Travel Apps Help Organize Your Visit, Save Money

Continued from previous page cially for you; plan an independent tour; organize a self-drive tour where you take to the open road with car and trip notes, or organize a private tour where you get your own vehicle, your own guide and everything to yourself.

TourRadar also spotlights deals of the week, home page spotlight tours, discounts like 2-for-1, extra add-ons, and great deals. (www.tourradar.com).

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Drive an exotic car, learn to fly, rock climb, skydive, bungee jump. Virgin Experience lists some 3000 different experiences in 122 regions from 600 “best in class” partners that their gift card can be applied to (bioluminescent kayak adventure in Tomales Bay, CA; drive a stock car on Thompson Speedway, CT; learn to fly in Mesa, AZ. (https:// www.virginexperiencegifts.com/ action-and-adventure,

Whether retracing the Revolution in Paris, diving into the ecology of Venetian canals, or exploring Kyoto’s teahouses at twilight, Context Travel offers tours with experts. Context offers personal walking tours in 60 cities across 6 continents. Skip the line and get off-hours access to popular sites in the world’s cultural and historical capitals. Tours range from half-day to 7-days plus. Context Travel also offers the “gift of learning” – virtual and in-person sessions with top experts– you can explore the Colosseum with an archaeologist, uncover masterpieces of the Louvre with an art historian, or explore the palaces of Istanbul

BY TRACY BECKERMAN

I had to roast an egg. I wondered: How hard could it be? I’ve made hard- and softboiled eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs and omelets. They all came out perfectly every time. People loved my eggs. They devoured my eggs. If there were an egg kingdom, I would be the queen of eggs.

But I had never roasted an egg.

No one ever actually eats a roasted egg, which is probably why I’d never made one. But I had to roast an egg for Passover, and so it was up to me to take ownership of the egg roasting and get the job done.

I assumed, like anything else you’re roasting, you could just preheat the oven to 350 degrees, slap the egg on a pan and roast it.

So that’s what I did.

And then I forgot about it.

I was cooking about four other things at the same time, so I was somewhat distracted. But after 20 minutes, I remembered the egg, looked in the oven window and saw that my egg did not look roasty. It didn’t even look toasty. It just looked like a regular egg.

I decided that maybe I should try broil- with an architect — from home, or in person. Gift cards available. (www.contexttravel.com)

TripAdvisor.com is excellent for doing research about what to do, and provides the links to the listings to book.

I typically Google “highlights of a visit to....” to get ideas and traveler reviews.

Want to hire your own local guide? ToursbyLocals.com can hook you up with 4,715 guides in 187 countries.

Spafinder offers a compendium of resorts, wellness centers and day spas, which you can book (or buy gift card).

Organizing your own tour and need to get place to place? I find Rome2Rio extremely helpful – you can find local transportation, and then click links to get to the site. Rome2rio searches any city, town, landmark, attraction or address across the globe with thousands of multi-modal routes to easily get you from A to B. It links up to 162,238 train lines via 4594 train operators; 854,876 bus routes via 79,480 bus operators; 12,998 ferries via 4,128 ferry operators; 53,532 flight paths via 1,142 airlines. It also includes schedules, routes and price/fare-ranges.

I used Rome2Rio to figure out a complicated link up from one tour that ended in Porec, Croatia to my next tour that began the same day in Llubjana Slovenia. That’s how I found Flixbus in Europe, which is now in North America and Brazil offering inexpensive fares on wonderfully comfortable buses (and now intermodal with trains) with 350,000 daily connections in 2500 destinations in 38 countries (Europe’s largest long-distance bus network), and since 2018, train con- nections and intermodal travel options. Flixbus now even offers trip ideas. (https://www.flixbus.com/discover)

I also used Rome2Rio to find local train connections and book my ticket on raileurope.com from Berlin where I ended a CroisiEurope river cruise, to Bruges to start a BoatBike tour.

Life Rewards

Imagine you have booked a really expensive luxury hotel stay at a premium rate during a major event – think Oscars, World Series, Superbowl – and you find you can’t attend after all and the room can’t be cancelled for a refund. Well, a new online travel service, Life Rewards, for the first time ever will facilitate the sale to someone else, and you may even score a profit on the deal. The travel tech company plans soon to make it possible to resell airline tickets.

Life Rewards seeks to be the next big thing in travel, an alternative to other online hotel and airline booking services (OTAs) but with this twist: the ability to resell, much the way people sell NFTs (digital assets), shaking up things the same way as Priceline’s audacious travel auction program did (LIFE Rewards’ founder and CEO Eduardo Ibañez was Priceline’s Chief Scientist). Life Rewards’s fee is 2% from both the buyer and the seller.

Life Rewards claims it will be the first online booking platform to make large volumes of hotel bookings available for trading on secondary markets, just as baseball or Broadway tickets are today. By creating liquidity in

LOST IN SUBURBIA Egg on My Face

ing it instead, so I changed the settings.

It was at this time that I thought, “Hmmm, maybe I should just check the internet to make sure I’m doing this right.” So, I went online and found something right away.

t said, “You have to hard-boil the egg before you roast it, or it will... EXPLODE!”

At that moment it seemed like time slowed down and everything that happened next was in slow motion. I turned toward the oven to pull out the egg, and took one step, when suddenly I heard a sonic boom. OK, it was more of a pop. But it definitely didn’t sound good.

“Noooo,” I yelled, also in slow motion, and then I grabbed an oven mitt and opened the oven door. Some of my egg was still on the pan. But the rest was scrambled all over the inside of the oven. There was yolk everywhere. There was egg on the bottom, egg on the door and egg on the racks. It was an eggsplosion of epic proportions. I stood there stunned and wondered how my eggcellent roasting plan had gone so awry.

As I pondered the eggceptional mess in my oven, I heard a voice ring out from the front hall.

“Hey, honey, I’m home,” yelled my husband. “Why does it smell like egg in here?”

“We had a small event,” I replied. “And it involved an egg.”

“What kind of event?” he said. “Was it a good event or a bad event?”

“It was most definitely a bad event,” I said, still frozen at the scene of the crime.

My husband walked in and stopped next to me. I pointed at the open oven door. He took one look and then jumped back as though somehow the egg was going to fling itself at him, just as it had at the oven door, oven floor and oven racks.

“Do I want to know what happened?” he asked, after he’d regained his composure.

“I don’t think you do.”

“Was that part of the Passover dinner?” he asked.

“It was.”

“Do you have any more eggs?” he said.

“I don’t.”

“So, what do we do?”

“Nothing,” I replied, throwing the bookings, both hotels and travelers will get more flexibility and an improved booking experience, the company maintains. Users can pay via credit, debit card and (no surprise) crypto currency.

Based on AI (artificial intelligence) that services a large online travel agency, LIFE also offers discounted prices and negotiated rates for hotels globally.

But for those travelers who want personal help, they can pay an annual $500 membership fee can access a network of (human) concierges who can help plan, arrange and book what happens at the destination – opera tickets, a Michelinstarred restaurant, excursions.

Using NFTs to digitize your hotel reservations and events bookings will enable travelers who want access to hotels and events that are sold out on the primary market to find bookings on a secondary market. If travelers are unable to go-away, they can re-sell, much like a concert ticket. Or if a hotel is sold out and someone wants to stay there specifically, one can still work a deal out with someone else who owns a room night. A two-way marketplace for travel makes it all possible. Hotels and travelers get more flexibility and an improved booking experience by creating liquidity in bookings.

More information at https:// LifeRewards.ai/ oven mitt on the counter and walking away. “Sometimes, you just have to say, ‘Cluck it.’”

© 2023 Travel Features Syndicate, a division of Workstyles, Inc. All rights reserved. Visit goingplacesfarandnear. com.

Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, “Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

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