Travel

In reviewing the pictures from our two previous trips one thing stands out and that’s the fact that there’s simply too few pictures of Cynthia and I together.

Sure, she has her camera and I have my camera so we’ve got some pictures of each other, but the thought of handing hundreds of dollars worth of technology to a complete stranger causes one to pause. For the sake of a romantic shot of the two of us in front of (insert cool landmark here) we are risking them dropping, or even worse, stealing the camera.

And holding a full SLR at arms length doesn’t work very well either.

Then I had a brainstorm.

I came up with the idea of purchasing a used and inexpensive point and shoot camera. The idea being that it’s something that can easily be held at arm’s length so we can get the self portraits of ourselves and it’s cheap enough so that if we do decide to let someone take our picture and they drop it or run away we’re not out that much.

It occurred to me that the secondary camera market must be huge and that by being willing to sacrifice a few mega-pixels and some features, a few year old used point and shoot digital camera should be pretty inexpensive and readily available.

We headed over to The Camera Exchange and I was able to pick up a used Nikon Coolpix 4100 with a 1 gig memory card for a song (as in well under a $100 song)!

I’m sure I could have gotten even cheaper on Ebay or from Craigslist or even the Chronicle Classifieds but this was better for me as I like to put my hands on technology before I buy it, even if it’s cheap cheap cheap.

The camera weighs next to nothing, runs on AA batteries so there’s no charger which makes it a breeze to transport. 4 mega-pixels, 3X zoom, super easy to use.

It’s PERFECT!

One of the things I am liking about blogging our upcoming trip is that the posts are being quickly indexed into the main search engines. This is producing an increase in random visits to baldheretic.com from people all over the world searching terms related to travel to Spain. Besides the helpful and much appreciated comments from my friends and other known readers of this blog, I’ve also received some random e-mails and comments with suggestions about what to see and what to expect on our upcoming vacation from total strangers who seem eager to share their own experience, strength and hope.

It’s also resulting in people being able to benefit from our experience and efforts which is pretty cool.

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After a marathon planning session that lasted from 11:00 am Saturday morning till 5:30 pm that afternoon, we’ve pretty much nailed down our itinerary and are in the process of booking hotels in all the cities we will be staying in.

We have been using a fantastic web site called Trip Advisor. The feature most helpful has been the hotel reviews. Trip Advisor allows visitors to the web site to post their own experience with any given hotel directly to the site along with pictures.

This type of site can be subject to some fraud. I’ve heard of companies sending their employees or appointed P.R. folks to sites like this to write canned positive reviews and I am sure it happens here with some of the bigger hotel chains, but it’s easy to spot. Plus, we’re focusing on smaller hotels that are privately owned and don’t seem to have the where-with-all, much less the budget, for such chicanery.

On the site you have the ability to sort the reviews by best and worst. You filter through about a dozen or so of these and you end up with a good feel for the potential of the establishment.

Even if a hotel has several negative reviews you can often eliminate a good percentage of those when you read things like “hotel staff did not speak English” or “Inadequate parking” or any of a host of other so-called problems that just won’t apply to us or can be overcome with a little common sense.

The site is very user friendly and we have located most of the hotels we are interested in. Now it’s just a matter of getting up early and making some overseas calls. Fortunately Cynthia’s Spanish has gotten so good we should be able to negotiate our reservations without any trouble at all.

We’re going to get up early in the morning and call Hotel Los Tilos in Granada and and the delightful and musically themed Hotel La Musica in Seville for reservations.

We’ve believe we have found a suitable hotel for the Madrid leg and even our one night hit-and-run whirlwind visit to La Linea/Gibraltar. Barcelona is a challenge as it seems to be the most expensive leg of the trip with the most options. We’ll finalize those in the coming weeks along with a few others.