Once again Myrna and I are hitting the vacation road. As it has become a habit lately, we will be leaving in mid April for a 15 day road trip through a few Southern states. The timing of this trip is always after my last hockey game and before any serious golf starts up on our area. This also means that Myrna will be spending her 4th birthday in a row on the road. This trip however is not as exotic as our recent voyages to Hawaii, Alaska and Italy. As a matter of fact, we are not even sure where we will be going to exactly. The destination(s) was (were) picked based on the time of the year, thus needing to go south, and by how much bang we could get out of Aeroplan points. The longest short-haul flight (15,000 points) to the south is Atlanta therefore this was chosen as our start and end point. From there, we are renting a car for a fortnight and travelling around the southern states with a fairly loose schedule. Our plans are to visit Nashville and Memphis, but we are not ruling out New Orleans or the gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama. The wind, weather and maybe the opinions of some locals we run into will lead us on some unplanned journeys to be sure. As the departure is approaching, I have been using the weather link above to see the temperatures of the different cities we may visit and it's honestly not looking much better than Two Mountains. Hopefully that will change for the better in the next 2 weeks. As of April 15th, the only places reserved is our downtown Atlanta hotel (the Ellis 19th) and one night in Nashville on April 21st. The Nashville reservation includes a show at the Ryman Auditorium and is non-refundable so we will surely be there. Whether we stay in Nashville longer will be determined by the factors listed above. We will surely be going to Graceland in the following days but after that it's a point and go tour.
I learned a couple of valuable lessons when booking this trip and one of them could save you a lot of money. Our original plan was to land in Atlanta and drive to Nashville or Chattanooga almost immediately. That was changed when I tried to book a car for the 2 weeks of our trip. My first attempt at renting a car at the Atlanta airport was with Hertz. Since through work I am a Hertz Gold member, I like the special pickup service and treatment you get renting there. Anyway, when reserving the car, a regular Mazda 6 or equivalent car, the total estimate came out to $878USD with or without my corporate discount. When I looked at the detailed breakdown of the estimate, I noticed 2 extra fees of around $70 each, one for an airport concession recovery fee and another for a customer facility charge. Just for fun, I did the exact same search but renting from downtown Atlanta to see how much the bill would go down without the airport concession recovery fee. This is where I almost fell on the floor. The estimated cost had gone down from $878usd to the low $400's. Not only were the 2 above fees gone, but the weekly rate had dropped from $325 a week to $188 a week. In the end, with a small CAA discount, the cost of renting downtown instead of the airport was $387 rather than $878. That's a savings of almost $500us for the exact same car. This is what made us decide to actually stay in downtown Atlanta overnight on both ends of the trip. It will be basically paid for by the money saved in the car rental. I have already seen Atlanta just before the 1996 Olympics but Myrna hasn't and there are interesting sites there and on the Sunday afternoon before returning home early Monday morning, we might try to catch the Braves game against Houston at Turner Field.
Following us, if you care to.
As on our previous trips, we will be posting regular updates and pictures that probably won't be as spectacular some of our previous destinations. Nevertheless, you are invited to follow along. You are also invited to send us some suggestions on sites that you may have visited and deemed not to be missed , especially if you see that we are getting closer to those places during our 2 week runabout.
All the links are in the header and include a day by day diary or travel log, a link to a picture album which will have a section for each region we visit, a link to a weather page that we will be using to establish where to go next and an e-mail link to contact us for side trip suggestions. As mentioned earlier, Myrna will be celebrating another birthday while we are away on the 23rd of April. If you want to e-mail her directly, she can be reached at magoyetche@yahoo.ca
ps If you look at the picture album in Slide show mode, you should hear topical (not tropical) music in some of the sections.