Posted by Charlene Jaszewski on March 30th 2008 in Travel Tips
What do you do when you’re an intrepid traveler short on cash? Get creative. I recently had to travel to New York for a conference and since most of my money was tied up in paying for a cross-country move, I had to make it work on the cheap.
Tip #1: Keep Up On Airfare Deals
Luckily I knew this conference was coming up in advance, so I had time to book a cheap deal. I looked through all my point sources but was just shy of the amount needed to book a flight. Suddenly Northwest Airlines (the hub flying out of Minneapolis) started offering PerksChoice, a program that lets you use points for half a ticket! Bang! $110 off my flight! A great forum I discovered to keep up on things like this is flyertalk.com.
Airfare cost=$110 Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Charlene Jaszewski on March 20th 2008 in Travel Tools
If you’ve ever had to schedule a business trip you know you can be deluged by confirmation e-mails for every detail, including flights, hotels, and car rentals. God help you if you have multiple destinations! Tripit.com promises to relieve the headaches of travelers by aggregating all the details of your trip into master itineraries, available to be shared with friends, accessed by SMS text messages and supplemented with additional information like weather, google maps, and more!!
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Posted by Samantha Evans on March 13th 2008 in Travel Tips
The scene: It’s 10:30PM and your standing at the desk of a rental car desk at the San Francisco airport. Your plane landed 45 minutes ago luggage intact at SFO, a surprisingly stress-free experience. Now MUST be the time to hope in the rental car and check into the hotel to enjoy trendy drinks. For some reason you’re still standing at this flippin’ car rental desk! Secretly, you long for your SUV safely ensconced at Midway Airport parking back in Chicago.
Behind said desk, some 19 year old former babysitter is still the practicing the same art of mediocrity for the rental company’s 4 wheeled babies. Your San Francisco reservations were placed online weeks ago for modest vehicle at a great price. A well practiced sales pitch to up-charge your daily fee seems like a bit much tonight. But, do you actually need the insurance to safely traverse the great interstate beyond SFO? Is rental car insurance designed to protect, separate you from your hard earned cash, or both? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Charlene Jaszewski on March 4th 2008 in Travel Blogs, Italy
Imagine a country in which the denizens are experts at il dolce far niente (sweet doing nothing). Italy is a country in which a great day is one spent sipping espresso (the national breakfast) and people- watching in a piazza. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Eat Pray Love says she learned from her time in Italy that “the more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”
As a recovering Silicon-Valley workaholic, the idea of living this sort of existence both titillates and terrifies me. But I wanted to know more about it…
This is the first in a series of blogs that will introduce you to cool people blogging about their lives in venerable Italy.
Most Italian blogs I found carry the same observations from the authors: no matter how long they lived there they would always be outsiders, they miss clothes dryers, that the continual juxtaposition of the pope and naked bottoms in the media is amusing.
zoomata: Nicole Martinelli, based in Milan, writes in a smart and sometimes snarky style on politics and current events in Italy. Her “daily life” articles are a hoot – read about the recently found Mafia 10 Commandments and official love parking lots. Nicole also writes for Spot-on. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Travel Blogs, Italy | 9 Comments »
