Warm, Dry & WIFI

Or, the Art of Guesting

When I was a kid, we hardly ever stayed in a hotel, a motel or even a cabin while on vacation. Our preferred mode of accommodation was always to go camping – initially in our trusty TAG-A-LONG, hard-top camper, or later on in tents.

My dad would usually take his two weeks vacation in August and we’d visit our favourite Ontario Provincial Parks: Killbear, Bon Echo, the Pinery, Arrowhead, and when we started going on church canoe trips, the legendary Algonquin Park. We’d hang out for lazy summer weeks on the beach and evening pyjama-clad visits to the amphitheatre to see such classics as The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes, How I Learn to Love Lichen, and advice on how to escape an encounter with a black bear.

Because my mom and I are both August babies, most of our birthdays were celebrated around a campsite picnic table blowing out candles on a homemade, Tomato Soup Cake. It is one of my mother’s classic recipes– and with a brown-sugar icing, it is actually even better than it sounds. And whatever the heck is in Campbell’s tomato soup lets it stay fresh for a week or more without refrigeration. Perfect for camping.

But being the ungrateful third-born child that I was, I always envied the kids who got to stay in hotels with pools. Well, not so much envied, but I was always very curious what it would be like to stay in a place like that.

I finally got my chance in Grade 9 when our family made a three-week car trip out to Alberta . We had taken the “short-cut” through Michigan and faced with three days of constant rain, my parents decided it was too wet to camp.

“At last!”, I thought. “Swimming, here I come!” as we pulled up to a great hotel with a pool.

Not so fast. We actually turned left, across the road from the great hotel with the pool, and decamped at what can only be describe as a rather basic motel: no TV, no restaurant and certainly, no swimming pool. It didn’t matter that I probably wasn’t going to swim the rain; I was still bummed.

“Well,” my mother said in her wise, motherly tone. “At least it’s warm and dry”.

And that became the measure for any place that we’ve stayed since.

“At least, it’s warm and dry”, I now intone as the kids roll their eyes.
 

To Err, ‘Tis Human. To Air BnB….

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what anything cost or that part of the reason for camping everywhere was to save money. As a parent now, I’m much more aware of every penny, which is crucial when we’re travelling for an entire year, especially in more cosmopolitan places where our every-shrinking petro-Loonie doesn’t go as far. 

On this trip, we’ve had great luck using Air BnB, a peer-to-peer (P2P) website that allows owners to rent out their houses, apartments or even a room or couch in their house. This “sharing economy” website allows you to search by location and dates, and to filter places by key amenities like clothes-washer, elevator or WIFI.

Former guests can also posts reviews so that you can find out if there were any problems; in turn, the landlords can review you as a guest, so there is some mutual accountability. This review system works quite well, and a recent host told me that he finds the Air BnB guests to be much nicer than others who rent through bookings.com

AirBnB worked very well for us in Turkey, and again now in Spain, although there were relatively few options in Tanzania. On the upside, we’ve been able to rent whole apartments with kitchens where we can make our own meals, separate bedrooms for the kids and a living room to hang out -- all for a fraction of the cost of a dodgy hotel in the same funky neighbourhoods of Montreal, Istanbul, and Barcelona. We can also book the flats ahead of time in English and pay in Canadian dollars via a credit card, which eliminates much of the hassle factor. 

On the downside, we have found that a lot of the places that we’ve stayed are actually commercially-rented properties rather than private residences. As such, the contact with the host is often limited to handing over the keys and the odd text message. Not so gezellig, I’m afraid. And since we’re often staying in a private residence, we don’t bump into other travellers like we used to in hostels or hotels.

But on balance, it really is the way to go as a travelling family.
 

More Essential Criteria

The Ruffians have been remarkably easy going about some of the places that we've stayed at during this trip. Some of these hovels have not quite lived up to the "4-stars" rating they had advertised.  But having now stayed in something like 30 places since we left Ottawa last August, we’ve added a few criteria to my mother’s list. These include:

• cool: a good night’s sleep in Tanzania often required having air-conditioning, and/or a ceiling fan;
• bednets: essential in places where malaria is common.
• a central location: sometimes it is worth paying a bit more to stay downtown to avoid having to take a bus all the time for every outing;
• more than one bedroom – preferably three, so that our kids can enjoy some alone time;
• a place to play football: although Isaac has been remarkably flexible about this, and has practiced his craft in alley’s and courtyards.
• kids: If a place would have kids for Zoe and Isaac to play with, we’d probably stay in a bus shelter.

Probably the most important additional criteria, however, is access to WIFI. It is hard to imagine that we used to travel (shock!) without the Internet.  But these days, we’re online constantly to check the weather forecast; to navigate the backstreets of cities we get lost in; to book tickets for planes, trains and automobiles; to find our next week’s accommodation; and of course, to stay in touch with all of you out there in TV-land. Having WIFI also allows us to download English books from the library back home and to stay in touch with our family via a Voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone.

Again, being connected is a mixed blessing. With the internet in your pocket, you’re never actually as much “away” as you used to be, and it is easy to be only half-immersed in your surroundings. But it also helps you find things and solve logistical issues that used to take up so much time in travelling.

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So... here we are (left) in a new AirBnB place in Barcelona. It’s great: warm, dry and WIFI, and even better – an espresso maker in a funky, red kitchen!

Now if only I could just find some Tomato Soup Cake….

Operation Mother Hubbard

As we prepare to go #thataway for the year, we've been busy fixing up our house for our tenant, decluttering all the extra "stuff" that accumulates in closets, shelves and basements after 10 years in a house.  It has been an interesting exercise in deciding, detachment, and ditching. 

We've also needing to decide what to do with the remaining food in our pantry and freezer. This includes:

• a surplus of Italian tomato sauce that we've canned over the years;

• a surfeit of tomato soup stock -- a by-product of the aforementioned tomato sauce production process --- that we canned or froze, but somehow never got around to using; 

• several kilograms of various dried beans and sundry lentils at the back of our pantry -- carbon-dating test-results revealed that they may have migrated here from our last apartment, circa 2003...

• umpteen bottles of exotic Chinese, Thai or Mexican sauces that we probably aren't going to finish before we head off on August 1;

• still more lentils, pulses, peas and beans -- what we're we thinking?; 

• remnants of baking ingredients: flour, chocolate chips, shredded coconut, some unidentified seeds that probably boost your something or other;

• 20 kg of Thai rice that we had cached in the basement in anticipation of either Y2K Part 2 or the Harper-Zombie Apocalypse, I forget which...

• spices, spices and more spices!

So as not to waste these still-useful foodstuffs, we've undertaken Operation Mother Hubbard -- a multi-sectoral, all-of-household approach to cooking, using or other-wise disposing of these treasures from our cupboards.  This operation began initially with a festival of pasta and minestrone, until the kids asked us to stop.

It continued with Trish dutifully inventorying all the items in our pantry on a "DO NOT under any circumstances buy more of these items" list. Whenever we finish any item, we gleefully cross it off our list. 

But of course, as this list gets shorter, the menu combinations get weirder: What, pray tell, can we make tonight using oyster sauce, bread crumbs, split peas and dijon mustard?  

Other items have been "re-gifted" to appreciative (or otherwise) neighbours, and the remainder has been consigned to that great-big-compost-pile-in-the-sky -- well, actually just at the back of the garden. With this rich legacy of lentils, we currently are buying only fresh food items -- milk, cheese, yogurt, fruit and vegetables, etc.   

So if you happen to be passing by and would like a bottle of Sriracha sauce, do let us know.....
 

With Aeroplan, "It's NOT that easy"

A key reason that we can afford to travel during our year-off  is that we've been collecting Aeroplan points for the past five years.

Tricia travels internationally for her work and thus has collected quite a few frequent flier miles. We've also found ways to collect points via credit card loyalty programs and other tricks -- although we've not gone as far as that George Clooney character in "Up in the Air" (e.g. ordering extra meals in a restaurant just to earn more frequent flier points). 

Our plan all along was to book what's called a "mini-RTW" or "mini-Round-the-World" trip in which you fly say from Toronto West over the Pacific to Singapore on a return ticket; however, instead of flying back the way you came (i.e. East), you keep going west until you get back home. This actually requires the same number of Aeroplan points as a simple return ticket, and you can have a stop-over on the way there (e.g. Hawaii) and one on the way home (e.g. Berlin) at no extra charge. 

It's NOT that easy

When it finally came time to cash in these points last Fall, however, we realized that unlike what Aeroplan's slogan claims, it's actually not that easy. Tricia must have called 10 times, spending up to 2 hours on the phone each time, trying to find a way to fly to New Zealand on points. Getting there was straight-forward,  but there always seemed to be a reason that they couldn't route the ticket out of New Zealand via Europe. This was probably due to some Byzantine rule about the maximum variation of mini-RTW distance vs. a simple return ticket, or perhaps they just didn't want us to squeeze out every last penny of value from our points. 

After call number 10, we realized that a mini-RTW including New Zealand just wasn't going to happen, so we dropped a visit to Middle Earth from our list of "pillars". But once we scaled our plans back, booking our actual ticket was fairly straight-forward.  After two more calls, we managed to secure the following itinerary (see the Prezi below), and we're thrilled to be able to do this for a fraction of the cost of paying regular fare.