Helen's Travel Corner

Faraway Places

Helen Todd — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:37:19 +0000

I scratched this down and thought why – this could be content for my much beloved and undernourished travel blog, even if it’s a poor attempt at poetry! Enjoy (and hold all criticism for in-person poking fun over drinks .

The thing with dreams

Of faraway places

Is that it seems

The places are exotic

Romanticized, desired to be seen

As something quite extraordinary

But for those who live there

It’s quite ordinary

As is the place in which the traveler subsides

What a difference new eyes make

Whether an old or new place

In regard to fascination of the space

Far across the horizon or quite near

What lies

Is already decided

Countdown to Brazil!

Helen Todd — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:23:46 +0000

On November 18 I’ll be flying down to Atlanta and then hopping on a 9:50pm red eye to Rio de Janeiro with my friend and travel partner in crime, Sylvie. It snowed in NYC yesterday so being on the beach in Brazil couldn’t sound more inviting!

Since the trip is getting closer and closer, I’m starting to scratch off the to-do list items. I naturally looked at my old Pack/To-Do list from China for a refresher on some of the line items….and have managed to bring myself back to blogging on here . The trip to Rio will be my first real vacation since founding my company a year and a half ago so I’m really excited about it (and slightly terrified to unplug for so long. deep breaths.). It’s not a long-term trip like my backpacking trips in Europe or Southeast Asia or like the Beijing Olympics program but it’s still 10 days and in a country that requires a visa and shots. As I’m getting ready for it, I figured I’d write up my to-do list for my own sake and whoever else it may also help. I’ll be updating this post as the countdown continues. If you have any tips, please share them!

Travel Dates:

Depart LGA on Friday, November 18; long layover in ATL; arrive Rio Saturday, November 19 in the a.m.
Saturday, November 19 - Tuesday, November 22: Hostel Copacabana Suites (Hostel Copacabana Suites, Santa Clara Nº 304, Rio de Janeiro – Brasil, Brasil)
Tuesday, November 22 – Friday, November 25: Trip to the Amazon
Friday, November 25 – Monday, November 28 - Last 3 nights in Rio at the Best Western Sol Ipanema Hotel RIGHT ON THE BEACH!

Done:

Booked plane tickets, hostel and hotel
Got shots for Typhoid, Meningococcal and Yellow Fever
Got pills for Malaria (most of these are suggested for the Amazon)
Registered trip with U.S. Department of State
Got Portuguese phrasebook
Applied for visa

To-Do:

Pick up visa from Brazil Embassy
Get insurance for laptop and electronics from http://www.safeware.com/
Book trip to Amazon
Pack
Call credit card companies to let them know about the trip
Make copies of all important documents
Back-up laptop on external hard drive
Download photos on all SD cards to start with a clean slate
Check if what my insurance covers; need travel insurance?

On the Docket in Rio:

BEACH (Ipanema and Copacabana area)
Leica Camera Store
Possibly Tijuca Forest – Hang Gliding?!
Normal touristy stuff:
- Corcovado
- Sugar Loaf Mountain
- MAM museum
- Dancing in Lapa
- Dinner at one of the sushi places in the nice area of Leblon
Something else?

#thatsallfornow

-Helen

Paris Vacation part 2 – What to do

Helen Todd — Mon, 23 May 2011 22:49:26 +0000

So you’ve booked your flight, reserved your hotel and you’ve arrived in Paris. Now what? First of all, know this–there are so many things to do in Paris, you won’t be able to do them all in one short visit. So you need to pick and choose what you really want to do and accept that you won’t be able to get to it all. There are a million books, blogs and websites that talk about all the must-sees in Paris, so I won’t go into that here. But here are some tips we used in figuring out what to do.

Use Guidebooks

I’ll admit it, I love guidebooks. I like to get them before I travel and read them cover to cover, even including all the daytrips that I know I’m never going to do. Now most people probably don’t share my obsession, but I’ll say that having a guidebook or two is never a bad thing. I brought two to Paris: the Rough Guide to Paris and Rick Steves Paris. They both proved helpful at times but if I had to pick a favorite I’d say Rick Steves guide was the best. The book is filled with walking tours and interesting facts and information that was nice to have. But as a warning, the maps in that book (at least the 2009 version) were not the best.

Get the Paris Museum Pass

If you plan to go to at least a couple of Paris’ most famous sights and museums (the Louvre, Notre Dame tower, Musee D’Orsay, the Arc de Triomphe, etc.) you need to get the Paris Museum Pass. The pass is good for 2, 4 or 6 consecutive days and most of the popular Paris sights are included. It pays for itself pretty quickly, and at some places, even lets you skip the line. Just know that it works by day, not by 24 hour period. So if you buy a 2 day pass and use it at 2pm on Monday, it still expires at the end of the day Tuesday. It’s best to buy the pass and use it first in the morning, so you’ll maximize your time.

Getting Around

The Paris Metro system is really good. It’s fairly easy to navigate (it’s similar to a lot of major U.S. public transit systems). We found that buying a carnet of Metro tickets worked best for us. Basically you buy a book of 10 Metro tickets for about 12 Euros. Since you’re never far from a Metro stop, it’s a convenient way to get from place to place. Just know that some of the stations have multiple exits several blocks from each other, so check the signage when you exit to make sure you are going the right way.

Mix It Up a Little

Don’t go from museum to museum to museum. Go to one museum, and then do some outside things so you don’t feel cooped up (unless the weather’s bad, in which case you might want to stay inside). When planning your days, try to incorporate a variety of activities (and make sure you plan some time to sit down-your feet will hurt from walking!)

Also, as much as I love guidebooks, there are other ways to see the city than just walking around reading from a book. We did a boat tour on the Seine which was great (do it in the evening, when everything gets lit up, the city is beautiful). One afternoon, we did a free walking tour of the Latin Quarter with a Parisian guide. Our guide gave us a good insiders perspective to the city and pointed out some things that we would have definitely missed had we been on our own.

Figure Out a Plan, But be Flexible

Paris is a pretty big city. We definitely had a few experiences where we thought things were close only to find ourselves with an hour-long walk. What worked best? Look beforehand at the things you want to do and group them together by location. Pick one general group of things to do each day. That will help cut down on your traveling time between activities, ultimately saving time.

But the second part of this tip is more important–be flexible. Have a general plan for the day, but don’t feel bad if you decide to skip out on some of it. If you don’t feel like walking around anymore, don’t feel guilty about just sitting in a cafe drinking some coffee. If you try to pack everything in, you’ll likely end up tired and cranky, and forget all the incredible things you’ve seen in Paris.

- Miriam Sznycer-Taub

This is a guest blog post by Miriam Sznycer-Taub. Got questions? Connect with Helen’s Travel Corner on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/helenstravelcorner!

Paris Vacation – The Nitty Gritty

Helen Todd — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:23:51 +0000

Planning a trip can be a difficult process. And when you’re talking about an expensive European city like Paris, it’s even more difficult. Here are some tips that my boyfriend and I found useful for the pre-planning stages of our recent trip. Maybe they’ll help you as well!

Plane tickets

Plane tickets are ridiculously expensive-just accept that from the start. We cut down on cost by going to Paris in January. This certainly kept the price down and also led to a quieter city with fewer tourists competing with us at the sites. To book our flights, we used www.kayak.com to look at prices at various airlines on various days. Once we had a good idea of which days had cheaper prices and which airlines were less expensive, we went to the individual airline websites and priced out our trips.

We settled on Icelandair, as this was by far the cheapest option. This meant that we changed planes in Reykjavik, Iceland and made the overall trip a bit longer. For us, this was worth it, but if you’d prefer to spend less overall time travelling, you may want to look only a nonstop flights.

Hotels

Reading guidebooks about Paris hotels scared me-I was convinced every hotel in Paris would have teeny tiny rooms with terrible bathrooms. But what we found was that with a little bit of work we could get a decent sized hotel room in a great area for not too much money. We ended up booking through www.hotels.com. Why this site? We liked that we could see the name of the hotel before we booked it, which allowed us to do some additional research. Once we found a hotel that had a good price and good reviews, we also looked up the hotel on TripAdvisor. There, we found additional reviews and also could see where the hotel ranked among other Paris hotels. This helped us choose a hotel that had both a good price and good reviews.

So how did we do? Really well. We ended up at a fabulous hotel in the Grands Boulevards area of Paris, with a Metro stop outside the door. And we got it for a steal–$420 for four nights. We knew that was good, but it wasn’t until we got to the hotel that we realized how good it was. The hotel actually costs 265 Euros a night. So pretty much we got 50% off-not bad at all.

Other Stuff

Just a couple of other things to think about before you go. We ended up changing some money at the airport in Boston, and when we needed more in Paris. Once there we used an ATM. Check with your bank to see if they allow you to use a certain bank with no fee. For example, if you have a Bank of America checking account, you should be able to withdraw money from BNP Paribas with no ATM fee (you just pay a currency change fee of 1-3%). Just make sure you tell your bank that you’ll be travelling–and make sure you have a 4 digit PIN!

Lastly, think about how you’ll get from the airport to wherever you are staying. Since you’ll likely be flying into Charles de Gaulle, just know that it’s a bit outside of the city. There are a couple of options including the RER (basically the commuter train), a few buses (we took the RoissyBus), or of course a taxi. Once you know where you’ll be staying it’s relatively easy to find a way that will be convenient for you.

-Miriam Sznycer-Taub

This is a guest blog post by Miriam Sznycer-Taub who will be sharing more tips about her Paris trip in upcoming posts. Got questions? Connect with Helen’s Travel Corner on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/helenstravelcorner!

Across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney

Helen Todd — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 04:10:45 +0000

It’s a little embarrassing when the last blog post I published promised to write more and that was from June 12, over 5 months ago! There’s been demand for me to start writing again (just enough encouragement to get my rear-end focused again!). I can’t thank you enough for your support of this little corner of my world. To kick off the Helen’s Travel Corner renaissance, a dear friend of mine, Courtney Lix, has a guest blog post from her recent trip to Australia. Enjoy!

The wheels of our Airbus a380 grazed the tarmac in Sydney, Australia a few minutes shy of 7:30 a.m. Chris, my airplane-loathing boyfriend, and I had flown from Friday in Washington DC straight through Saturday and into Sunday morning on the other side of the world. After that long on a plane, we were ready for a shower, and a nap. But glorious, sun-drenched Sydney beckoned with sparkling blue harbor, eye-catching Opera House, and plazas filled with strange and beautiful plants and birds—natives to a land completely foreign to us. Well, to be more correct: we couldn’t get into our hotel room until noon. And thus we stored our bags, and Sydney beckoned.

But we quickly learned that while our hotel was in a good location for being close to “The Sights”, it was in a bad location for getting brunch. It was chilly at 8am, so we certainly didn’t want to sit on the waterfront in the howling wind—and none of the places on the harbor, where the concierge had sent us with a vague ‘oh, it will be so pretty’ looked appealing. We finally lowered our standards and bought a breakfast that cost $35 and tasted like they should have paid us to eat it, as a reward for not wasting food. And since food is very important to me, Australia was off to a mixed start: beautiful to look at, but possibly a lean 18 days to come. (It’s also very disappointing when someone gives you a bad recommendation.)

The loveliness of Sydney buoyed our spirits though—at the very least, we weren’t hungry anymore and there were old convict barracks and aboriginal sculptures to distract us. And the sun—the sun in Australia is a thing of beauty—it will warm the worries right out of you (and give you skin cancer if you’re not careful). Inspired, we decided to take a chance on another recommendation (but not from the concierge) that afternoon: ride the ferry out to Watson’s Bay and eat at Doyle’s.

I love ferries. Like a dog sticking his head out of the window of a speeding car, I love to sit on the open top deck, even if the wind is blowing so hard it sucks all warmth from the air. Which it was. My teeth were chattering and I loved every moment, especially when we ducked into the side nooks of the harbor—Double Bay, Rose Bay—navigating through dozens of smaller, anchored boats to get to the wharf. The people of Sydney love their water, and they should indeed be quite proud of it.

Watson’s Bay is the farthest out, a quiet little community with a beach on one side and spectacularly high and rugged cliffs on the other. We were encouraged by the crowd swarming around the counter at Doyle’s wharf-side restaurant, and—praise be—we weren’t disappointed with our first taste of Australian seafood (flounder and john dory) as we sat looking at the sunset over the far end of the harbor.

Travel is full of uncertainty and excitement—and the start of any trip sets the mood for the days to come. We spent the next couple of weeks at the whim of unfamiliar places, and we survived being both lost and hungry, and also reveled in glorious, unexpected discoveries of beautiful places and delicious foods, chocolate in particular. And, really, what better reason is there to endure an airplane flight across the Pacific Ocean?

Thanks Courtney!

To see more photos from Courtney’s trip down under, click here.