Booking a flight

Now that the reservations are all done, it’s time for the booking.

By which I mean the Purchase, Reference and Reading of Diverse Books Regarding the Areas to be Toured.

I’ve been to the UK twice before.

The first time, I did extensive research in the library, and made copious photocopies. Copious. I stapled these together into books for various parts of the journey, cross-referencing maps to the interesting places to visit, etc.

Last time, we bought a few travel books, and borrowed some others.

This time …

… well, heck, the Internet has changed all that, right? I mean, you can simply look up whatever you want, right?

Well, yeah, I could do that. And print out pages and create my own tour book again. Or be particularly geeky and download the pages to my Palm and carry that with me.

On the other hand, that presupposes I know everywhere I plan on going. Bzzzt. The advantage to a travel book or two is that they cover areas you don’t expect to go to, but do. Or they have info on restaurants.

The local B&N had a copy of last year’s Fodor’s London guide in the remainder stack, for $4. Given that this year’s is more like $20, and I suspect that most of the landmarks are still there, I think that was a fine deal.

I also pondered getting a Zagat London. Margie and I did run into trouble last time finding places to eat; it’s one thing to see that there’s a restaurant in town that has three stars, or that serves this-and-such, but the Zagat guides are nice for having actual people’s opinions in them.

I don’t know as we need too many straightforward tour books (a la Fodor, or Michellin). But it might be nice to have some specialty, or oddity, books. So, for example, I always enjoy visiting Neolithic sites — Stonehenge, Avebury, various stone circles and menhirs and quoits. I’m pretty certain I have a book or two that we can bring on that.

But another thing we enjoyed doing last time around was visiting old churches, of which Britain has a plenitude of. Hell, you could spend a few months in London alone. And I’m not just talking about the Westminster and St Paul sorts of places, but the smaller churches. Lots designed by Wren. Lots of interesting styles and architectures. Many of them closed most days. Saw a book, England’s Thousand Best Churches, which might be interesting to pick up, though it doesn’t cover Wales, alas.

There was another one, with the rather apprehension-instilling name of The Christian Traveller’s Guide to Great Britain. Mercifully, it’s more of a guide to religous sites on the island, though mostly Christian ones, and it treats them all with historic interest and respect.

Of course, now I also wonder if I need to get some sort of satchel, to carry all my books around in whilst touring.

One advantage I have is that most of these are available through Amazon, and if I buy a few of them, I’ll get free shipping, plus the normal 20-30% off, so the actual cost incurred will be minimized. Heck, a lot of them are availble used, too …

I suppose it would also be a good idea to coordinate with the others, to make sure that we don’t buy multiple copies of the same book.

One thing we can’t buy in advance was another fun sort of tour guide. We discovered that different regions have craft shop guilds or alliances or associations, and we used those to visit different, interesting places. Sometimes they were dud, glorified gift shops. Other times they were very cool art galleries, or the sales hall for local artisans. Other times they were fun ceramics shops. We picked up some good gifts (for others and ourselves). Something else worth thinking of in our touring plans.