OK, here’s the deal: You give me a thousand dollars, and I’ll send you somewhere on vacation this weekend. Now I can’t tell you where. Can’t tell you what you’ll do or where you’ll stay when you get there, either. But trust me. You’ll have a blast.
That’s the gamble my wife and I took two weekends ago. And we DID have a blast.
How’d we do it? E-mail air fares.
All of the airlines are getting into the act. You sign up at their Web sites and they’ll send you an e-mail every Wednesday telling you how low they can go on some flights for the coming weekend (returns are usually on Monday or Tuesday) that have too many empty seats. A sampling of some recent round-trip fares from Chicago: Knoxville, $89; New York, $139; Los Angeles, $169. That’s right. You could fly to L.A. for what you’d spend on a good dinner and a play with your significant other.
But how can you plan a trip that’s only two days away, and what if you don’t want to fly to the towns they’re offering? Relax. That’s why we went first. So just sit back, read on and remember what the old Greyhound commercials used to say: “It’s such a comfort to take the bus and leave the driving to us.”
The problem with these types of deals, of course, is that not everyone can decide on Wednesday that they’re going away that weekend. There are always complicating factors like work and child (or, in our case, ailing kitty) care. So you DO need to do a little advance planning.
In February, Bonnie and I picked the weekend of April 24 for our getaway. We also set a budget of $1,000.
The first thing I did, then, was to start keeping track of the cities showing up on the specials each week. My aim was to see if there were any frequent repeaters. There were: Boston and New York among the appealing ones, and Akron and Harrisburg, Pa., among the also-rans.
In this venture, your road atlas is your best friend. That’s because it lets you expand your horizons and quickly come to the happy realization that the destination of your flight doesn’t have to be where you spend your weekend. As an extra benefit, you’ll learn a lot more about our country.
One week when I was checking the specials, I was pretty bummed when I found that Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y., were the best offerings. What if that happened April 24?
But then I flipped through my atlas and got a geography refresher. How could I have forgotten that Niagara Falls is right outside Buffalo and the Finger Lakes region is south of Rochester? Hmmm. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Another week, Hartford, Conn., made the list. Great, we can visit insurance companies, Bonnie said.
Au contraire, I said, pointing excitedly at Connecticut in my well-used atlas. Here’s Long Island Sound and Mystic, where the old seaport museum is, and Groton, where the Nautilus is, and . . .
Even cities that by themselves are desirable destinations can benefit from a gander at the atlas. Because we live in downtown Chicago, spending more time in another big city isn’t always our idea of fun. So we found exciting possibilities in Boston (head out to Cape Cod), Seattle and Portland (what’ll it be, the mountains or the ocean?), and El Paso (Guadalupe Mountains National Park and, in adjoining southern New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park and many other scenic beauties).
Because we started planning our getaway far enough in advance, I had time to request tourism packets from several of the cities and states that were repeaters on the weekly lists. (Most city brochures also tell you about area attractions too.) In all, I got information from the cities of Buffalo, Boston, Hartford, Portland (Ore.), Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Seattle and Rochester, and from their state tourism offices too.
You can find phone numbers and Web addresses for state tourism offices and some major cities on the Tribune Travel Web site (chicagotribune.com/travel) as well as in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Or, call information (800-555-1212) for toll-free numbers of those offices.
Keep in mind that many tourism offices send out brochures using bulk rate mailings, which means it might be four to six weeks before you get them.
As the time for our adventure weekend approached, we became like two down-on-their-luck racetrack habitues as we looked at the latest listings each Wednesday morning. “Boston! Yes!” Bonnie yelped. But another week it was, “Akron? Oh, no!”
Then it was showtime — April 21. My eyes raced down the list: Saginaw, $69 . . . Green Bay, $79 . . . Knoxville, $89 . . . Allentown, $119 . . . DENVER, $149! . . . EL PASO, $169! . . . PORTLAND, $189!!!!!!
West Coast, here we come.
Now what?
The $189 fare to Portland (which ended up at $199 after taxes were added) was on American Airlines, which allows you to book e-mail specials on-line, by phone or through a travel agent. I logged onto American’s Web site because I knew from a previous visit there that I could earn an extra 4,000 frequent-flier miles the first time I booked a flight on-line.
Although American’s e-mail specials allow you to depart after 7 p.m. Friday or anytime on Saturday, we had already decided on a Saturday departure to eliminate an extra night of lodging on the coast. The e-mail special for that Saturday applied to only two outbound flights: 8:45 a.m. or 6:50 p.m. Naturally we picked the earlier flight, which, thanks to the time change, would get us into Portland at 11:01 a.m., allowing plenty of time for the drive to the coast. For our Tuesday return, we had a choice of either a 9:33 a.m. or 1:45 p.m. departure and chose the latter, which would get us home at 7:46 p.m. (of course it didn’t, because bad weather at O’Hare delayed our landing, but that’s another story).
Next, we needed a rental car. I spent at least an hour on this venture, both on the Internet and the phone, so I would be able to give you this advice: Pick up the phone and call Hertz or Avis or Budget or whoever you like and make a reservation, then get on to more meaningful things. I found the discount I got using my AAA card and the phone was more than the claimed discount for booking on-line.
Now then, where are we going to stay?
Because of my early planning, I already had the excellent Official Travel Guide from the Oregon Tourism Commission. Now that I knew our destination for sure, I also picked up the latest Frommer’s book on Oregon.
(A lot of people think nothing of spending thousands of dollars on a trip, but then balk at laying out $15 to $20 for a good guide book. That’s too bad, because there are many, many good ones out there — by Frommer’s, Fodor’s and Lonely Planet, to name just a few — that can make your travel much more rewarding.)
Looking at the great photos in Oregon’s Official Travel Guide made me want to see the whole 300 miles of Oregon coast, but we narrowed it down to a more doable plan to start roughly mid-coast and work our way north until we ran out of time (for more on our trip, see accompanying story). For now, though, we were running out of time to find lodging.
This is the type of job made for the Internet.
I fired up my Web browser and pointed it toward the Oregon Tourism Web site (www.traveloregon.com), which, like the state’s travel guide, is first-rate.
Any good tourism Web site should have a calendar of events. Oregon didn’t disappoint. It let me pick the month, area and types of events I was interested in.
Checking calendar listings is a good idea because, while they can point you toward things you might want to see, they also can help you avoid events that might create problems. In our case, I found the Astoria-Warrenton Crab & Seafood Festival was being held in the two towns that are tucked into the northwest corner of the state, where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific. If we had more time, the festival could be fun. But we had only 2 1/2 days to sample the coast, and there was the likelihood that lodging would be at a premium in the area of the festival.
The Fair and Festivals listing also mentioned a classic wooden boat show in Depoe Bay, a small village in our target area at mid-coast. So I dialed up the Chamber of Commerce number listed and talked with one of the volunteers who handle the phones.
She couldn’t tell me much about the boat show, but she was friendly. So I tried a question on her that I used with several other coast dwellers: “If you had friends visiting from out of town who had never been to the coast before, what are the two must-see things you’d show them?”
She said there were just some stores and restaurants in town.
“What about Cape Foulweather?” I asked, referring to a headland that juts into the Pacific just south of Depoe Bay that I had seen mentioned in some of my readings?
She conceded it was “beautiful.”
“How about sea lions or anything like that?” I asked, beginning to feel like I was the one who should be working for the Chamber of Commerce.
Well, she admitted, there were sea lions at Newport, south of Depoe Bay. And, of course sometimes you could stand on the sidewalk in Depoe Bay and see the whales.
“WHALES? You can see whales from in town?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” she said matter of factly, as if I’d asked her if they served coffee at local restaurants. “Or you can go out on the whale cruise boats. I do that all the time.”
Hmmmm. Now we were getting somewhere.
Through a link on the Oregon tourism Web site, I had found another information-packed site (www.ohwy.com) maintained by Online Highways, which publishes Oregon Coast and Oregon Outside, along with other magazines covering the Pacific Northwest. This site won’t bowl you over with its looks, but it has links to just about any town along the coast, and those links will help you find information on B&Bs, motels, inns and restaurants. Some of those facilities’ sites are only a single page with bare-bones information. Others are full of photos, room descriptions, rates and everything you would find in a brochure. Pair that up with a guide like Frommer’s or the AAA Tour Book, which I also had picked up, and you’re on your way to making some informed decisions about lodging.
(Keep in mind that you probably can find a Web site similar to the Online Highways site for just about any tourist destination in the country. Also keep in mind that restaurants and inns are paying to be listed on these sites, so their presence isn’t any sort of endorsement about their worthiness.)
After cruising the Web, I had just about settled on staying in Depoe Bay for the entire trip and exploring north and south. But a Wednesday night foray back to the Online Highways site (I don’t do all of my surfing at work, and I’m sure you don’t either) opened up the possibility of starting farther south and meandering up the coast through Depoe Bay and onward.
And so it was decided: Saturday night at Burd’s Nest Inn Bed & Breakfast in Yachats, Sunday night at Gracie’s Landing Bed & Breakfast Inn in Depoe Bay and Monday night. . . . Well, we’ll just see where the road ends for this trip. That’s part of the fun.
Though you know, now that you’ve read this far . . . getting there is half the fun.
THE NITTY GRITTY
HOW IT WORKS
All of the major U.S. and Canadian airlines now offer weekly e-mail specials. Generally you can sign up to be notified for domestic and/or foreign rates. Foreign lists usually come out on Monday and the domestic fares on Wednesday. Foreign trips usually require you to leave sometime between that Wednesday and Friday and return by the following Monday or Tuesday. For domestic flights you usually have to leave anytime Saturday (in some cases it’s anytime after 7 p.m. Friday) and return Monday or Tuesday. In addition to the specials for the current week, American just started offering e-mail specials for the following weekend. And, some airlines, such as Southwest and ATA, offer specials on flights several weeks away, but they must be booked by the coming weekend. Also, some airlines will let you book by phone, on-line or through a travel agent, while others require on-line booking. Pretty confusing, huh?
SIGN ME UP
You can sign up at individual airlines’ Web sites, in which case you’ll receive an e-mail (or e-mails, if you’re getting both domestic and foreign) from each airline each week. They will list all of the airline’s specials nationwide. Though I’ve signed up at half a dozen sites, I think the better route is to sign up at www.smarterliving.com. This site monitors at least 20 airlines’ offerings and will send you an e-mail on Monday (international) and Wednesday (domestic) listing flights only from the airport that you specify when you sign up. So, each week I get the fares for just O’Hare and Midway and don’t have to wade through flights originating in St. Louis or Atlanta or wherever.
If you still want to do it the hard way, you can sign up at each airline’s site:
Air Canada: www.aircanada.ca/sitemap.html
AirTran Airways: www.airtran.com
America West: www.americawest.com
American Airlines: www.aa.com
ATA: www.ata.com
Canadian Airlines: www.cdnair.ca/
Continental Airlines: www.continental.com
Delta Airlines: www.delta-air.com
Northwest Airlines: www.nwa.com
Southwest Airlines: www.iflyswa.com
TWA: www.twa.com
United Airlines: www.ual.com
US Airways: www.usairways.com
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Phil Marty’s e-mail address is pamarty@tribune.com
