Category Archives: General Information

Money Saving Travel Tips: Have a Pique-Nique in Scenic Surroundings

Lime green plates and red handled cutlery rested snugly alongside the cups, glasses, chef’s knife, and other kitchen essentials in the snap-lid container. And that container was safely tucked beneath the hatchback of the car. A quick trip to any supermarket in Europe and we were ready to eat both inexpensively and in style!

We had assembled the contents of that snap-lid container in England before driving onto the overnight ferry from Harwich to Rotterdam and beginning this adventure. So, along with the food that we have purchased in each country, it has certainly assisted in our budget-saving strategy in the Netherlands, Germany, and France.

A particularly picturesque stop was in the town of Tillieres in the Pays de la Loire where we stumbled upon a marked picnic ground adjacent to a moulin (windmill) on the grounds of a vineyard.

Late 1800s moulin (mill) in the town of Tillieres in the Pays de la Loire, France

Shady picnic hut in Tillieres next to the moulin

Making lunch in the shade on a hot day in France

View of moulin (mill) from the vineyard in Tillieres, France

Yes, we love those wonderful French plat du jour meals that I described in Lovely Lengthy Lunchtime In Lisle Sur Tarn — but unless you are independently wealthy, making your trip extend for longer than a typical vacation period of a few weeks will necessitate some savings strategies.

Picnics are one of your best money-saving measures since the fresh ingredients you need will cost a fraction of what you will pay in a restaurant — even if it is a plat du jour special! For a grand total of under €7 instead of €20-28, we each had a healthy lunch that included crunchy dark bread, deli meat, gorgeous French cheese, sliced tomato and cucumber, and a pot of yogurt for dessert. If you are lucky enough to be travelling by car, you too can pre-assemble a plastic box or carrier bag full of essentials and be ready for a roadside picnic pretty well anywhere.

My last picture below was taken outside the walls of the fortified medieval chateau at Fougeres and it’s pretty unbeatable for gorgeous eating spots. You won’t always get this lucky, but Europe certainly has some remarkable places with picnic benches or seats just waiting for your own fresh and breezy pique-nique.

Mark assembling a sandwich outside the fortified chateau walls at Fougeres in France

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Getting Sick While Travelling

Whether it’s a long trip or a weekend getaway, no one wants it to happen and no one really ever thinks that it could be ever be them that is inconvenienced that way. But getting sick whilst travelling is something that simply must be taken into account when you are planning your trip, booking your tickets, and doing those last pre-trip errands.

A long trip of several weeks or several months will require even more planning ahead, and that means one thing above all else — a good travel insurance policy to cover all of the contingencies including illness, hospitalization, routine but unexpected trips to the doctor or dentist, and (a worst case scenario if there ever was one!), medical evacuation back to your home country.

French medication for severe bronchitis

We are currently in France and one of those unanticipated situations arose just as we arrived in Normandy. I was sick with what I thought was a routine cold picked up from the child of friends in another part of France, but things went from bad to worse in a mere few days and suddenly I had such a severe bronchial infection that I was on the verge of pneumonia.

I am very fortunate that we have friends here in Normandy who could send me to their own GP in the next village, but I would not have hesitated to go to a local hospital if we had been on the road between stops. I felt completely fine about doing that since I knew that my outpatient care or even a full hospitalization would have been covered by the excellent travel insurance policy that we purchased from Travel Insurance Direct in Australia prior to our departure at the end of 2010. We knew that we would be travelling for at least a year, so we purchased a very inclusive policy that covered everything from lost luggage to damage to a rental car to unexpected delays to the all-important medical care.

As ill as I was, it was an office visit that I shall never forget as we tried to bridge the language barrier. I speak schoolgirl French and the doctor spoke no English! But I had written down all of my symptoms, swished them into Google Translate, and then printed that out for him. He understood completely and guess what — bronchitis means bronchitis even in France. I also had to giggle when he complimented me on my splendidly low blood pressure.

My sincere advice to all of you who are still in the planning and prep stages before departure is to do an internet search for travel policies that you can purchase online. They cost a lot less and seem to include rather a lot more than insurance policies offered by travel agents or your local insurance agent. This is their specialty and the coverage is excellent in most cases as long as you read all of the fine print and choose what suits your individual trip or lifestyle.

One of my sisters, Cynthia Hatton, lives in California and she has been either a nurse or nursing administrator for all of her adult life. She offered the following additional information to share with you — and I thank her for that.
“You might also add that it is important to consult a travel medicine clinician and check the locations that you are traveling. They will check the CDC and the International Institute of Travel Medicine tells you what is going on in the area …… TB, Influenza, hepatitis etc.”

Also — make sure you have adequate coverage for all of the areas that are important to you and consider adding ‘riders’ for additional protection on items such as expensive laptops and digital SLR cameras with lenses. I did exactly that prior to leaving Australia and have travelled for six months with an amazing peace of mind.

Eco-Edinburgh — Part Four

Pictures, pictures, pictures!!!

Champagne time at GreenWorks

We celebrated the roof topping out with some champagne last night in the workshop. Now Mark and I are taking a break today to go out and about in Edinburgh with my cameras.

Soooooo — instead of a daily report, here is a click-on link to a slideshow of all of the action as it unfolded over the last week.

GreenWorks SLIDESHOW

Enjoy! And please feel free to leave comments if you are so inclined.

Also, don’t forget to have a look at the website of Greenworks in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Bye for now!

6 Simple Steps To Save On Your Trip To Amsterdam

The misty mornings, the postcard-perfect views over almost every canal, the ease of getting around, the sensible and eco-friendly bicycle culture, the friendliness of every single person we met — these are just a few of the joys of travelling to one of my favourite European cities, Amsterdam!

Brouwersgracht Canalside

Here are 6 simple steps that helped us save money by ‘living like a local’ while we were there for 8 days recently.

1. Rent an apartment instead of staying in a hotel. I did a web search on “short term apartments in Amsterdam” and the links that caught my eye were not the very expensive commercial ones. Instead, I was drawn to two very similar sites — Roomorama and AirBnB. After searching through the options on both sites for an arrival on a prime travel-booking date of New Year’s Eve, I chose Roomorama based on the variety of apartments still available and was very pleased with the apartment that we rented in the Jordaan area. Both sites contain a range of prices and neighbourhoods.

2. Cook your own meals in that apartment — and that means shopping for groceries!

Cracker aisle in Amsterdam grocery

Grocery shopping in Amsterdam

Just by getting out and walking around the neighbourhood on our first day, we quickly discovered that Albert Heijn grocery stores were scattered all over Amsterdam in every district.

The word “winkel” means shop, so the click-on link above takes you to a map of their shops both within Amsterdam and in other parts of the country.

Even when you are moving past the obvious and easy choices of fruit and vegetables, food looks pretty much the same all over Europe, North America, and Australia or New Zealand in spite of the name on the package being quite different.

Besides, it’s fun to pick up your winkelwagon (shopping cart) and put some items in there like unknown cheese varieties, milk or butter in many shades and sizes, or these crackers to the left with mystery names.

Home cooked dinner in Amsterdam

Here’s an example above of one of the delicious meals that we cooked in the apartment with locally sourced groceries.

3. Use public transport such as trams, trains, and buses.

Tram at Museumplein

OV-Chipkaart for Amsterdam

One of the nicest things about Amsterdam is the ease with which you can traverse the city by using a combination of trams and buses along with trains for the suburban trips. A sensible way to save money is to refrain from buying individual tickets for each journey and to instead purchase a multi-trip pass sold by GVB — the public transportation company.

After doing some online research, we decided to purchase an OV-Chipkaart which would allow us several days of travel on any of the trams or buses in Amsterdam. These durable plastic cards are the size of a credit card, are valid for 5 years, and are rechargeable with a credit card at ATM style machines scattered all over the city. These ‘hole in the wall’ recharge machines are usually located right next to a bank ATM.

There is a wonderful series of network maps and tourism site maps on the GVB website. Just click on the link to find them.

We purchased our cards at the GVB Ticket Office in the Tourist Information building at Stationsplein, directly opposite the huge Central Station. But they are also available from dispensing machines in places such as Schiphol Airport.

4. Buy a Museum Pass and save, save, save!
Most visitors to Amsterdam will be planning on a visit to one or more of the stunning museums here such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Anne Frank House, the Stedelijk Museum, the Amsterdam Historisch Museum, and many more.

For the avid museum-goer, you can purchase the Museumkaart which is sold at the entry of most of the major museums for €39 plus a one-time €4.95 administration charge for issuing the card. We used our card at all 5 of the museums that I have just named and once you get past 3 admissions at an average of €15 each, the card has paid for itself. Our next two museum visits after that were essentially free.

You will receive another plastic card that is the size of a credit card and this one is valid for a full year. It certainly encourages you to come back for another visit during that 12 month period because the card covers over 400 museums, castles, and sites of significance all over the Netherlands, not just within Amsterdam.

5. Shop and eat where the locals do and avoid the streets where the tourists are.

Taking a break in a local cafe

Expresso at a Turkish cafe

Whether you are buying a croissant at a bakery, taking a break for lunch and a coffee, or stopping for a cocktail and some snacks, save yourself a lot of money and get off of the main tourist thoroughfares. Run away from cafes or restaurants where you see tourists with guidebooks on the table! Instead, seek out the neighbourhood cafes where the locals are reading their newspapers in the local language.

A perfect example of the shopping locally concept was the pastry run that my husband made one morning for croissants. He was up quite early on one of our first mornings in Amsterdam and he walked down to one of the main tourist streets and purchased four of them for €7. The following morning, after we had done a thorough perusal of our neighbourhood, he purchased four much nicer and much fresher croissants in our local bakery for €3.20 — a more than 50% savings.

You can apply that same principal to just about everything including the ubiquitous cup of coffee. Instead of paying €3.50 for an expresso or €3.90 for a far-too-milky latte, why not head down to the local Turkish cafe for a rich, fragrant, and strong cup of java at the budget friendly cost of €2.25 or less. Yum!

6. Sort out how to access money before you leave home.
Two of the fastest ways to burn up extra cash are by making too many visits to the ATM machine for cash whilst travelling and by using your credit card too liberally. A far better set of strategies are to
(a) have a few hundred euros with you upon arrival. We ordered this currency from our local bank in Australia and it was free of any transaction fees. Your own bank will almost always give you a much better exchange rate than those airport stands or street-side foreign exchange shops.
(b) keep your withdrawals to a minimum and take out more than you normally would back home. Your linked bank back home will most likely charge you a foreign ATM fee in addition to the foreign currency exchange fee. If you are withdrawing €100 at a time instead of €300-500, you will be paying an average of $8.50 in US or Australian dollars/£5.50 in British funds for each of those €100 withdrawals. So it is far more sensible to take a larger amount out each time.
(c) use a linked banking network. You will probably always be charged the currency exchange fee by your bank since they are simply passing on the cost of conversion to you. But what if you could find a way to bypass the on-average $5-or-more fee for using an overseas ATM machine that does not belong to your own bank? I made a point of opening an account in Australia with a bank that was a member of the Global Alliance. By using a bank that is associated with this international group of banks, I can access my money for FREE (not including the mandatory currency exchange fee) at banks throughout the world. Check with your own bank prior to departure to determine if they participate in such a network. Then you can use the same method to save you some money that you can happily spend on food or fun instead of fees!
(d) find out what it will cost you to use a credit card overseas for purchases. You certainly get the most accurate foreign exchange rate when you use credit cards, but they also attract rather a lot of fees with every purchase. On average, most banks charge a whopping 5% of the cost of the purchase for the ‘convenience factor’ of using your credit card abroad. And on top of that, you will also be charged a currency conversion fee. Save yourself the resultant shock when you check your online bank statement and be informed about your options and the costs involved before you depart on your trip.

Hundreds of euros can be saved by following the strategies that I have outlined above. By doing a bit of advanced planning, you can relax and spend your travel money where you want to spend it, not where you are forced to spend it.

NOTE: All prices were current at the time of writing in 2011.

Frugal Travel in Expensive Melbourne – Part 3

What to do — what to see. You have arrived in one of the most vibrant cities in the world, so how can you make the best decisions about where to spend your energy and your dollars?

First, wrap your head around the idea that you are going to nibble at the edges of a very LARGE cake full of delights. That will give you some perspective as you begin to realize that you will be coming back to Melbourne again and again before you can begin to say that you ‘know’ the place.

Consider planning your to-do list by going to either of these websites for information prior to your arrival. The first one is the That’s Melbourne site where you can click on the various categories in the left-side column to find out what art, music, festival, sports, or other events in your own particular areas of interest are available during your visit. The second site to check is the What’s On Melbourne Guide which lets you search by DATE or by TOPIC.

You can learn a lot about a city and its ‘vibe’ by people-watching and often this proves to be a highly amusing free activity.

Lunch hour tap dancer on Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia

Lunch hour tap dancer, Bourke Street Mall, Melbourne, Australia

A few days ago as I walked down Bourke Street, I saw a young red-haired man with a backpack and a bright yellow milk crate suddenly stop and plonk a portable tape player down on the pavement. Next a flowerpot appeared. Finally, he carefully placed a square of timber halfway between the tram stop and the steps in front of the GPO building. Without saying a word, he began to tap dance vigorously (and well!) for the lunchtime crowd that was milling around, his flowerpot began to fill with coins, and the silent tap dancer smiled sweetly at everyone. It was a tiny bit of magic on a cold and gloomy day.

Having walked a mere few metres further down the street, I began to chuckle quietly when I saw a faux-concrete mime who had removed his hat, thus revealing part of his un-made-up face and hair beneath. As he stood next to his upturned hat, his hand resting on his cart full of props, he dropped all pretense being in character as he made a phone call. As surreptitiously as I could, I raised my camera and began to take pictures of this unguarded and funny moment.

Mime Making Phone Call

If fine arts and culture are as much ‘your thing’ as they are mine, you will be happy to read that Melbourne is quite blessed to have three art museums that charge absolutely NO admission price. The only exception to that statement is for those blockbuster travelling exhibits from overseas that arrive once a year or so.

The permanent collection at the beautifully proportioned bluestone building housing the NGV International – National Gallery of Victoria on St. Kilda Road is quite comprehensive and covers several floors of exhibits that range from the ancient through to the contemporary. You can easily allow yourself a half of a day or more to see it all. And as an added bonus, there are wonderful cafes on both the ground floor and the first floor that serve quite good food. Seating areas are tucked around on every level and are much appreciated by those who wish to enjoy the various galleries at a more leisurely pace. The large gift shop on the ground floor, just before you exit next to the wall of water, is a joy for art lovers, book lovers, or anyone who appreciates finely crafted jewelry, stationary, art objects, and educational toys.

Another entirely free (except for those previously mentioned special exhibitions) museum is the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square (corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Street). This smaller museum is dedicated to Australian art. Although it is part of the National Gallery of Victoria, it is housed up the street from the main NGV in a light, airy, and very contemporary glass and steel building set amidst the ultra-modern Federation Square complex.

Finally, there is the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art — ACCA (111 Sturt Street in the Southbank area) and it too is completely free of entry charges. The stated goal of this particular institution is as follows. “It is the only major public art gallery in Australia focused on commissioning rather than collecting.” For that reason, there is a non-stop stream of cutting edge exhibitions to entice those interested in contemporary art.

This three-part article on frugal travel in Melbourne has barely scratched the surface of your options for places to stay, places to eat, sights to see, or walks to enjoy. My intention was to allow the reader to fine-tune their trip according to their interests and needs. I also hoped to let you understand that absorbing the media’s ongoing statement that Melbourne is one of the world’s most expensive cities comes at a cost. It closes people’s minds to the alternatives to big-price-ticket travel — alternatives called frugal travel, budget travel, manageable travel that keep those dollars in your pocket to spend as you choose, not as you must if you are booked into 5 star hotels and are only eating at 5 star restaurants. Frugal travel makes the world a better place for all of us because it gives us freedom and choice.

Frugal Travel in Expensive Melbourne – Part 2

Now that we have the where-to-sleep question handled, let’s move on to how to get around Melbourne quickly and easily without hailing a taxi and paying heart-stopping fares for that ‘privilege.’ The cost of parking in Melbourne can also be prohibitively high, so it’s best to avoid driving your rental car or personal car in the city and being forced to pay $10 or more per hour in parking fees.

Visitor Information Booth on Bourke Street Mall, Melbourne, Australia

Start your trip off right by getting a good map of the inner city since most of the sights and museums are within that area. Consider printing out a map of the CBD prior to arrival and an easy to read version is found online at the only Melbourne website. The map is downloadable in pdf and prints out beautifully.

For a comprehensive range of tourism maps and brochures, the two easiest to find Visitor Information Centres are (1) located inside their own building on Federation Square – corner of Swanston St. & Flinders St. – and (2) in a booth right on the main shopping street, the Bourke Street Mall.

Yellow Yarra Tram on Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia

For the ultimate in ease and convenience, the extensive tram network in Melbourne is hard to beat. The trams themselves range in ‘vintage’ and size from the lovely and modern ones such as the yellow tram pictured to the right to the last of the old “Red Rattlers” which run on the City Circle route around the fringes of the CBD (Central Business District).

City Circle Tram in Melbourne, Australia

You will need to purchase a METCARD to use any of the trams other than the City Circle which is seen on the left. That one tram route is completely free and is offered as a tourism incentive. For that reason, it is always quite crowded — so just be aware of that.

For all other trams, you will need a valid ticket and signs for the METCARD are found everywhere from the trains stations to the local convenience stores such as 7-11. Although they can be purchased at the coin-operated machines on some of the trams, it is always safer to have a METCARD in hand before you board.

There are quite a variety of fares depending on the time of day that you travel, your age, and several other classifications. The full range of fares are listed online at Metlink’s METCARD page.

An easy to read map of the tram network can be found online at Metlink Melbourne

Now let’s discuss what to eat while you are in the city. Even if you have chosen a budget friendly option like the Cube Serviced Apartment that was mentioned in yesterday’s post, no one arrives in Melbourne with the idea of eating all of their meals in their apartment-hotel, so finding reasonably priced food choices for lunches is the next challenge.

Yes, fast food is available everywhere in Melbourne, but it is almost never a healthy option. For a mere few dollars more you can eat at places like Basic Bites at 26-28 Hardware Lane between Bourke Street and Little Bourke Street. The “Crazed Hen” salad that I had there was actually the most enjoyable lunch that I ate on this trip. And there was so much premium quality chicken breast squeezed into that bowl with all of the salad greens that I couldn’t finish it! Cafe lunches in Melbourne can cost as much as dinners in some other Australian cities, so this small but lovely little cafe is a perfect example of finding good value for money when you do choose to eat out.

Basic Bites cafe on Hardware Lane, Melbourne, Australia

Other budget options for healthy eating include the large Riverside Food Court at Southgate where you can eat inside on gloomy days or outside facing the river and the Melbourne skyline on pleasant days.

If a delicious and filling curry at a rock-bottom price and served with a smile is what you are craving, then head up Bourke Street past the retail district to Funky Curry at 164 Bourke Street. The decor is basic and plastic — but oh — the food. I have eaten there many times and never, ever been disappointed by any of the options which can be fine-tuned to your own idea of how-hot-is-enough.

In our next segment we will look at the visual delights of Melbourne and sources for finding out prior to arrival what’s happening in the arts and entertainment world, sports, special events, and more.

***NOTE*** The author received no compensation during the research for this article from any of the sources which are cited.

Frugal Travel in Expensive Melbourne

Magical Melbourne — one of the jewels in Australia’s crown — a world class city with price tags for hotels and food to match Paris and London. So how then is it possible to travel to Melbourne if you are inclined towards a frugal and healthy approach and inclined away from backpacker style accommodations and ingesting fast food?

The first step in finding an inexpensive place to stay is to register with an online site such as HotelClub which, according to their website, represents “60,000 Hotels in Over 134 Countries.” By registering and selecting the specific countries or cities that you are interested in, you will receive weekly alerts on deeply discounted accommodations.

I was curious about the quoted fee-free price compared to the hotel’s own stated per-room cost, so I selected several hotels for comparison and in every case the HotelClub discount rate beat any specials that were being offered by the hotels on their own websites, sometimes by 50% or more.

How can you make a $99 rate better? By making that the discount rate on an apartment right in the heart of Melbourne! An alert came into my box on a Monday that 33%-50%-off rates were available for the weekend we had chosen.

Astute travellers know that one of the key ways to stretch your travel dollars is to rent an apartment and do some of your own cooking. Why pay $25 for a breakfast for two when you can cook your own and drink the tea or coffee that the hotel has on hand in each apartment. Having a major grocery store like Woolworths inside the huge new shopping and dining centre QV Melbourne a mere few blocks away means that you can bring home the ingredients for a dinner that totals a fraction of what most Melbourne restaurants must charge with their high overhead and staffing costs.

We were pleasantly surprised when we disembarked from the tram on LaTrobe Street, walked half a block to the Cube Serviced Apartments at 19 Exploration Lane, and discovered that we were staying right in the heart of the theater district. Our studio apartment was quite spacious for two people and was spotlessly clean.

The king-size bed was quite comfortable and the nearby writing desk had enough room to spread out my laptop and various pieces of camera gear.

Cube Serviced Apartment King Studio - Melbourne, Australia

Cabinet Wall at Cube Serviced Apartment in Melbourne, Australia

An entire wall of cabinetry has been divided up to house coats, linens, pantry, dishes and pans, an inset niche for the kitchen functions and an area for the flat screen television and dvd player. The kitchen area has a 2 burner cook-top, dishwasher, and a refrigerator and microwave are neatly hidden behind some of those cabinet doors.

Melbourne is easy to maneuver and the urban heart, the CBD (Central Business District) contains most of the art museums, theatre venues, and a vast array of upmarket and discount shopping. Between the on-foot accessibility of almost all major sites in the city and the splendid network of trams, you’ll soon discover that Melbourne is a joy to travel through.

In tomorrow’s post I will discuss the Metlink network of trains, trams, and buses and the daily or weekly cost of getting around Melbourne. I will also offer examples of wonderful places to eat healthy food at a reasonable price and fun activities that are free or practically-free. Check back for more!

***NOTE*** The author received no compensation or free accommodation during the research for this article.