Travel Tips: Sat-Nav Savings

So for our current trip to the UK, I decided to rent a GPS unit to go along with our car rental.  We did it on our last trip over there and although it did tell us to turn into a field at one point and at another point wasted forty minutes of our taking us to a restaurant that didn't exist, for the most part I was pleased with it.  It gave us the freedom to just turn down a road we wanted to explore without concern of becoming dreadfully lost.

Last trip it was a last minute add-on, so I didn't really account for how much it was going to cost.  This time, I booked it at the time of the car rental and was shocked how much it cost. It was 79 GBP for 8 days of car rental.  Ten pounds a day doesn't sound too bad when you're booking but that comes out to be $126 for the trip. Gross!!  


So this set up my first travel tip here:


Tip:  Borrow a GPS (if you don't have one)
My discovery was to borrow a GPS from someone and buy the maps for it.  I updated my father in law's TomTom XL with new maps of the UK and Ireland for $50.  


Why this works:  Its a win-win situation.
I saved $76 on this trip and even more when we go back in the future.  My father in law gets free added value to his GPS, so as long as he gets his unit back why not!


We leave for England in three days, so stay tuned here for highlights very soon.

Traveling Fools

From the beginning, travel has always been a priority for Susan and me.  One of our very first dates was at Brew Haha in Newark, DE pouring over my pictures from my recent trip to China and her recent trip to Kenya.  I loved hearing the stories about the amazing things that she had done there and I guess she liked what I had to share too since she kept on dating me after then.  Almost ten years later, we've got three kids that go with us everywhere.  Some people think we're fools for staying on the move, but we wouldn't have it any other ways.  We think allowing our kids to have a big world is a very good thing for them and we're committed to keep on moving.  We may be fools, but at least we're traveling fools.

So, I wanted to start up this journal to write up and help us remember different things about all the places we've traveled over the years.  I was inspired to start doing this after listening to multiple episodes of one of my favorite podcasts, 'Travel with Rick Steves.'  If you haven't listened to him before, he is such a neat guy to listen to.  We have a lot of the same travel values, such as connecting with the culture and locals and trying to get away from the places that all the tourists flock to.  However, one value that he frequently talks about that I haven't tried yet is journaling.  He says that a travel journal is the best souvenier and that if his house ever caught on fire and he could only save one thing, it would be the journals from his travels.

Rick says to make them short and fun.  Don't fill them with a boring old log of all the things you've done that day.  He says to talk about things you saw that day that struck you as fun or insightful.  One story that I remember he shared was one of his journal entries from Egypt, which went something along the lines of 'The flies are easier to swat at when they're rubbing their front legs together.'  While that seems like a silly little thing to write down, he said when he reads that, it takes him right there and makes that memory fresh again.  He can remember all the flies that were circling around and the smell of that hotel room and how annoying all that was.  Little insights like that are worth so much.  While I'm not looking to recreate that fly experience, I do want to remember things like that.

So here's to journaling.. er blogging, since this is the 21st century now.
~jason