There are good things and bad things when you plan a trip so far in advance. Several good things for our trip include the ability to use Frequent Flyer miles, pretty much follow our initial itinerary and being able to stay where we had hoped. The rate for the car lease has also gone up but we are "locked in" at the lower rate. The "downside" (which is not really a negative) is the amount of time we have to wait to actually start our trip. But with that said it is amazing how fast the time has gone by since we made our first "official" reservation last year. And we are sure the next four months will fly by.
Since our last entry we have made our TGV reservations from Paris to Avignon. We used the iDTGV website and it could not have been easier. Thanks to a post on the Slow Travel forum we discovered that tickets for the summer were available sooner than 90 days before our scheduled departure. Using the website could not have been easier (thanks to suggestions in the forums). One of the key things to remember is to NOT indicate you are from the US or you get routed to Rail Europe and their high rates. Say you are from the United Kingdom so everything is in English and you stay on the website. Because we booked so early (and fares rise over time) we were able to get First Class seats for 27 euros each. Selected our seats, paid by credit card and printed our tickets - it was a snap.
We also contacted the four places we are staying at to confirm our reservations (since it had been six months since the original contact). All is in order so all we have to do is pay the remaining balance at the appropriate time - hoping the exchange rate stabilizes since it has been going up the past few months.
United has changed our seats several times (with no notice) apparently due to equipment changes. Unfortunately we have lost our bulkhead seats but we still have the extra room of Economy Plus. We will continue to keep an eye on United to make sure there are no other significant changes.
Charlotte is on her second term of French lessons at the Alliance Francaise of Portland. She is learning a lot and will be very helpful during our travels, especially to the more out-of-the-way, less touristy towns and villages.
We continue to browse the various forums looking for the details you probably won't find in a travel guide. It is becoming very clear that we will just be able to scratch the surface in regards to what to see and do during our month in Provence.
Within the next few months we will purchase the "necessary" gadgets to make our trip easier - a Kindle for e-books as well as other content they now support like pdf and Word documents; a GPS with European maps pre-loaded; and a SIM card so folks in the US can contact us if necessary. Also hoping that a few more of the travel guides will be available on Kindle so we can cut down on the number of guides we "need" to take. We already have a notebook for e-mail, web searching and blog updates, as well as backup storage for the pictures we take.
And speaking of books we discovered that FedEx Kinkos can cut off the traditional glued back and "install" a spiral binding. This is a great feature since you can open the book flat or you can open it all the way and just reference one page/side at a time. And it is just a few dollars a book. We highly recommend it!
Until next time - au revoir!
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