travelgirl: give a girl an open road...

Cheap Flights, Airline Tickets, Cheap Airfare & Discount Travel Deals - Kayak.com

Cheap Flights, Airline Tickets, Cheap Airfare & Discount Travel Deals - Kayak.com.

For being such an early adopter, I sure am a late adopter on certain things. Why haven't I used Kayak.com before? Kayak is a great site for finding cheap and cheaper flights - it does a meta search, compares, contrasts and serves up some actual deals.

I had been using Orbitz for quite a while to handle booking all of my business trips. Traveling from Anchorage, Alaska to anywhere in the Lower 48 can be quite expensive with terrible flight times. Today I found a flight from Anchorage to Seattle for about $500 bucks give or take a few.

Then I went onto Twitter and posed the question: What travel site do you use and why? Most responses came back as Kayak.

I was able to get a flight to Seattle through Kayak for $443 - that included tax and fees. I booked it right away, then booked my flight to San Francisco. I'm traveling to Seattle for BizJam Seattle and to San Fran for BlogHer.

Hope to see you there! And hope you used Kayak.com to book your flight.

Travels With Baby: Paris, France

We stayed at few nights at the Hotel Eldorado on Rue, 18 rue des Dames, off the Place de Clichy (that we later found out is known as Paris' "red light district." That explains the blocks of XXX businesses.)

The hotel reminded me of inns I stayed in with my family in Amsterdam. Long, twisty, warped stairs leading to small rooms with smaller bathrooms, older fixtures, eclectic furnishings.

We didn't have a portable crib, so baby slept in a suitcase.

Our room overlooked the "garden" which turned out to be the garden of a restaurant, so we were serenaded each night by loud laughter and the clinking of glasses and silverware on plates.

But the price was right, and the location was convenient to a Metro station. Within walking distance we had our patisserie, laundromat and what became our favorite little cafe on the Place - Le Petit Poucet (translation: The Little Thumb, or so we were told).

On the first evening, we decided to walk to Sacre Couer (Sacred Heart) on the top of Montmarte. The walk was a slow climb up a gradual hill along winding cobblestone streets...

This is just the first entry of a series of posts about our travels with baby...Stay tuned...

September 11 - One Year Later

I visited New York City two years after September 11th, in October of 2003. This was a big step for me. I had been driving back home to Manhattan and was at an RV park in the middle of Nebraska on September 11th, 2001.

At first, I headed to a friend's mother's house in Kansas instead of continuing to the East Coast. A few days later, I headed to Richmond, VA to stay with my sister for a month. When I did go back to the Upper West Side to pick up a few personal items from my apartment on 72nd Street in October 2001, it was on the day that they discovered anthrax at the NBC building.

I was struck by how normal everything seemed on my block, other than the black jets screaming overhead.

Photos from New York City, a month after September 11, 2001

72nd Street, business as usual...

Fairways, business as usual...

I couldn't bring myself to traveling downtown to see the aftermath. I just couldn't do it.

Photos from New York City, a year after September 11, 2001

One year later, I had the opportunity to attend the Internet World conference in New York City and after much debate with myself, I decided I needed to go to see the hole at Ground Zero. Here are a few photographs from that day.

Memorial fence.

Blank space where Towers stood.

Before and after.

In Memorium.

Through bars.

I thought I would be more emotional when I was at Ground Zero. I remember being so quiet inside, staring into the space, thinking that my friend who was with me had never seen the Towers before, never been inside of them, so he had no idea how much emptiness there was before us. How the open space was so unnatural...

New Orleans - 3/3/01

While on my RVGirl Road Trip, I took a business trip detour into New Orleans for a speaking engagement. Here are some photographs from my trip. I just remembered I had them.

I wish I had similar shots of the World Trade Centers but while I was in New York City, they were such a fixture that I never thought of taking photos of them.