Tomorrow is the first official day of summer, and with it comes a few months of peak traveling season.
I’m still sorting out my summer. Some long weekends in my near future include a trip to Florida, Cape May, New Jersey and Washington DC.
For August, Iceland is still a front-runner. 20 hours of sunlight sounds pretty cool to me.
Where are you headed?
In the spirit of Father’s Day, here is a short list of reasons why I love my dad:
* A little bit as in if he was any angrier, the next step was for him to get on a plane and physically bring me home. Thankfully, he calmed down and put some dollars in my bank account. It took me years to repay my parents for the monetary help they gave me so I could work and live in London – not the best place for the USD.
I get loads of direct mail marketing. Then I have to call and tell them I like to be green so could they just send me an email instead.
But Macy’s, they really like me. They send me tons of coupons and ‘personalized’ catalogs that are based on my interests and recent purchases.
I know they probably spent a lot of money to find out who I am while tracking my Macy’s card purchases to come up with a targeted mailer. Between you and me, I know my recent past purchases are shoes and dresses. Not much diversity there.
They repeatedly send me a personalized mailer of things they think I would want to purchase. Which really? I don’t.
Of course because it’s personalized, I am intrigued because maybe they do know what I will want before I know myself. So maybe something is working.
The bus I was on earlier this week smelled like maple syrup and celery. An odd mix, but oh, the joys of public transport.
Here’s some of my notable, and probably, common, observations whilst on public transport:
I’ve seen:
A really tall guy on the phone in the outside seat on a bus who won’t get up and makes the other guy, in a business suit, climb over him to get out.
Someone take their shoes off on a subway train. Is this your living room?
People eating meals. Not just a bag of chips, but proper rice and chicken dishes…on the subway.
People setting up music so they can break dance, people selling bags of M&Ms and chocolate bars (in the middle of the summer – melted much?), people clipping their nails and people making out. Yes, all on a subway train.
I know I’ve seen more. And I know you have too. What have you seen that makes you go HMMM?
Some pondering…
Have you ever had just one dollar on you, you punch the button, your much-awaited snack drops, and then…gets stuck? This is what I think of as I wait for my snack to drop. It’s at that time, I think I should have brought two one-dollar bills, just in case, but I never do.
Or what if you only have one bill, and the machine refuses to take it?
The thing with vending machines is figuring out what’s really popular, so you know it gets refilled with fresh stuff pretty often. You don’t want to get the thing that’s been in there since 1995.
And I’ve always been cautious when sticking in my hand to retrieve my snack…for some reason, I am terrified that there’s a mouse in there. I mean, crumbs get in, it’s warm, it’s the perfect place for a mouse.
Makes you want to go grab a snack asap, huh?
I don’t like to talk politics but WHY are debates for the 2012 election starting now? Shouldn’t the length of campaigning (and the amount of funds spent on said campaign) be limited? The amount of resources and time spent on campaigning should be cut down. There are fifty states, some big, some small. Spend a few weeks in the big ones, a week in the smaller ones.
* After some Googling, I found out that those in US territories can nominate a candidate, but cannot vote. So you can campaign to get on a ticket in places like Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the USVI. But that’s where it ends. They cannot ultimately elect the president.
With all ways people can access media, it doesn’t need to be a 24/7 news cycle for 18 months. We get that you are running. We get that there are debates. We get that you need to make appearances. But all the politicians who are running already have a job to do and they should be concentrating on doing that one job well.
Brought to you by WHY Wednesday.
Why is it that, without fail, when I go into the supermarket to pick up one item, I leave with more than the one thing I went in for? And without fail, when I do this, I neglect to pick up a basket when I arrive. And it’s usually oddly shaped items. It would be simple if it were boxes that would be easy to carry. Yes, I am the one who continues to shop while her arms are overflowing. I am the one juggling an arm load of things that may or may not fall to the ground and break into a million pieces. Glass jars and bottles, don’t you know it, I am talking to you.
Good thing we had this rental car!
At Plitvice Lakes, (click the link to see a collection of Google Images – the place was seriously amazing), the boyfriend and I were staying at a small lodge. We had arrived a little on the late side and hadn’t eaten since lunch so we were starving.
We were told the nearest restaurant was about half a mile away. We were told it was walkable, and after being in the car for several hours, we had decided that it would be nice to walk.
What we didn’t realize that there weren’t any sidewalks and we had to walk on the side of the road all the way to the restaurant. This wouldn’t have been bad on its own but because this was a bit in the middle of nowhere, okay, it WAS the middle of nowhere, there were very few street lights (read: one or two for the duration of our walk) and we were certain that oncoming traffic would have a problem seeing us. There were lots of tall trees, making every little noise or animal movement that much more amplified.
What we didn’t anticipate was hearing the locals at dinner tell us about the prevalence of black bears in the area. We were in the land of mountains, forest, waterfalls and lakes, so it made sense.
At some point during dinner I had decided that there was no way I was walking back to the lodge. After going back and forth with conversation that was along the lines of … him: I’ll handle the bear, you just run and me: are you crazy?, the boyfriend told me that he would walk back alone, get the car and come back to pick me up.
When he left, what I didn’t anticipate was how nervous those few minutes would be. What if he got attacked by a bear? How long do I wait before I get worried? What the heck am I supposed to do? Then, more practical questions like , will they speak English at the hospital? What will our families say? How would I return the car?
Thankfully he made it back with the car in a reasonable amount of time, picked my scared ass up and we headed back to the lodge together, without a bear sighting.
One of the great things about traveling overseas is discovering things before they come big in the States. Or, seeing something in the States that later gets introduced overseas.
This post is about the former.
While traveling throughout Croatia in September 2010, the boyfriend and I found ourselves in Split (ok, I had planned it that way). We had started our journey in Dubrovnik and were working our way north to fly home through Zagreb. Prior to arriving in Split we had already traveled on the Adriatic Sea on…
a Jadrolinija ferry (seen in the distance in this photo) that was like a no-frills cruise ship.
a Krilo Jet catamaran – seen here…
and various city buses, mini vans, car taxis, water taxis and our feet, thus far.
Now that we were heading inland, the boyfriend and I wanted to rent a car to get from Split to Zagreb. The Split-Zagreb leg could have been done by bus or train but we wanted to stop at Plitvice Lakes in the mountains where public transportation was spotty at best.
In fact, we were told that if at all possible, to avoid taking buses around that part of the country because service was unreliable, and missing one bus could leave you stranded for a day or two. If we did get stranded, there would be no car rental agencies in the Plitvice Lakes area so hitchhiking to Zagreb would be the only option. That option was immediately nixed by my boyfriend, so a rental car it would be.
We had arrived in Split (via the Krilo Jet catamaran) from the island of Hvar around 8am. We ate breakfast and before setting out to explore Split, we had to secure a car for later that afternoon. Mind you:
1 – we hadn’t made any reservations and this was only the start of shoulder season
2 – we would need to return it in Zagreb, making this a one-way rental – more difficult to secure at this time of year we were told
3 – we wanted to leave town around 4pm.
Either way, the world wasn’t going to end if we weren’t able to rent a car. We could have spent the night in Split to wait for a car, or rerouted ourselves for the last few days of our vacation. If it was that big of a deal, we would have made a reservation. This is why it’s called traveling on the fly! It’s fun, and it allows room for spontaneity. You just need to realize your ‘ideal’ plan may not come to fruition. But if it does (and this time for us it did), it feels like quite an accomplishment. Sometimes you have absolutely no control over the situation and you really just need to go with it.
Anyway, we wanted to try to see if we would be able to secure a car, so off we went. We showed up, unannounced, at a rental agency, expecting that this would be easy. After all it was the off-season, and we didn’t need it until later that afternoon. Um. Not so easy.
Our fifth, and final, stop happened to be the only rental car agency that had an available car, later that day, that could be used as a one-way rental. We signed the paperwork and said we’d be back in a few hours to pick up our wheels.
Fast forward. We return to the rental agency and the guy told us that he had a few cars from various carmakers on his lot, but thought it would be amusing to give his only American car, to the Americans.
I was slightly saddened that we wouldn’t get a European car. I had grandiose dreams of speeding down Croatian highways in a Fiat convertible because when in Rome, but whatever. We were lucky to even have a car at this point.
So we settled into our Chevy Cruze, which neither of us had ever heard of before, waved back to the guy who got us a car, and headed out on the highways of Croatia.
Months later, we see prominent billboard advertising for the Chevy Cruze in Times Square, and elsewhere.
We had enjoyed our ride, and clearly others, here in the States do too – as the Cruze was the best-selling compact car in the US in April 2011.
And we tried it first.
This has the potential to take a lot of the fun out of traveling!
Isn’t a big part of the fun not knowing?!
What about the time in Brussels where I ordered fondue and out came mozzarella sticks?!
Isn’t part of traveling trying things you don’t know?
I spent the good part of an hour at a cheese counter in a supermarket in Switzerland just trying different cheeses I had never heard of before. The person behind the counter even got a kick out of it.
Would you ever try centolla? Or are you afraid of the name? Because it’s actually crab legs. And I had them in Argentina. And they were yummy.
Of course there are times when this back fires. There was a trip to Italy. We were in a town called Greve in Chianti. The restaurant was full of locals and if there were any other tourists, they blended in just fine. The boyfriend decided to try the daily special. The daily special was an array of meat, meat so fresh, the plate had an overwhelming smell of wet dog. But to the restaurant, they were so proud. And to not insult, my boyfriend ate the better part of the plate. Every bite was chased by a gulp of water and a sip of wine. But he ate.
I should say my gnocchi, the other house specialty, was delicious and required no such chasers.
simply three cents 