Vacations & Holiday News

If you need to check heavy baggage on an Alaska Airlines flight you should be ready to pay an additional fee. While you can avoid these fees with lighter luggage, sometimes this is not possible.

Bags that weigh less than 50 pounds will not be charged an additional fee. But those that weigh between 51 and 100 pounds will be charged a fee of $50. What if my bag weighs more than 100 pounds? In this case, you will want to get in touch with Alaska Airlines to see what your options are. In most cases, you will have to ship your bag via air cargo. Although this can be a pain, it is better to find out about this before you leave for the airport.

Many passengers find that a heavy bag is often times over the size limit of 62 linear inches as well. In this case, you will be assessed two separate fees.

When flying Alaska Airlines your best bet is to keep all of your bags under 50 pounds. By doing this you will be able to avoid excess fees that can add up in a hurry.

photo credit: Cubbie_n_Vegas

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Does Alaska Airlines Charge for Heavy Baggage?

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Does Alaska Airlines Charge for Heavy Baggage?

What does an actor do when he’s got (nearly) enough money and enough time to do what he wants? Some might buy a second home in France but Michael Tucker (of LA Law fame) decided to buy a house in Italy. Not only that, but he also wrote a book about it, resulting in Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine and Love in Italy.

“The Rustico” is the main character in this book: a cottage that overlooks the Spoleto Valley in Umbria. Michael Tucker and his wife Jill fell in love with Umbria while on vacation in Italy, largely because an accommodation booking in Tuscany didn’t meet their expectations. They certainly didn’t set out to buy “The Rustico” but it turned out to be irresistible.

With some additions and renovations to be made the house, nothing goes exactly smoothly – it is Italy, after all – but the story is a great way to help us know the country better. It’s also very educational for anyone considering investing in the chaos that is Italian real estate.

There’s also plenty of food in this travel memoir, with plates of home-cooked Italian delicacies (and the accompanying wine) wafting over many of the pages. You can also learn not to order a cappuccino after ten o’clock in the morning – it’s a breakfast drink. Who knew? photo credit: mozzercork

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Live and Eat in Italy with Michael Tucker

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Live and Eat in Italy with Michael Tucker

You might have thought that the secret life of a natural history museum is what you see in the Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum, but science writer Richard Fortey tells the real truth in his book Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Fortey worked at London’s Natural History Museum as a palaeontologist for over thirty years so certainly has some inside gossip.

For museum-loving tourists, there’s probably no better book to read before the trip than a behind the scenes account of museum life. Fortey takes us inside parts of the museum the public doesn’t usually see (which in this case, apparently, is more than half of the collection). He writes of exploring the hidden corridors of the museum with the excitement of a schoolboy – the only problem is that this makes us as readers want to follow him and we can’t!

Fortey almost became famous, he reports, for burning down the Smithsonian Institution with his smouldering pipe embers in 1976. Luckily security guards noticed the fire. These kind of anecdotes are littered throughout the book and the end effect is that you’ll see the next museum you enter in a different way.

This book could have got too technical or scientific, but Fortey manages to combine information with storyetlling and most of the time keeps it interesting. It turns out to be a treasure suitable for travelers and scientists alike and it’d be great if every museum could offer this kind of inside story to its visitors.

photo credit: ben.snider

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Getting Inside London’s Natural History Museum – Travel Book Review

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30 Days in Sydney: A Distorted Account by well-known Australian writer Peter Carey is not, as the title might suggest, a traveler’s guide book for how to spend thirty days in Australia’s biggest city. It’s something much different, loosely framed on Carey’s thirty-day stay in Sydney while he lived abroad in New York.

Since Carey had lived in Sydney before, he had a ready network of friends to tap into when he once again set foot on the Aussie shore. Before arriving he had decided he wanted to tell the story of this month-long trip through anecdotes related to the elements of water, earth, wind and fire, and he spends the book pursuing the various friends who he knows have interesting tales to tell.

Through this framework, the reader really gets to know Sydney, its culture and its history, getting much deeper than the average tourist. Carey goes into detail about the design of the famous Sydney Opera House through hearing a presentation from a little-known academic; he describes the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race through the terrifying tales of friends who took part in its most dangerous year. He looks back into history to when white people first arrived in Sydney and lets us see how it has changed since then, for better or for worse, and he brings us up to the present day by looking at the influence of the 2000 Olympic Games on the city, too.

30 Days in Sydney won’t tell you when the ferry to Manly leaves Circular Quay, but it is still a must-read for anyone visiting Sydney.

photo credit: krossbow

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Understanding the Real Sydney

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Understanding the Real Sydney

Are you traveling with a Group?

If you are a group of three or more, vacation rentals are an obvious choice. Yet, people around the country shell out hundreds of extra dollars just because they don’t even think about a vacation rental and simply regard hotels as the default choice. Many hotels boost their rates if a room has more than two occupants, while most vacation homes maintain the same nightly, weekend or weekly rate regardless of the number of guests. And room, yes isn’t that reason enough just by itself? A vacation rental can often provide you two to three times the space that a hotel room can.

Do you have special food needs?

Are you a vegetarian? Do you have food allergies? Do you hate sea-food but love the Florida Keys? Whatever your food preference may be, a vacation rental can accommodate it, because you can do the cooking yourself! Also, if you are traveling in a group, restaurant bills can cost hundreds of dollars over the course of a few days. You can save money and spend the extra $$$ on more activities during your vacation. And your family will love the “new setting” for your home-cooked food and stay healthy too.

Want to Take a Break From the Outdoors?

During most family vacations, there’s always a day or two that you want to take a break from the outdoors and hang out indoors.