Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Now that we’ve started looking at the detailed costings, we’re thinking of the tradeoff of the £30 each flight vs just driving there.

Going in the car is a whole lot simpler of course in that there’s none of the hassle of weighing luggage and juggling stuff from one case to another that you get into with airline trips. A minor downside is that it’s about six hours drive from here to Alicante but then it’s nearly three hours to Barcelona airport so it’s not a whole lot further.

Much simpler to organise too in that all we need is the accommodation and no worries about flights nor airport parking.

Despite spending the whole morning searching for somewhere to go over our Christmas break, we’ve still not settled on anywhere to the extent of booking it.

At the moment, we’re looking towards places further south than in the original plans in that we can get away for longer for around the same amount of money as we could when we were considering the likes of Germany or Switzerland.

So, in the frame at the moment is Ibiza which comes in at the lowest price for the flights and the apartments but means that we need to book into a hotel in Barcelona before and after the holiday that costs almost as much as the apartment we’d be staying in for the week in Ibiza. Also, Ibiza doesn’t have a great image and the apartment in question isn’t in a great town on the island.

Next up is Mallorca for which the flights are more expensive and so are the apartments BUT we don’t need the night before and after the holiday in Barcelona so the overall cost is much the same as Ibiza. There seems to be a whole lot more to do in Mallorca too which is a big plus point.

Late news: Wendy fancies Basel in Switzerland so she’s looking up hotels for there too.

We dithered around too long with the decision on Aarhus and the flight prices went against us which is a shame as it looks like a seriously cute place to be at Christmas.

Therefore, we’re back to our original thought which is of Baden-Baden in southern Germany. That has the advantage of having loads of choice in terms of hotels so the prices are lower than we’d expected to be paying. It’s also in Germany so we should get to see some of the famous German Christmas markets.

Now, “all” we have to do is to check out the flight prices one final time before we hit the “book it” button…

We’ve sort-of decided on Aarhus in Denmark for our Christmas break. Let’s face it, how much more Christmasy could a place look than that in the photo (of Den Gamle By, the open air museum of historic Denmark that’s in the town)?

It also fulfills our criteria of being walkable, having enough to do for a few days, “doing” Christmas and, as I say, it even looks Christmasy.

Normally, we’d book the flights first then look for a hotel but as it’s Christmas we’re checking that there is a suitable hotel before we book the flights this time as it’s easy to be caught out at peak periods like that.

Our car was totalled way back on May 23rd when a plonker in a tractor drove right into the side of it and we’ve been trying to collect on the insurance from GAN ever since.

The reason for a lot of the delay is that the “expert” appointed by the insurance company never gets back to us in response to our queries. We bought the car for around 9000 in July 2005 and their offer in June 2007 was 3800. Now, I’ll grant you that we had a lot of use out of it running up over 70,000 km but it was running fine and we’d no intention of replacing.

In fact, the “expert” is quoting the commercial value for the car whereas, of course, the value that’s relevant is the retail value ie what it would cost to replace with a similar car (ie same age and so on).

Oh, and there’s the matter of the car rental bill that we have for getting on for four months rental.