Going Away Preparations

So, part of this blog is me putting down on (virtual) paper the things I had to do to get myself to Milan successfully...

I mentioned that I was able to book my flight on the cheap, through sheer luck. I happened to stumble across this blog post from How Stuff Works on getting flights cheap the next day. Most of the tips were ones I already knew ("use travel search engines" "check to see if one way flights can add up to less"), but one tip that I didn't know about but accidentally followed was "Never book your flight on a weekend. Flights are more expensive on weekends. Shoot for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, for deals." I have to assume that it's because the airlines know that people are doing their vacation planning on the weekends, and either raise the prices then since people are booking then or drop them after to move inventory that didn't move on the weekend.

(Side note, speaking of travel search engines... a friend of mine who works at Google mentioned the Google flight search tool, which doesn't do international yet, but is pretty cool. Travel guru Pauline Frommer recommended Dohop.com because it lists airlines that don't give it kickbacks and thus has more complete listings...)

Another topic... money issues abroad. I know I will have them. I did get a international fee-free credit card from Capitol One, but that doesn't help for things like cash. And if you've been to Italy, you know there are lots of cash only things, so i will have to rely on the ATM's alot. In both the cases of ATM's and credit cards, banks can be a bit of a damper if you travel without saying anything. So in the last few days I set up travel alerts for my banks. At some point, I am going to have to get an Italian bank account, but they typically have a lot of fees and are difficult to handle properly, so I am trying to avoid it as long as I can...