Travel a Different Way

So you are going to travel.  Well you can always book into the nearest Hilton and see the sites from there.  Quite honestly, if you don’t spend much time in hotels then they might be part of the fun.  As a Hilton Diamond member I already spend far too much time in hotels which all look the same all over the world.

When travelling Mike and I really like to have a living room and kitchenette which are separate from the bedroom.  This may be due to the fact that I go to bed very late and Mike gets up at some awful hour in the morning.  We do compromise on vacation but we still don’t exactly match.

Over the last few years our accommodations have included traveling around Venice and the Venetian lagoon in a houseboat, renting a 39 foot catamaran for a week in Thailand’s Phang Nga Bay.  In the Baltics, Central Europe, New Zealand, Australia, France, Ireland and more we rented Class C motorhomes typically for two to three weeks each.  In the UK we lived and traveled on a rented 55 foot iron barge.  In Paris, Santiaga, and Cape Town we stayed in lovely, cost effective, two and three bedroom apartments.  In Japan we spent a couple of nights in a tiny Japanese Inn with no English spoken and where Mike, at 6 feet tall, didn’t fit in the doorway.  In the Golden Triangle in Thailand we hired a private driver and tour guide.  There are still some places where you can afford to do that.  We have stayed in bed and breakfasts all over the world.  We have slept in trains and been robbed twice in the same night on a train in Italy.

All in all there are many options open to you other than your standard hotel chain.  Over the next few weeks, maybe months, I will write a little bit about why you would want to live and travel in a 5 ½ foot wide, 55 foot long canal boat and why a more normal house boat in the Venetian lagoon makes extraordinary sense even if you don’t know much about boats.  At 10 km or 6 miles per hour you are pretty safe.  Of course our last morning was spent being towed back to base, how embarrassing.  In future articles we will look at how you find apartments to rent around the world.  Currently my 17 year old niece and three of her friends are renting apartments for three or four nights each in four countries across Europe.  It can be a fairly inexpensive way to stay in a good locale with far greater space and comforts than you will find in your normal hotel room.

My niece is an excellent writer and I will try and get her to write about how she found her apartments and what they were like in the different countries.

Stay tuned.