Life of Wry

I’m not complaining. Really. There is a lot in life that is terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad (to quote Alexander)…. but working through the travel logistics for a European vacation is not one of them.

Still… oh my god, looking for the perfect hotel accommodation in a faraway city is tedious and just a TAD. BIT. OVERWHELMING. A search for hotels in, let’s say, Paris, turns up, oh, you know, about 20,000 options. Narrowing your search by arrondisement (if you’re me and never took french, that’s Air un DIZE ment) or price points or a particular je ne sais quoi (I believe this is the second time I’ve used this phrase in the last month, not bad for a non-french-speaking person) helps, and looking at the customer ratings and comments helps even more, but it’s hard to know what to trust, and wow, but there are a LOT of choices.

We spent a huge amount of time today on Expedia, when we weren’t on Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Orbitz… Found other travel planning sites I didn’t know existed, like Hipmunk, which seemed useful, but it quickly became just too, too much. It’s easier to ask people for their favorites, and we did, but their favorite hotels never seemed to be in areas where we wanted to stay. So the web it was.

We finally just concluded we’re not going to spend a lot of time sitting around hotels anyway, so who cares. We booked rooms in Oslo, Geneva and Paris. Many more details yet to work out, but progress was made.

And, with a bit of satisfaction, I renamed Expedia: Extedium.