Travel

Well, I was going to try and see if I could afford getting plane tickets for the wife to go to Kerrville TX next month, but at this point it doesn’t look like she is going to make it. That kind of sucks, but it’s just one of those things.

We have been making lists of some things that we need to get before we go on our next vacation though, and as much as I hate spending money we need to get a new set of luggage. I have always pretty much been fine with just using my old canvas carry on, but for any kind of traveling where we have to pack heavy, that just doesn’t work well.

…Perugia?

One of the things that I really enjoy doing when I am writing some of my reviews are the posts about vacations in different places, particularly in foreign countries that I have not been able to visit. I was checking out hotelclub.net tonight because you know, that’s what I do 🙂 and I came across a listing for Discount Perugia Hotels.

Where is Perugia you say? It is the capital city in the region of Umbria which is in central Italy right near the Tiber river (or so Wiki tells me). Hey, and they have a chocolate festival in October. Italy and Germany in October. Sweet. Chocolate and Beer, two of my favorite food groups.

Anyway, they only have one listing for a five star hotel in Perugia but there are several four stars available such as the Castello Dell’Oscano Hotel Cenerente, which is probably more in my price range.

Check out this postcard from Perugia.

Looks like a really nice place to visit actually.

That one is the Fontana Maggiore which is at the center of Piazza IV Novembre. I was built as a monument to celebrate the success of the completion of the aqueduct which carried water into the main square back in 1277. Pretty darned cool hydraulic system seeing as how it was designed 730 years ago.

When we pulled out of Dallas the next morning we headed north into Oklahoma City and took I-40 west back into the panhandle and into New Mexico. We drove most of the day with just bathroom breaks and a couple of meals. We did get to Route 666 in western New Mexico that evening and had to stop and get our pictures taken under the highway sign. Since it was twilight and I had left my flash at home they are pretty shitty pictures. The only thing that shows up on one is the sign that says 666, and on the other my friend Chris’ body is there, but his head is a blur.

Driving through the Rockies was wild. We hadn’t had much sleep and quite a bit of the trip is a blur. We kept on driving through the night after that. At some point early the next morning we stopped at the Grand Canyon and slept for awhile in the car. We crossed the continental divide at some point either before or after our stop there. Except for a brief stay in Dallas we had driven two days straight. Once the sun came up we got out and looked around the Grand Canyon, took some pictures, and left.

After the Grand Canyon we drove straight to Las Vegas, or our only other overnight stay. We spent most of the afternoon and evening hanging out in Vegas. Since I wasn’t 21 we got thrown out of Caesar’s Palace 🙂 and ended up hanging out at the Holiday Inn which in Vegas is still a casino. If I remember correctly (it’s been 20+ years) it was some kind of circus theme, a little more family oriented than the rest.

Once again it is time to start getting ready for work. I think perhaps I will sit down this afternoon and try to remember the time-line better, because the entire trip at least out to Vegas is one big blur. It would help if I didn’t type these right after I wake up. Even if I don’t remember properly I will write more about the trip later. This is my Open Track-back post for the weekend of April 14th-16th.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, Is It Just Me?, The Virtuous Republic, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, Pursuing Holiness, , Rightlinx, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, stikNstein… has no mercy, , Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, 123beta, Maggie’s Notebook, Adam’s Blog, basil’s blog, Phastidio.net, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao’s Blog, , Jo’s Cafe, Conservative Cat, Allie Is Wired, Faultline USA, stikNstein… has no mercy, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Gone Hollywood, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

…with an aching in my heart.

I may have posted about driving to California at one point or another over the last few year, but I can’t get online right now to do a search and don’t care anyway. If I have I am going to rehash the subject. Writing about ex-girlfriends got me to thinking about my last trip out there and how surreal it was.

My friend Chris who passed away last year was home on leave and decided that he wanted to drive back home but didn’t want to try it by himself so I agreed to go with him and then would fly back. The fact that I didn’t have a driver’s license didn’t particularly bother me. He did quite a bit of the driving due to that and I would take over when he was just too damn tired to drive and he would crawl out the little window into the back of the pickup and sleep for awhile.

We left on Sunday morning at about eight and went straight out I-20 west to Dallas, which was out first stop. The longest part of the drive was damn Louisiana. Nothing but damn swamps all around, but it was cool as well. I don’t remember how long it took to get there, but it was dark. We ended up getting a hotel room there and crashed for the night. Nothing exciting really happened there, but I do remember that they had a radio station that played nothing but Heavy Metal. That was cool as hell and nothing like I experienced here in Redneckville. I wasn’t even aware that there were radio stations that played nothing but the music that I listened to.

I didn’t realize quite how late it was, I have to get ready for work, but will post more about the trip this afternoon when I get home. Sucks being left in the dark, don’t it?

…thank goodness. It will probably be a quite long one as well. I will be on the grill until at least after lunch, then I have three weeks of schedules to do, some other paperwork to finish, audits and inventories and a butt load of cleaning (particularly my office). I also have to paint all of my booth supports and chair legs.

I thought they were going to tell me to stripe the lot, but for a change we are going to come off with some money and actually pay someone else to do the job. Too bad they aren’t a professional. It’s going to look just as bad as if I did it, but at least I get to sit that one out.

My boss that I have written about is indeed leaving the company, and I will have a new division manager when I get back from vacation. That really sucks. As many problems as I have given him over the years I like him, and the evil I know is better than the one I don’t. And he pretty much leaves me alone to do what I want unless something is just screwed up.

Our company came to him with a contract to sign in order to stay. Basically it said that he would sell all of his rental houses and quit taking safe jobs. Of course he wouldn’t sign it. Smart man. What I do on my time off is none of their business, but they have always asserted themselves in a very intrusive way.

I’ve written once or twice about how I would love to go on a vacation to Italy. There are a bunch of places in Europe that I want to see while I’m still young enough to get around pretty easily and Italy is one of them. I want to travel to Rome and see the Vatican as well well as all of the earlier historical sites and monuments.

I also want to check out the countryside as well. The Villas in Italy are supposed to be among the most beautiful in the world. Check this out.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to just hang out there for a month or so.

A couple of months before my wife and I were married, she and a friend along with their respective mothers took a trip to Mexico. My son has also been a few years back, but as of yet I have not had the chance to visit. Sooner or later I will remedy that. While they were there they rented a car of course. When I do end up going I will either drive mine, or rent one here to drive there. If you’ve been around here for awhile you know that I am deathly afraid of flying and after that last fiasco on a commuter jet I decided that there was just no reason for me to leave the perfectly good ground.

One thing I was not aware of when my wife went that I wish I had is that Mexico does not recognize auto insurance from the United States. This means that if you get into an accident and don’t have Mexican Car Insurance you might end up in jail, or held personally liable for any damages, whether it was your fault or not. Just as in the U.S. if you get in an accident without insurance, they can hold you responsible. You might even end up with jail time over something as simple as a fender-bender. In addition, they will hold you in jail until they have received FULL payment.

Another thing to consider when going is health insurance. Quite a few U.S. Insurance companies will not cover you when you leave the United States. This means that you need to get some kind of coverage that will take care of you and your family while there.

There is a pretty good article here about why your insurance may not be enough on a trip to Mexico and why you might want to find out exactly what is covered. The Mexican Insurance Store has a lot of valuable information about Auto and Health coverage while in Mexico. They’ve been in the insurance business for 29 years and offer the best emergency medical assistance services in the industry through Assist America. That’s the same service that the AMA gives THEIR employees and families when they travel outside of the United States.

You can actually purchase your insurance online and print out your insurance certificate right at home OR you can call them and give them your information and they will fax or email the information right back to you.

They also offer some extras as well such as programs with fixed deductibles and a $25k Bail Bond Service, which might not be a bad idea in Mexico. I have heard horror stories about people getting locked up out of country and it’s not pretty.