. Frankfurt is also $504. Amsterdam is $604. Paris was $605 last week, but seems to have gone up in price.

For our trip to Paris in 2004, Dave & I snapped up PriceLine.com tickets for 2 on a Thursday for a Sunday flyout & 7 days in Paris. Even the customs agents were impressed. People talk & dream about a "Weekend Getaway," or "Fly To Paris" on a dime, but never do it. We did. There was no jet lag. Somehow having only a week changed some brain chemical something & I didn't poop out the first day, or the 2nd. I wasn't cranky for my nap.

I spend a lot of time researching at Trip Advisor. Sure there are a lot of sourpusses there, but it was reading about the hotel reservations which went unhonored in Vietnam that actually drove me to go to a travel agent. I was reading post after post about people showing up in Hanoi, or somewhere in Vietnam & the hotel not having their reservation, or had given it away. Uh-uh. Nope. I don't play that game. I too tired at the end of a 13 hour flight on top of a 2 hour layover & then another 2 hour flight. I'll let everyone know how my hotel reservations went from booking with a travel agent.

If they go badly, well, I do have a list of backup places I intend to go, but I'll also have someone - Exotissimo - to "call" (can you hear me now?) if I don't have a room & I'm jet-lagged.

Well....

All these pictures are from the 2004 trip to Paris

Will work for travel

This is not the first four week vacation Dave & I have been on. It's not even the second. The first long vacation he & I went on was for five weeks. That was in 2000. He & I were not yet 40. We had no children. We'd paid down our remodel. It had been 20 years since either of us had been to Europe. We were going to go & go as good as we could get.

Third day out into the five week vacation, I might have blasphemed a little bit while in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. I threw my back out ten minutes later - the kind of "throw your back out & I can't get up" kind of "threw my back out." So, lesson learned: Never blaspheme or damn the Pope while in the Vatican. Got that?

I created this website from our 5 week & 4 week trips in 2000 & 2001.

FOD

Using acronyms is part of my job description. I'm graded on it twice a year. It's deconstructed spelling; minimalism run amok, poking its thumb in Dr. Samuel Johnson's eye. Apparently, I can't do without acronyms in my non-working life, so I'll make some up here. First I'll define them, but then plan on being tested in later conversations with me. Okey doke?

Funny On Demand - FOD. Yes, worry about writing in this blog woke me up at 2am this morning (the hormone shift and hot wings weren't part of it at all).

FOD. If this is a blog requirement, it's another one I'll fail. My angst opened its trunk & unpacked. I guess it's staying awhile.

Will work for food

Sushi menus have always intimidated me. I can never remember which fish I like, or what roll I enjoyed. Is the negiri the roll in the seaweed, or just the fish flesh atop the rice? Do I use chopsticks or my fingers? Do I dunk in the soy sauce with the green stuff, or not. I break out in hives I get so nervous. Hajime Sato, owner of Mashiko's in the West Seattle Junction, makes it easy. He fixes us dinner.

We walk up to the bar and Hajime starts Dave's spider roll, after that, it's Chef's choice. I always order a masu of the Momokawa Pearl sake. The sake is served chilled in a wooden bowl (the masu) set on a small plate. The masu is overfilled so that some of the sake spills onto the plate. When you've drunk your masu down, you pour the rest of the sake from the plate back into the masu. It's like a small moment of coloring outside of the lines.

I wish I could describe dinner last night, but I can't. I don't have the vocabulary. While I'm still learning about Japanese food, I sit down & eat what's put in front of me.

I'm gonna miss dinner at Mashiko's while we're gone. I get these hankerings.

Will work for travel

Here's the calendar of our itinerary. You should be able to click on it to see where we're going to be, what we expect to be doing on any given day.

For the first time, we worked with travel professionals. Whoo-whee. They sure do write nice. It's quite easy to read their write-ups & say, "Charge it!". Of course, they never quite mention the cost unless you directly ask.

During this trip, we decided to take some private tours just to ease the getting around. We're not bicyclists. The Vietnamese don't appear to drive between the lines (and I don't think they recognize the international driver's license). Train service does not appear to be as well meshed as we've found in Europe and the idea of 8 hour bus rides is not appealing. Getting around was one of the things which we felt intimidated by during this first trip to Asia.

Our dear friend, Jacky Paillard, is a travel consultant and helped us with our planning: where we wanted to go, what we wanted to see, when we wanted to go, which direction. He arranged the bulk of where we were going to stay, what we were going to do and then turned us over to the travel company, Exotissimo, for booking. Mr. Quoc Minh Pham has been my contact with Exotissimo. Both people have been extremely patient with me & my planning, questions, and changes. I'm a compulsive reader, an internet junkie, forum / bulletin board addict, and in my past life I'm sure I was a research librarian. I've always planned my own trips, including transportation before. I was a burden to both these gentlemen, but they endured. This is Exotissimo's write-up of our itinerary. It just makes me drool to read it. They use present tense and action verbs, historical references and surprising images.

I give up

I’ve avoided working on a blog for years because if I don’t keep up my correspondence with my mother, my writing buddies or my college friends, I’m obviously not responsible enough to keep up a blog. A blog is a pet. It’s a responsibility. There are blogs I’ve read where I’ve fallen in love with the blogger’s wit, their POV, the theme, their writing style. They maintain the energy for three, four, six posts and then nothing – for four months- nothing. Then one day, a new post appears and they get seven posts up. And they stop. For a year. Or more.

Dave has pets, I don’t. I’ve refused to have a blog for the same reason. A blog must be fed and watered. If I forget to feed myself, feeding others is an even lower priority. A blog needs to have its hair brushed and toenails trimmed. I’m a walking bad hair day. So expect this: this blog will be active for a while & then a whole lot of nothing. I will have a passion for a period of time and then I’ll be curled up in a fetal position with my bankey and thumb-sucking will be my most demanding activity. I won’t care about the blog, I’ll be caring about my shattered psyche. I have no particular interest I can maintain for longer than my hair color. I will feel passionate for thirty minutes and then afterwards I’ll smoke a cigarette, roll over and fall asleep. The only promise I can promise to keep is that this will be one of “Those Blogs”, a peripatetic blog, a blog without a cause. It will be spastic, fibrillating. I make no promises as to continence, continuity, or congeniality. My commitment will be to uncommitted.

But Dave & I are about to begin another one of our trips. During our trips in the past, I’ve emailed friends and family while on the road. We’d find an internet café, or use the computer at the front desk of a hotel we were staying at, and we’d write our friends & family about our trip. My favorite were the emails which I know will arrive in people’s work inboxes on Monday mornings. It helps us savor the experience of "We're on vacation" because "You're not!"

But maintaining the email list is a nightmare. We’ve all be sold more than twice and companies no longer use names in the address, my fingers are too fat, more people have emails now & the emails bounce. Oyyy. That’s why I decided to start this “blog”. It’s easier than maintaining the distribution list. The drawback is that I’ll have to remember yet another new password.