Category: Travel Planning

Suggestions for better travel planning, recommendations for travel tools and the results of my travel planning, both good and bad.

DESTINATIONS, Road Trips, TRAVEL, Travel Planning, United States

California on My Mind!

Jane Sadek
Santa Barbara CA
On the Beach in Santa Barbara

TRAVEL THERE: STILL CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

We just got back from California and it was a crazy trip. In fact, it was crazy before we packed the first bag.  Just getting the vacation planned had been all kinds of crazy!

The Best Laid Plans

See, last year one of our nephews moved into a new home and had his first child.  We were all geared up for a long weekend once our grand-nephew settled in.  Then my mom went into the hospital and that meant all travel was on hold.

She was in and out of the hospital several times, but rehab was planned and Bill thought the care-giver needed a break.  Everyone seemed to agree with him, so I re-planned the trip for nine days and bought our airfare – just a little too soon.  Rehab turned into hospice and then a funeral.

I wasn’t much in the mood for travel, but Bill thought I needed a change of scenery, so I started trying to coordinate a date for new travel plans.  However, the holidays were coming up and nothing worked.  So, we postponed the trip until March.

Believe it or not, before we could get the trip planned, another game changer came along.  A niece and grand-nephew from Egypt would be in California in June.  So we postponed our travel plans to June and the trip grew to 11 days.

Does this sound familiar?  Does this kind of thing happen in your family?  Well, it got crazier.

The Heath Project

If you’ve been following my Friday posts, then you know that sometime in March we decided to start looking for a new home and that search turned into a building project in Heath.  Since one thing always leads to another, we put our house on the market, thinking we might be lucky if someone bought it before the end of summer.  So, of course, some one bought it, right before we were supposed to leave on vacation – but that’s for the Friday posts.  Bottom line, even though it looked like something might undo our plans, right up to the phone call I got as we boarded our flight.  We made it all the way to California!

Confession is Good for the Soul

I’ll just tell you right now, with all this planning and re-planning, more than one thing fell through the cracks.  I double-booked myself into two hotels on one night, for instance.  I packed way too much and ended up with an $85 extra bag fee for another.  So travel stuff happens to the best of us.  Come along with me and I’ll show you a good time over the next few weeks as I share my experiences – good and bad – with all my blogospere friends.

DESTINATIONS, Restaurants & Bars, Road Trips, TRAVEL, Travel Planning, United States

No Mariachis at Durty Nelly’s or Paesano’s

Jane Sadek
Menu, Durty Nelly's Irish Pub, Riverwalk, San Antonio TX
Certainly not any Mariachis here!

TRAVEL THERE: NOT A MARIACHI IN SIGHT!

Warm Reunion of Friends on a Cold San Antonio Night 

One hallmark of my travel planning is finding a way to squeeze in a visit with friends and family if they are anywhere along my route.  San Antonio is home to one of my best buddies that I barely knew until a few years ago, even if we did meet decades ago.  We’d only casually crossed paths back at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, but rediscovered one another on Classmates.  Maturity gave us a whole lot more in common than we’d had as youngsters and Facebook gave us access.  Since Bill and I would be in my friend’s town, we took the opportunity to meet he and his wife for dinner.

Searching for Mariachis

Who else but me would have discovered a mariachi competition that just happened to be going during a visit?  And who else but me would drag relative strangers around the Riverwalk on the coldest night in San Antonio anyone could remember (but not as cold as it was going to get while I was there)?

When we first started planning the trip, I suggested to my friend that we meet at Durty Nelly’s and he agreed that it was a good idea, but then I found out about the mariachi competition and learned they’d be having a concert at Rivercenter’s Lagoon, so I upended all of our plans to include the free concert.  Being the spoiled rotten kid I am, everyone acquiesced to my wishes, except the weather.

Champion that Bill is, he only grumbled a little bit about leaving our nice warm hotel room to walk along the Riverwalk to the Starbucks at the Rivercenter Lagoon to meet Clark and Linda, people he knew virtually nothing about.  As soon as we entered the shopping mall I saw an information desk.  They didn’t know anything about a mariachi concert, but they did know where Starbucks was.  Shortly after we walked into the coffee shop, Clark and Linda joined us.  Introductions abounded and everyone tried to make nice.

As we chatted one thing became very clear, no mariachis were going to play.  No one with gold braided costumes came in with instruments in black cases.  Proud wives, mothers, aunts and cousins were not clustering around the lagoon.  In fact, the whole area was becoming quite empty.  Obviously, everybody had someplace else to be.  The Polar Express had struck again.

Dashing to Durty Nelly’s

So I suggested we retreat to Durty Nelly’s.  I love Durty Nelly’s.  It’s a not quite clean pub on the Riverwalk that has a crazy guy playing the piano.  I literally could have sat there all night singing along with his goofy songs – and perhaps Clark would have enjoyed it too, but the spouses both had this “what in the hell am I doing here” look in their eye.  I’ve got to give them credit, they were making the most of it they could, but I may have been the only one having a good time.

Moving on to Paesano’s

So I suggested the next item on our agenda – Paesano’s.  Someone in our Sunday School Class had suggested it to Bill and Clark said it was a big favorite with them, so we headed to dinner.  The wait was thirty minutes for a table inside the building, so somehow we ended up on the enclosed patio.  It was a lot colder than I wanted to put up with, but after dragging these people all over the place, I wasn’t going to complain about where we sat. I’m just not sure who thought it was a good idea.

I’d fill you in on what a great restaurant Paesano’s was, but my brain got numb in the cold.  My baked eggplant (the only thing I thought might be safe on my diet) was quite good, but I have no idea what everyone else had.  And it was so dark, I could barely see my own dish, much less my dining companions’ faces.

Darn that weather.  I’d anticipated my reunion with Clark to be a great time, with much wandering about the River.  I knew all the spouses were going to get along grandly and perhaps Bill and I would be singing our way back to our room in the wee hours of the morning.  Instead, Clark and Linda beat a hasty retreat home and we power-walked our way back to the hotel.  (Note to self: check the weather!)

There’s one more day in San Antonio, so be sure and come back next week.