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