Travel – Page 22 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Travel planning – Barcelona hotel and bonus air fair

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We finally found a hotel in Barcelona we like.

The Hotel Pulitzer is a bit pricier than we originally wanted, but it’s well situated in the city center and within spitting distance of the Placa de Catalunya.

The reviews at Trip Advisor give it an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5. It was also the winner of the 2006 Trip Advisor Traveller’s Choice Award.

Even with it’s designer price-tag, we’re still in under budget for hotel accommodations for the entire trip so we went ahead and booked it for the 8 nights we’ll be there.

That’s the last of the hotels for the trip. Yay!

We also booked the flight that will take us from Granada to Barcelona. This is bugging me a little because the carry on restrictions are very tight in Europe. It’s 10kg (22 lbs) and that’s not per bag, that total per person. My camera gear comes in at 4 lbs alone so I may have to check my backpack which fills me with dread thinking it could get lost or stolen at the Barcelona airport.

If I end up having to check the backpack I will remove a few items and add them to my carry on and just hope for the best knowing that Barcelona is a big enough city to allow me resupply if the need arises.

I also found some great shirts for the trip. 100% silk and very wrinkle resistant. In terms of clothing I think I am all set.

The next phase of planning is the Eurail pass. We need to go over the options and see what we need and then purchase them online. That will probably be next weekend.

What time is the eleven o’clock duck parade?

The hotel they have us shacked up in is for this event is the Peabody Orlando.
It’s pretty posh, but not exquisite or anything. Convention rates put the rooms at $200 a night (company is paying) so I am sure they’re more expensive for the average visitor.

The “mascot” of this hotel is the Peabody Duck and since opening its doors on November 1, 1986, The Peabody Orlando has continued, in unbroken sequence, the traditional March of The Peabody Ducks which began at its sister property, The Peabody Memphis, many, many years ago.

Each morning, promptly at 11 a.m. the ducks ride in a special elevator that descends from their $100,000 penthouse Royal Duck Palace.

When the elevator doors open, The Peabody Ducks, accompanied by their crimson-and-gold-braid-jacketed Duck Masterâ„¢, take up their positions on a plush red carpet and begin The March of The Peabody Orlando Ducks to the strident tones of John Philip Souza’s King Cotton March.

Oh the huge manatee!

I have been dispatched to Orlando, FL to support the companies annual sales rally. It the one time each year all of our sales critters are brought together to be educated and hyped on the corporate sales strategy.

Overall, it’s not a bad gig for me. Good food and a luxury hotel combined with an endless stream of sale people who each owe me a drink, or WILL owe me a drink so let’s just get it out of the way thankyouverymuch.

My Internet friend Suzanne lives out on the coast in nearby Melbourne. She and her husband recently moved there from Lansing, Michigan. Since I was in the neighborhood I dropped her a line and we arranged to meet up for lunch at a pretty cool tiki bar and grill called Bonefish Willies. Great place!

From there went by her art gallery and checked out some of her painting and then moved on to a local park where you can go out on this small pier and actually pet a manatee. When we arrived there were around 6 or 7 of these odd creatures milling about.

Apparently they’re quite common around these parts. Regardless, I was very excited to see them for the first time and to actually get to pet one on his grizzly little manatee head.

Thanks Suzanne for showing me a little slice of life in Florida I would not have otherwise seen on this business trip!

I was pretty beat after I got back to the hotel but I snapped this from my hotel room window before crawling into bed and getting some sleep.

Long distance information

For the last two days Cynthia and I have woken up an hour earlier in the morning so we can make overseas calls to Madrid, Seville and Granada to book hotels.

Yesterday we secured our hotel in Seville but there were no vacancies at Los Tilos in Granada. Not totally unexpected as we will be in Granada during Fiesta Nacional de EspaÃ±a or DÃa de la Hispanidad (aka: Spanish National Day; aka Hispanic Day) which is a Spanish national holiday commemorating the exact date when Christopher Columbus first set a foot in the Americas.

We went back online yesterday and did some more research and found Carmen de la Alcubilla del Caracol, a charming 7 room hotel on one of the slopes of the Alhambra. It’s rated #4 out of 132 hotels on Trip Advisor and all the reviews are quite glowing. We called them this morning and successfully made our reservations. I’m actually very excited about this hotel and am rather glad Los Tilos was unavailable as it lead to this discovery.

So far, not one of the hotels we have booked or tried to book have had any English speaking employees. This is not a problem since Cynthia speaks Spanish quite well, but it is something to consider if you are planning a trip to Spain. I am sure that any of the larger chain or luxury hotels can easily accommodate non-Spanish speaking guests, but getting a room in one of these smaller, private/family owned or “boutique” hotels could be a challenge if you don’t speak the language.

The proprietors of these places seem wary of non-Spanish speaking people seeking to make reservations, probably as a result of misunderstandings about rates, dates, services, etc. That’s understandable. The hotel in Madrid would not even take our reservation over the phone and will only work with us via e-mail. I am sure that is probably so there is a record of what has been agreed upon and way to avoid any misunderstandings that could be caused by the language barrier.

I have to say, it was pretty cool listening to Cynthia negotiate our reservations and doing it all in Spanish. I think her language skills are going to allow us to have an even better experience than we would if neither of us spoke the language.

Up next, finalizing Madrid hotel reservations, more research on Barcelona hotels, more research on rail passes and possibly booking a flight from Granada to Barcelona. No way I am taking a night train again.

Travel resources

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.

Practical considerations – photography

Obviously one of the key components to the upcoming trip is the photography. It’s my first trip with my new digital SLR and Cynthia will be bringing her new Pentax K10D.

On our previous trip I used the Sony F828 which was a glorified point and shoot camera.
It had the benefit of having a built in but very versatile 28-200mm lens and it did a good job. I can’t complain about the pictures I got in Venice or the glorious time-lapsed picture of the Eiffel Tower.

Now with the Sony Alpha 100 I find myself with 6 lenses, 4 of which I plan to take with me on the trip.

Where the F828 was easy to manage and carry in a small shoulder bag, my current photo equipment needs required the purchase of something a bit larger. I went with a Domke F-3X after seeing how nice Cynthia’s Domke F-5XB bag was.

It’s made of good, solid canvas construction with minimal padding except on the bottom. This makes it much more flexible for storing a variety of lenses and other gear. The strap has a non-slip surface so it doesn’t continuously slide off of my shoulder.

It holds all I need plus some stuff I don’t. The side pockets hold my external flash and the charger quite easily.

I was really happy to get this sorted out but during our research we realized something that has thrown a kink into our planning. We kind of knew this from before, but it’s even more of an issue now and that is the fact that many museums don’t allow camera bags. You have to check them at the front desk. Of course this means you might get your bag back with certain key elements missing, like your camera or lenses.

Most places will let you carry your camera and some allow photography without a flash but the bag-check issue it a real problem. It looks like I will have to purchase a photographers vest. That way I can check an empty bag while carrying my lenses and accessories on my person.

When looking at the camera store the vests run around $100. I just ordered one off of EBay for less that $40.

Advance travel planning – Gibraltar

We spent the better part of today hammering out some of the details of our trip. We’re determining how many days we need to each leg and starting to fill in the schedule.

We have discovered that getting in and out of Gibraltar is going to be much more difficult than we had previously imagined.

Apparently the fact that Gibraltar is subject to a disputed irredentist claim by Spain means that practical methods of ingress and egress are not high on the priority list for Spain.

We have determined that we will need to take a 3-4 hour bus ride to La Linea from Seville as there are no trains that travel the route.

From La Linea you can just walk across the border to Gibralter. We ‘re trying to find out if we can manage this as a day trip. From what I can tell there’s not enough to do in Gibraltar to fill two days. If we can get there early enough we can tour The Rock and then go back to Seville that evening.

We have not been able to find too much information on the web, but if we’re lucky, there will be any number of companies marketing trips to Gibraltar from Seville and it will just work itself out once we actually get to Seville. Otherwise we’ll need to stay the night in La Linea and then find our way on out the next day to go back to Seville or just move on to Granada from La Linea via a convoluted combination of bus and train trips.

Even though the Spanish government and the transportation system seems determined to hinder our ability to add Gibraltar to our itinerary, Cynthia is adamant about going to see the monkeys (apes) and Europa Point.

Reservations and time off

Cynthia and I put in our time off requests with our respective employers on Monday. Mine was approved that day, Cynthia’s boss made her wait till today.

I’m burning up all my saved vacation plus one personal day. Cynthia is doing more or less the same thing. That’s in excess of 170 hours of vacation each. 4 work weeks and a few work days plus the weekends.

With approval secured we went online to buy the tickets this evening.

Buying this far in advance and not travelling during the peak season means we are saving about $500 each on airfare which is good. Of course the airfare is only a small portion of the overall cost of spending a month overseas but every little bit counts!

Now comes hammering out the exact itinerary in terms of days per location and proceed time for each destination followed by researching hotels and making the reservations.

Our experience on our European vacation in 2005 was that the hotels with the best overall rates were not easily booked online, but usually had a web page with contact information with pictures and descriptions of the facility.

The process was for us to find the one’s we were interested in and then e-mail them to check on availability. They would respond the next day and then we would make a final decision and arrange to fax or phone in credit card information to secure the rooms. This worked really well from Amsterdam all the way down to Rome.

We’ll also need to sort out which rail pass will be the most efficient.

It’s hard work nailing down all the particulars, but it’s all part of the experience for us. We don’t want to be tied down to a tour group or a scheduled dictated by a third party. We want the freedom of exploring on our terms based on well thought out decisions that we have made.

We’re using a lot of what we learned on our last two trips to ensure the success of this one. The most practical and useful decision we came up with last time was to travel using only what we could carry in a back pack and a camera bag. The back pack measures 9″ x 21″ x 14″ and I had it down to 20lbs last time. Not having any checked luggage and being able to “wear” what you’re bringing with you does wonders for your mental state.

On the European trip we brought older underwear and socks and just disposed of it as we travelled. That was good plan! Our load lightened as we travelled! Plus you’re not stinking up your clean laundry with dirty socks.

Midway through the trip we did have to make a laundry stop in Paris.

Going to the grocery store to buy laundry detergent in a foreign land and a foreign language adds a whole new dimension to any trip. You would think picking a laundry detergent would be simple, but I was never absolutely certain that I wasn’t marching off to the laundromat with a box of dishwashing detergent, all the while being snickered at by an amused clerk who had done their level best to convince me that they spoke no English.

Then there was what could have been an international incident as I crossed the border from Rome into Vatican City to dispose of the last of our dirty undergarments. I could just imagine hearing something like “Arrestar, arrestar! Siete sotto l’arresto per terrorismo biologico!”

Fortunately I was able to utilize the cover of darkness and slipped stealthily to the dumpsters and returned without incident.

We’re starting to feel the excitement!