I have four concerts on our agenda at this point. One vocal with my favorite group, one orchestral with a favorite conductor, one with my favorite oboist, and an opera I really love. Stay tuned for the big reveals as we go to these events. Needless to say I’m quite excited.
Now I’m figuring out other things, like a dance event and a food tour. I’m sure museums will be on the agenda as well. When I get all these set and when we attend, or are at least in the city in which we will attend them, I’ll post links so others can take advantage of recommendations. (Yes, I’m assuming what we attend will be super and I will recommend them.) I just don’t like to give away our itinerary in advance: I’m silly that way!
I didn’t realize what a food tour would be like until our son Jameson and daughter-in-law Meghan scheduled a tour in Donastia / San Sebastián. There it was pintxos. In some places they will be tapas. In both cases they are absolutely delicious! The tour we took really opened my eyes about what they were about, so I had to schedule one for this trip as well. Weight gain, here I come!
Below is our tour guide with Dan and Meghan, and a photo of the four of us at a table. (I think we visited four places that time, but I can’t remember for sure at the moment.)
I realized I’ve not written here for a time. But that doesn’t mean I’ve not been making plans for an upcoming trip! I have, in fact, gotten all our planes and trains set, and hotel reservations are also complete.
Today I pulled out the clothes I thought would work, and I do believe I have what I will need for a trip during winter.
Yes, in fact, THIS winter!
Let’s see … what will I bring? Down jacket. Rain jacket. Cashmere sweaters. Several merino wool turtlenecks. And merino wool pants as well. Merino wool leggings to wear under pants. Tights. Warm socks. Warm hat.
The big word for winter travel is layers. I will have those. And yes, I plan on carryon only (except for one bit I’ll fill you in on later). Easy-peasy!
I also conversed today with our houseguest. Thus I’m feeling comfortable blogging about the trip. I will share our destinations as we go, though. Gotta keep some surprises, after all!
The last thing I had to find were shoes. I wanted some low boots (otherwise called booties) for walking that would be comfortable and, with my nice Darn Tough socks, warm. I also need a pair of shoes I could wear with my dress, because we are going to four concerts while we are out and about! Yesterday those shoes were purchased.
I hope.
I always buy shoes, get home, and wear them for a time to be absolutely certain they will work. I’ve gotten a wee bit smarter, too, and I now have shoe covers I can put on to protect said shoes until I know they are a done deal.
UPDATE: Yes, I have taken the original images down. I realized it was just a bit too much info to share. I’ve now put up a new photo without all the $$ info. Because. Privacy.
The process of finding lodging is, for me, a very time consuming project, and I’ve set up a spreadsheet. Otherwise I could never keep track of places, costs, and all.
Below, for instance, is some of our 2023 Europe trip. The hotel in bold is the one we ultimately chose. The greyed out are the ones that were on the list but we opted not to choose. I compare prices between the hotel site (usually the best price, but not always!), Booking.com, and Expedia. I compare ratings as well. Well … I don’t need to tell you all this: you can see it on the screen shot! I am only sharing the Venice and Milan. I did this for ALL the cities, which included Paris, Porto, Lisbon, Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Florence, Arezzo, Orvieto, Siena, Bologna, and Venice. Yep. Lots of work!
One other thing. The hotel we chose in Venice was initially cheaper via Expedia or Booking. I contacted the Inn and they said they’d not only match the price but beat it AND if I paid in cash they’d lower it even more. Contacting the hotels directly is always a worthwhile thing to do. Sometimes they’ll want to match or beat prices, sometimes not, but you only know for sure if you contact them!
I hope you can see these images well enough. I’ll save them as a pdfs as well and post them below these images and I am fairly certain that will be easier to read.
(No, we don’t choose the 1 or 2 star places. We are picky that way.)
If you click on the pdf names (not the Download option) you will see a better image.
MORE INFO ADDED: You might notice I don’t always fill in every box. If I realize a place just won’t work I don’t bother checking all the price options. If a place is non-refundable it’s out. Period. I want to be able to cancel without penalty until at least a few days before we stay, and frequently it’s cancelable up until the day before. If I can pay AT the hotel/inn I do that as well. I prefer not to pay in advance whenever we are able to do that.
For the most part I do the travel planning around here, and of course I love it. Recently I’ve been looking at how to get from point A to point B, when I know we would have a number of stops on the way.
How do I do it, you ask? (Yes, I can hear you talking … or maybe not. You decide.)
For one thing, of course, I google “possible itineraries” and plug in the cities. That is frequently not all that helpful, though. I also go on to the Rick Steves’ Forum Page and ask. Sometimes people there are extremely helpful. (On our last trip I had questions about trains and one person in particular was all sorts of help.) Sometimes I look up tour sites and see where they would take a group tour. (We aren’t group tour sorts, though, so that’s just to get ideas. Maybe some year we’ll end up doing one, but not yet.)
And then I always visit the Rome2Rio site. It’s really handy and they’ve fixed things so I can once again put in a number of cities (for a while that didn’t work and I had to piece things together a bit more). Last trip I put in each of our destinations in the order in which we traveled. Or what I thought we would do. Then it hit me that doing things in a slightly different way — and this change took us to Oban! — worked really well.
Rome2Rio will give different travel options: if flying is an option that will show up, along with the train (or sometimes more than one idea for the train route), but, or possibly a combo of plane and train or train and bus, or a car (we aren’t usually car rental types and tend to prefer the train) — just any way you can get to your next destination.
But what if I don’t KNOW where to stop? Well, I plug in the starting city and the next city I know we will visit. I look at the map and check to see what cities appear between those two spots. It’s pretty handy!
For instance you can see below a train from Amsterdam to Toulouse. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on a train for 9 1/2 hours, so why not put in a few stops and enjoy other cities as well if I have the time?
This is a fun thing to play with, and something I can do even when I have no trips yet on the calendar. (It’s so much more fun than house cleaning, after all.) I can get new ideas. I can then either save them on Rome2Rio, or just take a screen shot, as I’ve done with what I posted above.
So there’s my travel tip for today. And yes, I realize many of you probably already know all about this. But maybe there’s someone out there who doesn’t. You (okay I) never know!
As usual, I’m online, checking out flights. I do this a lot. After all, you never know when a deal might pop up, right? Besides, it helps me keep track of just what flights are costing these days.
And yes, we use United. It usually goes where we need to go, and we have a charge card that gives us perks. Some suggest this is not the way to travel, but this is how we do it and it’s doubtful we’ll change now!
So the past few days I’ve been looking at a particular itinerary. I try different ways of paying (cash or miles), and I look at different levels of seats, from economy (NOT basic economy, but the next level) all the way to business class.
A recent flight gave me these dollar options for two legs of a flight, showing economy, premium economy, business, & business fully refundable:
For miles it was 234k plus $155.20 in cash per person. There are other things to check though: how many “PQP” (personal qualifying points) will we each get? How many miles? If you pay with miles you get no miles and fewer PQP. I’m not sure we want to do that at the moment.
But the price? Not bad, I thought, but what about adding one more leg to this? Well … understandably the price went up:
And of course a higher price for three legs rather than two makes perfect sense. I get it.
BUT … while we might want better seats on two legs, we don’t need that on the final leg. We can easily do economy. The insane thing is that choosing the time we’d most likely want to come home this is what I see:
We’d be better off going all business! I’ve yet to understand why they do this, but they do. A lot.
Granted, there were other options that would get us home at decent times:
BUT … if, instead, we choose the very first combo above, we can then choose a one way ticket home for these prices:
I ran everything through, as if to buy tickets, doing business on the first two legs and economy on the last, and one way of doing it, separating the last leg, came to $8,394.10 and doing it with everything lumped together came to $12,446.38. In addition I did check the miles cost, although I knew it was unlikely we’d opt for that for now.
I also must note that f you pay for flights with miles you can add a “free” flight if you do it the right way. If we fly, for instance, from SFO to somewhere in Europe we have to pay, but if you then fly from somewhere in Europe to somewhere else in Europe, that flight won’t cost you any miles, but just the dollar amount in taxes that have to be paid (in the one I plugged in we would have had an addition $40 or so to pay). Then miles are used again for coming home to the US. But you have to have a good number of miles to play that game.
And THIS is why I have to play with flight plans so much before we actually decide what we will be doing.
