Foreign Perspectives

Whilst yesterday we rebooked a room within 10 minutes of putting it onto the system, tomorrow that won’t happen no matter how low we price the rooms because the French will have all gone home.

The fact that they all go home at the same time creates chaos on all of the roads in France. Whilst we notice the French retreat from Spain, of course they are doing exactly the same thing all over Europe so that the roads in all directions are packed with cars and drivers who have been on the road far too long.

It kicks off from before dawn and will run well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It’s one of the days of the year when we get requests for breakfast at 6am (nope, it’s 8am at the very earliest) as the French usually take to the roads around dawn. Others go to the opposite end of the day and we’ve one family who are planning on setting out later this evening with the hope that the traffic will have tailed off by then (it won’t).

Definitely not a day when you would want to be on the road in France!

As ‘yall know, Wendy and me have been plugging away with paid posts over the last month or so.

One thing that we hadn’t expected was that by taking it a little bit more seriously, we’d be rapidly closing on the top 10 earners on PPP quite so quickly. Due to the delay in payment (you’re paid 30 days after your post is approved), it’ll actually be another month or so before get into that list but ’tis encouraging that we can get there so quickly.

Actually, all being well, we’ll not only be in that list but moving up it next month as we should be bringing online another blog by then.

As you know, I’m in the process of building up a sort-of technology blog over at An Age of Magic. It takes about three months before you can make money on these things so it’ll be a month or so before I’m ready to start raking in the cash from it and retire on the proceeds. Well, maybe a “bit” more than a month before I can retire on it 🙂

Anyway, I’ve been putting on vaguely techie type postings as you can see. Techie with a slightly different slant on the technology.

What’s really interesting is the kind of searches people have been using to arrive on the site…. “walk on water with magic”… “travel in time”… “move things with magic”. Also interesting are the results that I get when I use Digg and similar social bookmarking sites on individual posts: some of them do incredibly well considering the content that’s on the site.

Now, the bigger question is whether I’ll be able to make money it….

I’m hoping to rope people into writing articles for the Whole Earth Guide in exchange for a link to their own website (or just for the fame that it’ll bring if they don’t have a website).

Anyway, my first volunteer has produced a truly excellent article on Hawaii which puts my humble effort on London to shame.

Still, ’tis early days and I will be gradually upping the ante with the quality of articles that are planned for the coming winter.

If you’d like to contribute to this effort, you can add your contribution here (select “Whole Earth Guide” as the property type and don’t worry about the talk of charging etc.).

We’re about set to choose our next car and aren’t too sure what to get at the moment.

In theory, we’d like to get another Suzuki Alto as it was a brilliant little car with getting on for 70 mpg but they don’t make them anymore so that’s not an option. So, we looked at the next model up which is the Wagon R but I’m not too keen on that one. Their Ignis is a baby 4×4 which looks interesting and would let us go up to the ski resorts this winter plus we’d not need to use the tailer all the time as we did with the Alto. On the diesel model the mpg isn’t too bad either at around the 50mpg mark.

We were also looking at the Chevrolet Matiz but it seems a bit tiny and I suspect that when they say it’s a five seater they mean three kids in the back rather than three adults. Still in the running, but we’d need the trailer all the time with it and, until very recently, the Matiz range didn’t have type approval for trailers so we might not be able to get a tow bar fitted.

We’re still looking though… ideas welcome… ideally what we need is a four door, five seater car with a large luggage capacity and very economical on the petrol/diesel. Preferably 4wd but not necessarily so. Oh, and cheapish but reliable.