I'm known to my associates as a road trip guy, and I have put a lot of miles on cars over the years. While going through my archives of old photos to prepare for a future blog series, I hit upon the idea of assembling some of them into a chronological history of my various vehicles. To that end, here are my nearly thirty years' worth of cars. It's a somewhat bittersweet trip down memory lane.
Continue reading "My 30 year car history"
Tag: Road Trips
bookmark_borderBooking.com removed my negative reviews
I've made many long road trips over the past decade or so, with most of my nights on the road having been spent in various motels across the U.S. and Canada. For the past several years, I've mostly made use of Booking.com to book my lodgings whenever I'm not able to stay with friends or family. Booking.com has proven to be a great resource for finding places along my way, particularly when I'm trying to decide whether to stop for the night or if I can continue a bit farther onward. I can look for patterns or trends among recent reviews and also try to find last minute deals. But there's an apparent issue with this website that needs to be acknowledged, one I've encountered a couple of times and which has called their ratings' reliability into question for me. And it's this: I've posted several reviews on the site in recent years, and the two most negative ones have both been deleted.
bookmark_borderAn animated road trip history
2012-2024
Documenting thirteen years' worth of big road trips is a challenge at any time, but it's all the more so when you're trying to do it long after the fact. If by some chance you happened to visit this site before the 2021 revamp (and you had the appropriate direct links), you would have been able to see travelogs for 2012, 2013, and 2014 on some very simple webpages. These were thrown together while I was actually on the road using a laptop and motel room wifi, and were intended to cover highlights of each trip for people back home. I stopped doing these in 2015 due to the excessive time I was spending going through all the material and putting it together every few days while on the road - during my supposed vacation, I would rather do something else. But when home and not running around North America, collecting all my big road adventures together in detail on the site has been a long time coming.
bookmark_borderPlaces I have stayed during my travels across North America
Updated on June 6, 2024
This is a listing of recommended lodgings in various cities across the United States and Canada, based on my own personal experiences. This is most definitely not a listing of every motel or other property I have ever stayed in, and I am also leaving out certain properties that I have stayed in multiple times as they are not necessarily places I would recommend to other travelers (some are borderline dives or in borderline seedy areas, for instance). When booking a place to stay, my main considerations are cost, convenience, cleanliness, and the area the property is in - amenities such as free breakfasts, gyms, laundry facilities, in suite coffee makers, and room service are not priorities of mine. The goal is always to find as inexpensive a room as possible while not ending up in a dive or in an area where I don't want to go outside at night. Continue reading "Places I have stayed during my travels across North America"