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Well, it seems that we had a rather hefty flight credit with American Airlines so we decided to take advantage of it. After we figured out that we wanted to go to London, not New York, not Mexico, no anywhere else did we call up AA to call in our old tickets. That's when the fun began.

Apparently, there is a rule that states you can only change a ticket for one that originates the same country. Normally, I'd be cool with this, but our previous AA flight was a one way from Dublin to LAX. So to use these ticket credits, we MUST fly out of Ireland. Oye.

So after some hunting around, we found that we should just book a flight to London and book a return from Dublin. We figured on just getting one of the many London-Dublin flights while we were there. So we found some very interesting bits. If you book an LAX to London flight, it will cost you about 500 to 1000 dollars per person one way. If you book a round trip, it will cost you about 700 dollars per person. Now, if you book a LAX-London-DUB flight, it will only run you about 325 dollars per person!! Yeah, you read that right. You save about 675 per person by flying into London and then hopping a plane to Dublin. So we booked our flight to London and then onto Dublin even though we have no intention of getting on the Dublin flight, at least not on that day. We're going to stay in London for about 6 or 7 days, then go back to the airport to get our connector to Ireland. Will it work? Who knows...but figure the worst that can happen is they'll make us pay for a flight to Ireland which is like 50-100 dollars per person...still a huge savings!

The good news is that we were able to book our one way back from Dublin and get 115 dollars in the form of a travel voucher back from AA. We then booked teh crazy LAX-Charlotte-London Gatwick-Dublin beast of a flight. But as stated before, we're just going to go through customs in London and head into town. Then we'll call the airline once we get into town and see what our options are.

BTW, we found an interesting site that has podcasted walking tours of London. I think we'll load up one of the Sansa Connects with these and see how they are.

UPDATE: I confirmed with some frequent flyer gurus that our skipping out on the last segment is ok. The keys are:

1. Book each segment separately: If you miss a segment, the airline will sometimes cancel the rest of your reservation. Meaning, if we had booked a round trip from LAX-DUB-LAX and skipped the London-DUB segment, we very well may have cancelled our DUB-LAX segment and would have been stranded in Europe.

2. Don't check any bags: No problem for us. We brought backpacks and survived for a month in Europe quite nicely. I can't imagine bringing big bags anywhere any more.

3. Book your London-DUB flight before you go: London immigration may be wondering why you only have a one way to London and a flight out of Dublin. They'll probably want to make sure you have conveyance booked that gets you out of their country (and off their welfare rolls).

When I saw joe's post on bookofjoe: bookofjoe MoneyMaker™ — OneZip Mini it made me want to recount my own plastic bag obsession.

Ever since our Europe trip, I've become a believer in resealable plastic bags. While I know that one-time-use plastic bags are the enemy of the free world, I think these little guys are useful (and plus they are reusable).

For our first trip to Europe, we used plastic bags to pack everything in easily removable groups. For example, in the "pants" bag, I had my spare pair of pants...yes I only had two pair of pants with me plus a pair of shorts for the whole month. I packed the AC adapters, plugs, connectors, etc into another plastic bag. Of course, our toiletries went into their own bag. My underwear and socks plus a couple of t-shirts when into our good old Eagle Creek packing cube that have been on every trip with me for ages and ages. Another plastic bag for splenda, meds, etc. We brought along extra baggies just in case and used them to carry food we bought at supermarkets and left overs from restaurants.

When we got home, we've continued to use the same bags for storage of various items. We have our "croissant bag" which houses the tasty Costco croissants and keeps them from turning into rock hard projectiles. We also use them to keep other foods and then we wash, dry, and reuse them. Aren't they disposable you ask? Why yes, but just because something is disposable doesn't me it can't be reused. We've used the same set of gladware plastic boxes for years now. I know you're supposed to toss them after a few months, but why? They work perfectly fine.

My one word of advice is to avoid Hefty zip bags. They're just not as well made as ziploc or glad baggies. We got them because they were cheap but found that a couple of bags had funky zippers that did not close properly. So much for quality control.

Oh yeah, on of joe's commentors had a link to this sweet selection of baggies in case you need odd sizes.

Hongyun and I have been struggling with fatigue, but nevertheless, we've been having a good time here in Holland. Our first day, we spent in a daze since we had hardly slept on the plane. We just wandered a bit and The next day we spent walking around the central Amsterdam area where all of the action and tourists are.

We also visited the Van Gogh museum which was rather nice. Did you know Van Gogh only painted for 10 years of his life before he went insane and shot himself? I knew he didn't have a good time of things, but I had no idea he imploded so horribly.

The Rijks Museum was a rather big disappointment. They only had a small portion of their collection available while the main museum is under construction. At least Rembrandt's Night Watch was on display.

The following day, we went out of Amsterdam to Zaans Schans to see functioning windmills. We saw one mill in action that was making peanut oil....a sight to see indeed.

Today we went to Alkmaar in the north of Holland for the cheese market where they've been doing large scale cheese trades for about 650 years now. There's an interesting process of quality inspection, weighing, and loading the truck. We're uploading the photos now, so you can check them out.

After the cheese market, we took a train down to Rotterdam to see some post-modern architecture and boy did we find some interesting buildings...again, the photos will speak for themselves when they are uploaded.

Now we're just resting and uploading as much as we can until we head to Venice tomorrow.

Tots! (bye in Dutch)

Well, we're about 5 days from our departure date to Europe and making last minute preparations. As you already know (I think), we've decided to go sans laptop for this trip. What? No computer at your every beck and call? Preposterous you must be shouting by now. I think so too, but we decided against it since a laptop would comprise about 20-25% of our total gear weight limit of 40lbs. I still think we're a tiny bit over without the beastly machine, but at least we're not lugging a whole computer and what not around.

This presents a few problems in and of itself. First is that we will need internet access. Sure there will be Internet cafes just about everywhere, but we know those are about as safe as carrying your money around in a clear plastic bag floated by helium balloons behind you. I'm sure most are perfectly fine, but I'm not really in the mood to take a chance with my private info.

So what to do? Well, in this day and age, plenty. We're bringing a USB thumb-drive-ama-key-fob-ama-flash-amajig that contains a bevy of widgets:

1. Portable Apps - a nice suite of apps ready to go for your USB thing
2. KL-Detector - a free keylogger detector.
3. KeyPass - a password keeper app (yes, you should put your passwords into this app BEFORE you leave home)
4. LockNote - a notepad that uses AES256 encryption to lock up text...we're going to keep backup copies of our info on here...just in case.
5. TrueCrypt - a drive encryption mechanism that will keep data safe in case it gets lost.
6. Mouse Only Keyboard - a tool that will allow you to construct passwords by choosing letters and symbols on screen instead of using a keyboard. Sure it's slow, but it is much safer.
7. Neo's SafeKeys - a variation on the on-screen keyboard theme.

I'm also thinking of bringing my PPC-6700. Eventhough I won't have EVDO access, it still has built-in wifi that should work with public wifi connections. The cool part comes when I login to my home PC via logmein from the phone. Since there are no keyloggers on my personal phone and the logmein traffic with my home computer is encrypted, we should be pretty safe. A little paranoid you say? Yeah, but at least my data will be safer for the most part. A little geeky elbow grease goes a long way.

Big Ups to The Great Geek Manual for point the way for us paranoid geekswho want to roam the earth.

It seems that all of our travel reservations have gone up in smoke. Well, the reservations are still there, but the email confirmations have disappeared. I think gmail really doesn't want us to travel this summer so it has gone and deleted all of the email that had anything to do with us paying for our plane tickets. 3 or 4 in all.

It happened when I labeled them "Travel Reservations" figuring it'd be a good idea to have a quick way to take a look at them. The next morning I went to look something up and they were gone. Hmmm...curious. I decided to search for them using the much touted "search" feature in gmail. Nada. Hmmm, how about the trash folder? Nope, try again. SPAM folder? Nope, not their either.

"WTF?" I'm thinking to myself at this point. I start trying to remember the places I bought tickets from. American Airlines for the Dublin to LAX flight, Northwest (I think) for the LAX to Amsterdam flight, and Aer Lingus (maybe) for the Athens to Dublin flight. Without the confirmation numbers though I'm screwed. Then I remembered spending a while to debug problems with our networked printer at home and had printed everything so we were saved.

Phew...and being the obsessive backup-er that I am, I keep Windows Live Mail Desktop (yes that's the name of the app...and yes, I hate the name) running on my desktop PC at home at all times, quietly sucking down all of my Gmail all day and night. When I got home yesterday, I found that I had not only a hard copy (mental note: print EVERYTHING out), but also a copy of all of the emails sitting in WLMD (not to be confused with the president's WMDs). I could not have imagined a day when Microsoft saved my ass from a bungle over at Google. The world has truly turned upside down.

So last time, Hongyun and I visited the topic Cameras for Europe, we were wavering between going all out with the Canon HV20 (aff) (nice, but pricey) and going relatively lo-fi with a pair of Kodak cameras.

Well, we decided to get the Kodak V705 (aff) and see if that would fit the bill, then grab the V610 if we need to. So far the V705 has been phenomenally popular with us. I've used the panorama feature a few times and am planning to take as many panormas as I can now that it's drop dead simple. Here, take a look. Here's another one that shows the carnage of the 880/580 freeway debacle in the bay area.

I'm not even sure we're going to grab the V610 at this point since super zoom probably is not going to be necessary. I'm still considering taking the Rebel XT with some lenses with me, but only if we get a lot of couch surfing hits. But honestly, the thought of carrying around a large camera around my neck or a camera bag does not appeal to me.

On the subject of bringing a laptop, we've decided not to. Wait, what? I'm not bringing a laptop with me to Europe? The guy who brings his laptop to the can so he can keep reading blog postings about how everyone has screwed themselves by not reading their mortgage documents? Yep that's right...I, the eternally net-tethered one, am not going to bring a laptop. I'm hoping the withdrawl symptoms will subside a few days into the trip.

This doesn't mean, however, that we'll be sans technology. I'm considering getting some sort of backup solution so we can offload the memory cards for safe keeping. I've looked at a bunch of solutions both cheap and pricey and I think we're going to for one of the higher quality (read: not so cheap) ones. The Epson P-4000 (aff) may be the right little one for us. Why? Well for several reasons. It has a nice big screen, so we can actually verify that our files have arrived properly. It also plays DIVX files, so we can bring along a few movies for the down times when we're too pooped to party. The plan is to be able to hook this up to a PC when we have a chance and upload photos to our home storage system and flickr for safe keeping. Obsessive? A little, but it's a sound disaster prevention policy in my mind.

Also, there is a rebate on this little bad boy which brings it in just under $400 including shipping and no tax! After we get back, I'd probably just sell it off for near what I got it for and we'll get our money back.

Camera Strategy for Europe
The Sunglasses Epiphany
Amtrak Blues
Air China Sucks
Folding Bicycle Info
Scenically Challenged
Yosemite Info Nexus
Napa Gouged
Lake Merritt, Piedmont, and 4th street Berkeley
Kaanapali Alii Review
Back From Maui
Off to Maui
Oakland and the Chabot Space and Science Center
We don't buy shoes at WalMart
Radical Guides