Travel Tips from a Fruit Fly(er)

That’s right, I will fly for fruit. The imported stuff is just so blah.

This time around, though, is the week of my bi-annual in-law pilgrimage to northwest Massachusetts and I’ll tell you, it’s truly all about the face-to-face. I’m writing this while my husband has gone out to wander around the ponds and trails of his youth but will have to post it when we go into town. I have zero bars of service on my iPhone and there’s no internet at his brother’s house, either–he’s given up on the prehistoric speeds of dial-up, won’t pay for satellite and can’t get DSL or cable. P.s. We’re only 85 miles from Boston.

For those of you who are traveling to places where you won’t have regular internet connectivity (broadband or wireless) but will have cell service, there are a variety of devices on the market that will enable you to connect a laptop to the internet through the cellular phone (data) network. Your mobile phone provider is a good place to start for more information.

I’ve always been a big fan of air reward miles credit cards and love them even more now that airlines are charging for checked bags on domestic flights. Because I used my United Airlines MasterCard to pay for our United flights to Boston, our first checked bag was free. The annual card member fee just went up to $95 a year, but it saved us $50 in baggage fees, bringing the cost of the card down to $45 for this year after just one trip with United.

Speaking of flights, a great website for doing searches is www.hipmunk.com. It returns results for all the airlines, and they come up in an exceptionally readable format that can be sorted by price, duration and even agony. You can also keep tabs open while you search, so if you want to compare a few different routes or dates, the other search results remain available right there in the same window. When you click to purchase a flight, it takes you right to the airline’s website to complete the transaction.

Whoohoo, lightning just struck so close that I saw blue sparks fly out from the now-unplugged fan. We don’t get storms like this in Seattle! I hope hubby made it back to the car before his camera bag got soaked.

And speaking of husbands, mine is the kind of guy who will forsake packing trousers so he can bring a camera tripod, and sharing a suitcase with him can be… interesting. I’ve always been a light traveler but find I can squish even more into my half of the bag when I roll up my clothes instead of folding them. Don’t know the density and volume calculations behind it, but it really works.

Time to sign off for now as we’ll be heading to the parents’ place for dinner in a little while. My goal for this trip is to spot the woodchuck who inhabits the woods around their place. My father-in-law, who is softening in his old age, has promised he won’t get his shotgun out and blow the little rascal to bits. Baby steps.