When Kate Pavao and Aaron Lazenby moved into their three-bedroom condo in Bernal Heights two years ago, they knew they were making sacrifices. One of them was that there would be no long Hawaiian vacations anytime in the near future.
But then the couple found themselves vacationing in Oahu for three weeks with their 4-year-old daughter, Coco.
They didn’t hit the lottery. No rich relative died and left them money. Instead, Pavao and Lazenby discovered what hundreds of Bay Area residents already know. To take your dream vacation, you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg. You just have to be willing to share your home.
Thanks to the Internet, home exchange programs have proliferated over the past decade, offering Bay Area residents a way to leverage their biggest investment into dream vacations. And, because they live in one of the post popular places on Earth, they can easily swap their homes for the best locales. Potrero Hill for Paris anyone?
“It really speaks to the pragmatist in me,” said Pavao, 33. “You don’t have to leave your house empty, you don’t have to pay for a cat-sitter. We’re paying a lot of money for this place every month. It’s silly for it not to be used.”
Category: Travel
On the Cheap Dollar and Travel to Europe
Just when I was getting used to the idea that a euro should cost $1.20, our dollar plummets 20 percent, and now a euro costs $1.55. Don’t expect our currency to recover any time soon because, frankly, we’re not as rich as we think we are.
But 12 million Americans – the vast majority of them normal working people – had a blast in Europe in 2007. So don’t mope. Just get smart and stretch that wimpy little dollar. To help you keep your travel dreams affordable in 2008, here are ways you can take back that 20 percent drop in your dollar’s value – and have a more rewarding trip.
1. A bed and breakfast offers double the warmth and cultural intimacy for half the price of a hotel. You’ll find them in most countries if you know the local word: Husrom is Norwegian for sobe, which is Slovenian for Zimmer, which is German for bed and breakfast (literally, “room”). In Haarlem, in the Netherlands, I save 33 percent by staying a 10-minute walk from the center and paying 55 euros for a double room with a shower, rather than on the square in the cheapest hotel in town, which runs 85 euros for a double with shower.
Milwaukee Art Museum VR Scene
Click for a full screen VR view.
There are some flaws in this hand held scene, but it’s a pleasant view of a spectacular space, particularly the day before our latest snowstorm.
Evaluating the Proposed Delta/Northwest Merger
Doug Parker had a vision. His successful America West had completed a merger agreement with bankrupt US Airways Group on May 19, 2005. With this deal he planned to become the dominant low cost carrier in the country as the new US Airways (NYSE: LCC). And he would be its CEO. The next day CNN reported that “Parker thinks he can buck history and make a success out of merging his more successful airline with one in bankruptcy.” The company’s press release said:
Building upon two complementary networks with similar fleets, closely- aligned labor contracts and two outstanding teams of people, this merger creates the first nationwide full service low-cost airline.
On September 29, 2005 trading began for Mr. Parker’s new carrier. On that day its stock closed a little above $20. Then in a remarkable run-up to November 24, 2006 it was trading at around $63. Doug Parker seemed close to realizing his vision. Close, but no cigar. The run-up was followed by a steady erosion in shareholder value that on Friday March 7, 2008 saw his stock close at just under $11. That represented an 82% loss in value from its peak and a 46% loss from its initial price. What went wrong?
Northwest is Madison’s largest carrier. This proposed merger, combined with high oil prices that will dramatically reduce the number of small jets servicing airports like ours may require rethinking local air service.
Deserts in Bloom: Late-winter rains in California and the Southwest have nature-lovers and sightseers holding their breath. This could be the best spring in years for seeing wildflowers.
The vistas here in this land of desert and rock feature deep canyons and striated rock formations. But the most impressive sight is yet to come. At some point next month, the gray floor of the desert will be set ablaze by carpets of wildflowers, in riotous shades of purple, yellow and red.
Aficionados maintain that witnessing desert wildflowers is one of the most rewarding experiences in nature. Fall’s dramatic leaf color change is guaranteed to happen every year. Desert wildflowers are far less predictable. If good spring rains are lacking, which was largely the case in 2006 and 2007, the flowers don’t appear. When nature does cooperate, for two weeks or a month the desert looks as if it has been streaked by a giant paintbrush.
This year is shaping up as one of those lucky years, due to a series of storms that swept California and the Southwest in January, followed by more rain in February. “I’m hoping it’s going to be terrific,” says Patrick Leary, a professor of plant biology at the College of Southern Nevada, who teaches a course in desert plants. “You suffer and wait and pray for a good year and when that year comes, you have to be out there every available moment. And then it’s gone.”
Wisconsin’s Chocolate Delta
OAKS Candy Corner in Oshkosh is a chocolate mirage.
Its gingerbread exterior yields to an interior that in winter is as sugary warm as the inside of a circus peanut and in summer is as refreshing as a wax Coke bottle. It smells like caramel corn and cocoa butter rubbed into the floorboards with a pair of Red Wing boots. It’s the shop just around the corner in an unremittingly blue-collar part of an unremittingly blue-collar town. It shouldn’t still be there, but there it is.
If Oaks Candy is a mirage, then the Hughes Homaid Chocolate Shop, less than half a mile away, is a figment of Wisconsin’s imagination. An 80-year-old bungalow two blocks from Lake Winnebago, it has only a small neon sign to state its trade and a full-blown candy-making operation in its basement.
But Oshkosh isn’t the only caretaker of these unlikely sweet dreams. There’s Beerntsen’s in Manitowoc, with its plate lunches and ice cream sodas; Wilmar Chocolates in Appleton, with its old-time awnings and row of state-fair prizes on the south wall; Kaap’s in Green Bay, with its jar of jawbreakers on the counter; Seroogy’s in De Pere, with its magical whipped-chocolate-filled “meltaways”; and more, much more.
Thinking of Summer: Antibes
This image of a woman jumping from a rocky cliff into the Mediterranean was taken from a “people’s beach” adjacent to the Hotel du Cap [Clusty search]. A useful image as we Madisonians face another snow shoveling event. Clusty search: Antibes.
satellite view
Thinking of Summer: Aix-en-Provence
Thoughts of summer as Winter continues in Madison. Note the fashionable sushi delivery vehicle, a Smart Car and the smartly dressed pedestrian. Summer in Provence. Much more on Aix-en-Provence here [map]
Steve Tabor has organized the desert into bite-size hikes for those unused to dry landscapes
The Desert Trail runs 656 miles through California. Steve Tabor of Alameda has alphabetized it into 26 weekend hikes, A to Z, starting at the Mexican border in winter. When he isn’t walking the barren landscape, Tabor, 58, is a pumper and operator at a vegetable oil refinery in Richmond.
“I got involved with a group called Desert Survivors, which is a desert protection organization. I became their president and started leading hikes for them. I got involved in the Desert Trail program, which was supposedly going to go from Mexico to Canada. They had no one to do the route work in California and Nevada.
For many years people were trying to figure out how to do this and there were many different concepts. One guy just wanted to carry no food and no water and try to do it. That doesn’t work for most people. We wanted to make it like a backpack trip that the majority of hikers would be able to do. I said, ‘Why don’t we just do it the way we’ve done it in Desert Survivors? Instead of having these 100-mile-long segments, have quick bites that people could do in two, three or four days. They should be able to carry enough water.’
SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled’s carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.
To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.