Looking back at my Orbitz activity over the last few years, there is a significant spike in "My Trips" planning right around this time. Every year. Forget Winter Break, forget Spring Break....these professional duty avoidance daydreams are all about the next Summer.
The research reverie this deep Fall is of a Summer '09 cycling through France. This is the perfect type of trip for a November daydream research-a-thon, as it involves lots of detail, rampant choices to make (fly to Lyon?, or to Toulouse?, how do you pronounce "Toulouse"?, etc.) and the review of similar trips done by similar-minded geeky types who are all too happy to recount their own trips.
My two hour or so a day habit is now centered at Crazy Guy on a Bike, with copious side-journeys to see if British Airways has dropped the price of travel yet (they haven't). Plug in twenty minutes or so of French instruction at the BBC, and you've wasted an evening that would otherwise go to watching "Law & Order", blogging...or solving the world's economic dilemmas.
Or grading papers. Yeah, there is that. As a "writing" teacher there is always that. Hmmm...maybe I could check out the reviews of the airports near Lyon instead of grading....let's check Skytrax for Geneva or Basel....
P.S.: Now that you asked (okay, you didn't ask but you were just about to think about asking...trust me), I'm trying to go with British Airways to France instead of Air France or such because BA told me they wouldn't charge extra to haul my bike to Europe. My former favorite Euro carrier Lufthansa told me it was to cost $200 for such a service. Damn cost-efficient Germans. It strikes me now that I haven't even researched Air France for such info, assuming they would charge as well. Better go
2 comments:
This will almost certainly also entail a lot of "training," by which I mean aimless two-wheeled shambling come Sundays.
Exactement John. Exactement. And that covers about 50% of the French adverbs I can handle.
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