TPThursday: ‘Un Petit Cadeau’ in Provence

Un Petit Cadeau; a small gift.  That’s how we recall that night in Haute Provence. . .


Nice, France was the place we would end our road trip through Provence and from where we would set sail on a Mediterranean cruise on the Windstar’s Windsurf for Rome.

Because our trips begin from the U.S.West Coast it take a full day, or night, of travel to reach European destinations. So, we pack as much into a trip as we can – that means a land excursion either before, after or at both ends of a cruise.

On this trip, we tacked 'land time' onto the front of the cruise, beginning in Paris.



We headed to Nice with six nights to spend on the road, taking a meandering route through Provence without set direction or plan. That’s how we happened upon a magical place set high up in the mountains of Haute Provence, (High Provence):  Moustiers-Sainte-Marie.

This tiny commune, that blends into the limestone cliff on which it was built, had a population of 1,955 back in 1765. In 2008 the population was 710.

Below the town stretches a valley so intensely picturesque it was almost difficult to absorb it.
 

The valley floor was a checkerboard of homes, fields and pastures. We drove slowly through it hoping to find ‘just the right’ place to spend a night. And we did. . .

But it was more than a place, it was our petit cadeau, “Le Clos des Iris”.  Its name, The Closed Iris, seemed particularly fitting as the flowers in its many beds had closed long before our October visit. It was late afternoon and we hoped there would still be a room available in this nine-room hotel. Despite the owner’s inability to speak English and our inability to speak French, we used broken bits of both and lots of sign language and smiles, and secured a room for 65-euros a night.

Our room was small and charming.  As we snuggled in between the lavender scented line-dried sheets I recall pulling them over my head, inhaling deeply and suggesting that we skip the cruise and never leave this place. 

The cheery breakfast room  felt more like someone’s private kitchen than a hotel restaurant.   We were sorry our scheduled arrival in Nice allowed us only one night here. We left vowing to return one day.
 

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie is considered a gateway to the Gorges du Verdon. And leaving our charming hotel we traveled the two-lane paved highway with sharp twists and turns – not for the faint of heart  - along the rim of the Gorge. There are great views along  the 25-kilometer-long (15 mile) stretch into a canyon that in places reaches to a depth of 700 meters (2,296-feet). The Gorge is popular with outdoor enthusiasts – especially kayakers, hikers and rock climbers.

Have you found un petit gadeau on your travels? If so, where did you discover it?

If You Go:


Le Clos des Iris, Chemin de Quinson, 04360 Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, 04-92-74-63-46 phone; o4-92-74-63-59 fax. Nine rooms with en suite baths, located 400 meters, or a quarter mile outside town.
Click this link for information about villages and activities near The Gorges de Verdon.

It’s Travel Photo Thursday, so stop by Budget Travelers Sandbox. And if this is your first visit to TravelnWrite please come back again soon.

Travel Tip Tuesday: America the Beautiful for only $10

Smokey the Bear, that icon of the U.S. Forest Service  has got one smokin’ deal for all you senior citizens out there.

Did you know that for $10 those of you who are 62 years of age and older can obtain a lifetime pass that gets you into more than 2,000 federal recreation sites?

Thanks for today’s Travel Tip goes to Larry in New Jersey and his son Aaron in Washington State, who tipped us off to this incredible deal.

Residents of the United States know that it costs to visit our national forests and federal recreation lands these days. 

The annual pass price: $80.
The senior citizen lifetime pass price: $10.


What does the senior pass do?


Covers Entrance fees at national parks and national wildlife refuges as well as standard amenity fees at national forests and grasslands, and at lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

At places with a vehicle charge it covers the pass owner and passengers in the car.


Even better, it covers the pass owner and three additional adults in the car if it is a place that charges a per-person fee.

How to get the pass?


Passes can be obtained in person at a federal recreation site or through the mail using an application form that is provided on the National Park website (click the link).  For passes obtained by mail there is an additional $10 processing fee.

We recommend you check out the website listed above as it offers details about the Senior Pass and the amenities it provides as well as information on Free Annual Passes for U.S. Military members and their dependents; Free Access Passes for those with permanent disabilities and Free Volunteer Passes.

If this is your first visit to TravelnWrite please sign up to regularly receive posts in your inbox (see box on the right on our home page). We’d love to see your photo among our followers. Provence is our destination on Travel Photo Thursday – hope to see you back again then. 
And don’t forget to send tips for Travel Tip Tuesday to travelnwrite@msn.com.

WAWeekend: Staying at Spokane’s ‘Living Legend’

Beginning today, our WAWednesday becomes WAWeekend. The focus will continue to be on short getaways and hidden treasurers not far from our Pacific Northwest home. 


With our love of old places – the kind where the floors sometimes creak and the wood-frame windows still open - we chose The Spokane Club for our two night stay in Spokane, the second largest city in Washington State.

Like The Union Club of British Columbia, that we told you about last week, this is a private club – its origins dating back to the late 1800’s -- that has opened its guest rooms, The Inn, and athletic facility to the public.

The clubhouse, designed by Kirtland Cutter, whose name would become synonymous with Spokane’s Age of Elegance, put us within two blocks of the theatre district, Spokane Falls and its gondola ride, the River Park Square, and the city’s more famous historic hotel, The Davenport.





We paid $135 night which included various taxes, and it provided free parking at the Club’s nearby garage, in- room wireless and use of their modern-multi-storied athletic club. 







We dined in the Club’s restaurant where we had some of the tastiest food of our entire road trip.  Restaurant ‘regulars’ recommended the Crab Louie – they didn’t steer us wrong.








The Club’s common areas weren’t as inviting as were those at Victoria B.C.’s Union Club.  But the Spokane  folks were pretty proud of their recent room renovations which included new beds, so they had a bed on display in the middle of the lobby instead of seating.  And their stately old library with a man-sized fireplace was under renovation one day of our stay and reserved for a private party the next. (We did sneak a peek – and that’s Joel standing inside the fireplace.)


If you go: 

The Spokane Club Inn, 1002 W. Riverside Avenue, Spokane, WA, 99201, 1-866-599-6674. Two restaurants on-site, one bar, 37 guest rooms, 10 suites.

A quick check of Expedia showed a summer Mon/Tues stay rate at  the Spokane Club to be $95 a night, about $50 a night less than the Davenport.

Tip:  You can book  travel on Expedia, by going through the Ebates.com site that provides rebates and cash back for booking through the site. 

TPThursday: Do you ‘Capture the Colours’ or Clichés?

We’ve sometimes overlooked the ‘colors of  travel’. So often, I am trying to capture the memory of a particular travel moment, that I don’t notice the colors that contributed to it.

I traveled down a number of Memory Lanes to find photos that express each of the world’s primary colors: blue, yellow, red, green, and white for today’s post. I did so after Cathy Sweeney of Traveling with Sweeney and Vi at Short Travel Tips  tapped me for participation in a contest being sponsored by TravelSupermarket.  (I never win contests, but this was a great exercise - you should try it.)

The contest judges don’t want photo clichés: a blue sky, a red sunset or a yellow flower (like the sunflower photo here that I took in Stehekin, WA. It’s a great memory but cliché).

They want color in photos that give a sense of place, perhaps even ‘a splash’ of color.  Something that ‘captures a place so well that even if I’ve been there before, I think to myself, ‘Wow, I have to go there', ” says one judge.
 
With that in mind, here’s the travel palette of colors I chose:

White:

It was simply, a fairy tale. One of the most stunning road trips we’ve ever taken was high up into Spain’s Andalucian hillsides.  We lost track of the number of small hamlets – the famous White Towns – as we followed the winding road on that magical journey.

Red:

Sometimes the ambiance and charm are so intense that a place seems unreal, almost as if it were a movie set; one in which we are lucky enough to be among the cast members.  That was Gibraltar.  This pair of street musicians provided the movie’s soundtrack. Their melodies followed us for blocks in this little bit of England on the Iberian Peninsula.

Yellow:

Greek ferries. They come in every size, shape and color creating a rainbow in the harbor at Piraeus, the port city serving Athens. If I were recommending travel experiences you must have before you die; sailing a Greek ferry from this harbor is at the top of the list.



Green: 

I called it the Emerald Empire in an earlier post; The Palouse, that agricultural land that makes up the Eastern part of Washington State.



Blue: 


My take on blue is probably as cliché as it gets, but after years of dreaming about visiting Greece and then finally getting there, I couldn’t believe it was as picture perfect as we found it. And this time I did notice the colors because it made the travel moment unforgettable.

Have you been capturing the color or clichés?  On your next trip keep those primary colors in mind when you take aim with the camera – I will.

That’s it for this week’s Travel Photo Thursday. Hope you’ll head over to Budget Travelers Sandbox for more photos.

I’d also like to tap the following fellow bloggers to join in the Capture the Colour contest:
Dick’s Travel Tales from the Road
Keryn’s Walking on Travels
Heather’s Lost in Arles
Andi’s The Particular Traveler
Five American guys’  Travel Philosophy

Travel Tip Tuesday: Ridin’ the Rails for Free!

Mary and her husband, who live in south central Washington State, will be traveling round-trip to Chicago aboard Amtrak this fall – on free tickets – thanks to Amtrak’s Rewards Program and a Chase credit card offer she received.

That is a savings of $636.

The Amtrak card – which doesn’t have an annual fee -- works much like those cards that offer airline points.  Mary received 16,000 points from Amtrak for joining the rewards program and another 16,000 from Chase for signing up for the card. The Chase points were added to her Amtrak account as soon as she made a purchase using that card.  It took between a month and six weeks for the points to be posted.

Once they appeared in her account, she put in their travel dates and destination ‘hoping to get a few dollars off the cost of the tickets’. Instead, she found that the amount of points required for the trip was 32,000. Her points paid for the trip. She’s booked it!

“I already had booked a neat brownstone in the Lincoln Park area and will use the card to pay for it and hopefully accrue some more points by next May, when we plan to take Amtrak to Carmel,” she wrote.

Mary’s note came right before news of the latest round of price increases on airline tickets. If you’re tired of airports and want to give Amtrak a try, you might want to also check out the Amtrak credit card site. (Offers can change so you may not find the same deal that Mary got.)

If you missed last week’s money-saving Travel Tip,’ click here to read it.

If you’ve got a tip – place to stay, a good deal, a way to save travel dollars – send us an email to travelnwrite@msn.com Be sure to include details and we’ll use it in a future Travel Tip Tuesdays! 

And, if this is your first visit to TravelnWrite, welcome! Hope you’ll return soon or better yet, sign up to have TravelnWrite posts delivered to your inbox.

Our Room with a View in Victoria, B.C.

Psssttt!  We stayed on Victoria’s Inner Harbor in a ‘room with a view’ at a delightful place you’ve probably never noticed.   And that’s because it sits in the shadow of the more well-known Empress Hotel, an icon of the city and its busy harbor.

We stayed at its lovely next door neighbor, the equally elegant and elderly Union Club of British Columbia.  (That’s our room right under the flag pole as a matter of fact.)

The Club, eh? Doesn’t that mean ‘private’ with membership?  Not necessarily. . .read on:

The Union Club has been in this landmark building for 99 years although the gentlemen’s club was in existence long before that time.  (Ladies have been welcomed as members since the 1990’s). 

We discovered the Union Club some half dozen years ago and following a delightful stay there, became non-resident members. (I think it was the view - in the photo to the right - to the Inner Harbor from this outside patio that won us over.)

These days you don’t need be a member to experience the private club life because a portion of the 22-guest rooms that make up the upper two levels of the club are available to the public. (This was our king room without all the fancy doo-dad pillows on the bed.)

And this was our view. I did a quick check this morning on Expedia.com and Booking.com and the price for a harbor view room at the Empress Hotel was $414 a night, as compared to this room which was $357 for two nights (Victoria’s hefty tax of 14 percent wasn’t added to either of those rates.)


It is still a private club at heart though so it may not appeal to everyone.  A dress code applies to all who stay (as in ‘no jeans or shorts’ in common areas) and cell phones are kindly requested to be quieted as well in the common areas, which include an elegant reading room and a cozy library.  (We’ve been known to spend hours in that reading room enjoying any of a number of English, Canadian and American newspapers and some two dozen magazines.)

There’s no pool or spa, but there is a bar and restaurant . . .some of the best food in Victoria is found in the Union Club restaurant.

A card room and a billiards room harken to the days of old, and still attract a good number of guests. 





It is a place  where Ladies Nights and Men’s Nights occur with special buffet dinners once each week and on those nights members of the opposite sex are not to be seen in the restaurant or bar, but can dine and socialize on the patio or reading rooms.

The old carpeted floors creak and oh the stories those rich wood-paneled walls could tell.  Nestling into the green leather chairs with your feet up on the matching ottoman is the perfect cure for weary travel feet.

If you want an out-of-the-ordinary travel experience, The Inn at the Union Club, 805 Gordon St., Victoria, B.C. is our recommendation for the place to stay.


For information or reservations:  reservations@innattheunionclub.com, www.innattheunionclub.com, 1-800-808-2218, 250-384-1151, or www.booking.com

TPThursday: Go North “Young” Woman

We’d decided to do something different for my birthday: stay home.

And we stuck to that plan until 1 p.m. when we did something so spontaneous that we both were still shaking our heads as we stepped ashore in Victoria, British Columbia a few hours later.


We often describe our travels as going ‘where the winds blow us’ but this one struck with gale force. I’d been working on a blog post and mentioned Victoria . . . an hour later we were packed and in line on the Seattle waterfront ready to board the day's last sailing of the Victoria Clipper, a high speed catamaran that would whisk us off to what has been a three night stay in the “City of Gardens.”



Victoria, B.C. is at the southern tip of Canada’s Vancouver Island. Cradled between Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, it is 71 miles from Seattle, just under three hours away on The Clipper (which blasts along at 30 knots, or 35 miles an hour).



Incorporated in 1862 and also celebrating a birthday – its 150th – this year, the city is decked out in its usual summer finery. . .including its trademark hanging baskets. The flower baskets have been a tradition since 1937. There are 1,500 baskets adorning the old-fashioned light posts. (And if you want to replicate those baskets at home, the city’s web site, www.victoria.ca offers a brochure with instructions.)



Every street corner is decked out with a garden. This Orca whale topiary sits across the street from the visitor’s center at the Inner Harbor.


While its Butchart Gardens is the most famous of its gardens there are so many parks (78 in Greater Victoria) that we usually don’t have time to visit Butchart, as was the case again this trip. Our first day was spent strolling through Victoria’s many gardens and parks that are within an easy walk of the Inner Harbor where we were staying.
.
One such place is  the beautiful lawn of  the iconic  Empress Hotel, pictured above.  We  had a special treat: watching a bride and groom starting a new life together at the lawn’s rose trellis.



Only a couple blocks from the Inner Harbor, we strolled through the grounds of St. Ann’s Academy National Historic Site (835 Humboldt St., www.stannsacademy.com ). Just beyond it is the 25 hectare, or 62-acre Beacon Hill Park which led us to the seafront promenade that stretches for miles along Dallas Road. 






We walked nine miles as we explored but a corner of this magnificent city of some 80,000 people but in full disclosure, our long walk was in part to ease the guilt of  the amount of food we had consumed the night before at our favorite restaurant, The Tapa Bar, (620 Trounce Alley, 250-383-0013, www.tapabar.ca)  and although we turned down the offer for dessert, the waitress decided my big day shouldn’t go past without. . . .



That’s it for this week’s Travel Photo Thursday, so head over to Budget Travelers Sandbox for more photos.  I’ll tell you more about the gem of a place - often overlooked by travelers - that we stayed at here in my next post.

For more information on Victoria, B.C.: www.tourismvictoria.ca or the city’s blog  www.goinglocal.tourismvictoria.ca  For information on the Victoria Clipper, www.clippervacations.com .

Travel Tip Tuesday: The Big, Fat Check’s in the Mail

We are skeptical of things ‘too good to be true’. So with skepticism at an all-time high, we tried out an on-line shopping site that had been recommended by a trusted friend, although it really did sound too good to be true. 

But you know what? 

In this case it was true! 

We’ve since received nearly $200 in rebates from that site simply by logging into it and then heading to our favorite on-line retailers, especially travel sites.

We don’t book any travel related item – airlines, cars, or hotels – without first checking to see if they are listed on Ebates.  And most are found there – the site has some 1,500 participating on-line stores now. 

Just a few examples: 
Hotels: Expedia, Hotwire, Hotels.com, Courtyard, Days Inn, Fairmont, Intercontinental;
Cars: Budget and Enterprise
Air:  CheapoAir, Air France, American, Alaska Air.

We’ve also purchased travel clothes like my Chico’s Zenergy, (that’s what I am wearing in the photo) and Land’s End outdoor clothing, our Clark’s walking shoes and my Baggallini purses and totes (pictured above) through Ebates.

While checking the site this morning I see that Amazon is now among its vast inventory of stores, so our travel books and novels will be ordered via Ebates as well.

With a nod to our Canadian readers, the site offers many of your stores as well.


Ebates  does as it claims: “Big Fat Checks” as they call them arrive quarterly.  We’ve recommended the program to so many family and friends that we decided to let you in on this ‘deal finder’ as well.  We’ve added it as a recommendation on  Joel’s Deal Finder page as well.

Ebates was founded in 1998 by two Deputy District Attorneys in the Silicon Valley, California. They used to prosecute on-line fraud and identity theft before starting this venture.

Click on any of the highlighted Ebates words in this post to go directly to that site and check it out!

Note: As with all our tips, this is intended to show you how we save travel dollars.  We’ve not been paid to promote Ebates.  (In full disclosure, if you click a link on this post and then buy from a business listed there, we will get credit for the referral and you get a bonus as well. All  Ebates customers can  participate in the referral program  - and you’ll probably want to do so after you see how it works!)