In the middle of my three week tour, Rochester, MN to Pittsburgh, PA to Austin, TX to Las Vegas, NV to Albuquerque, MN to Pittsburgh, PA to Rochester, MN, I lost my iPod. I was flying Southwest Airlines between Las Vegas and Albuquerque, on the first Southwest Airline flight I’ve had in years. I was completely unprepared for the experience and my complacency cost me an iPod!
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For those of you who loath the aweful workout facilities offered by hotels, let me tell you about a bicycle that will travel. The breakway is not a folding bicycle, but rather a real sized, normal road bike that has a seperation point in the frame so that it will come apart into two pieces. All the parts fit nicely into a suitcase sized bag that comes with the bike. Now you can take a real bicycle along with you and store it as a mule bag, without having to pay extra to the airlines, or getting funny looks at the hotel.
Bill pay systems are widely available now where you can send electronic payments without having to have the paper stub to send in. Many companies are switching to electronic statements that allow them to send your statement to your inbox instead of regular postal snail mail.
I also have some checks that are sent to me for some rental properties that I own, but these are very difficult to handle electronically without great cost. For this problem, I worked out a system with a customer service person at my bank to receive these checks on my behalf and deposit them into my account. This system works out very well for me, so if you have a similar situation, maybe you can work something out with your bank as well.
Connecting to your home computer while away is a bit more technically complex, and unless you are away from home regularly, can be too expensive to worry about for a quick vacation.
First, let me say that I want to highly discourage everyone from having a machine running any windows platform connected directly to the internet. Read the rest of this entry »
For sending emails while away on personal travel, I’ve found the best thing to do is use a free email account available on the internet. I use Hotmail, but Yahoo mail, Google mail, and others work equally well. This avoids the temptation to check your work email Read the rest of this entry »
Even in the overhead bins, I occasionally get confused about which bag is mine when someone shows up with the same model I have. Personalize your bag with a flashycolored handle, or name tag that stands out. No one will walk away with your bag (hopefully) and your won’t grab anyone elses.
Book a round trip instead of a one way fare if the price is equal or less.
I took this advice to an extreme on a recent trip I took. I booked several round trips and had the return dates staggered so that if I missed my next flight out, I still had a return trip back the way I came. It looked like this: I was flying from Atlanta to Athens on the first of the month, and booked the return for the 30th. From Athens I was taking a train to Istanbul, so my next flight was from Istanbul to Jerusalem, which I made for the tenth, returning the 28th. From Jerusalem, I went to Hong Kong, leaving on the 20th, returning the 27th. From Hong Kong I had a flight on the 26th to San Francisco. From any city if I had missed my scheduled departure for the next city for whatever reason, I had a return flight already scheduled and paid for that would have gotten me back to Atlanta.
In my personal experience I’ve found that it is much cheaper to book a roundtrip to a city than to book a one way ticket. If you only want to go one way, price the round trip becasue you don’t have to use the second half and sometimes you can get a partial refund for the unused portion. Just keep in mind that you can only miss the second half of the ticket. Once you miss a leg of the ticketed trip, every other leg after that gets automatically canceled. This means that if you miss the outbound flight the return flight gets automatically canceled.
Round the world tickets aren’t easy to come by anymore, instead you might find a deal on travel as long as every stop is in the same direction. For example, San Diego, Albuquerque, Dallas, Atlanta, New York in that order are all going east. You should be able to avoid paying the excessive one-way fares for each leg and get each leg for half the price of the round trip.
For travel that is more complicated than a simple round trip, then you might want to solicit the help of a travel agent or call the airline directly and talk to a person about what options are available to you. Some options to ask for ar open-jaw tickets and same direction tickets.
Open-Jaw tickets, are similar to round trip tickets in that they start and end in the same city, but differ in that the city you fly to is not the same as the city you return from. An example would be a trip from New York where you flew to London, but returned from Paris. Travel from London to Paris is considered the open jaw and this is not part of the ticket, but you probably wanted to take the train anyway.