Foreign Perspectives

Up until quite recently your choice was between paying $5 or so a month for a web hosting service or running with one that plastered adverts all over your site.

No longer. Take for instance PinkPaper. You get a quite respectable 300MB webspace (more than enough for many commercial sites and lots more than most individuals need), 10GB/month bandwidth (you’d need a lot of traffic to use that up), five addon domains (more than many paid for services offer) and all the usual stuff like MySQL databases and so on.

If you’re debating whether to go down the freebie blog route with something like blogger.com, this is a much better way to do. Your only cost would be $10/year to register a domain and you’d get a personal POP e-mail mailbox too.

I’ve been plugging away at the weekends with my new WordPress template over at SevaTeem for the last month or so and interestingly it’s starting to get hits from people looking how to do things like add extra sidebars and whatnot.

Whilst it’ll be a while before it’s ready to roll out to the world at large I’ve started using it on a couple of blogs to see how it flies in real-life. Personally Chosen uses an early version of the template with a very plain look. Slightly more along the lines of what the finished template might look like is the new Our Inns blog although there’s still work to be done as you’ll see if you glance at the SevaTeem blog itself.

What’s surprised me is that there really isn’t an awful lot of work required to create your very own WordPress theme and whilst I figure I’ve a few more weeks work to tidy things up, the theme is good enough to let me use it on a few sites already.

One of the regular nightmares that seems to get worse every year is the business of getting away for the bank holiday weekends.

We all know that the roads will be full, the airports chaotic and the ferry queue backed up yet for just about every bank holiday weekend you see the queues everywhere. From the other side of the fence it’s just as bad: we could do with another floor added on to the building at peak periods yet the bookings drop away just as quickly right after the bank holiday and we’re rattling round a big building.

Although you’d think that people would be glad to get a place to stay at such times, in fact we usually get an equally large jump in no-shows. Just this weekend we had a family who’d booked almost half the building between them yet neither cancelled nor turned up. Had they cancelled, we’d have filled the rooms easily enough yet they didn’t so we had to keep the rooms available for them.

One thing to watch in these days where almost all reservations are guaranteed by a credit card is that if you don’t cancel, you’ll get charged at least for the first night and increasingly often for your entire stay.

Whilst we all love our vacation time, we all assume that places that thrive on tourist business will be open during the holidays.

That’s not always the case in France where many attractions are closed today because it’s Labour Day (May 1st). Although many people will be eating out today, a number of restaurants choose this time of year to close thus losing considerable business of course.

Even when they’re not on holiday many restaurants stick to the 12 to 2pm lunchtime and we know of one local touristy village which gets tour buses every day from 9am to 7pm yet the restaurant only serves food from 12 to 1.30pm.

Myrtle Beach resort in South Carolina isn’t as well known as some other resorts nearby but don’t let that put you off as it has all the facilities on offer that you could want.

In addition to a wide range of hotel choices and, of course, beach activities there are lots of non-beach based activities in the area too including Myrtle Beach golf, numerous parks, museums and nightlife. This is all in a very compact area so you won’t end up spending hours in the car to get around as you do in some beach resorts which claim to have “everything”: they may well do but usually they’re so spread out that you’re in a completely different resort by the time you get around them all.

Clearly since it’s a beach resort you’re going to get aquariums, water parks and the like but you also get a good selection of non-water based attractions including the Hopsawee Plantation and the Childrens’ Museum. There’s a surprisingly wide range of shows on offer too of which I quite fancy Medieval Times but there are lots of others to cater for all tastes.

If you’re looking for somewhere on the coast but with a good selection of activities outside the beach area then a  Myrtle Beach vacation seems like a good choice.