"Books Help Plan Vacation"

With snow on the ground and the thermometer dipping below the zero mark, one of the indoor activities at my house is vacation planning!

Reading travel books and viewing videos on travel in exotic places are great ways of combating the winter blahs. The library’s extensive collection of travel books includes the most current Fodor’s and Frommer’s as well as the Rick Steve’s guides, Lonely Planet, and Landmark Visitors Guides. Some people have their favorite guides and swear by the Lonely Planet, or Rick Steves.

Personally, the guides all seem about the same with the exception of Fodor’s and Frommer’s, which seem to be more for the well-heeled traveler. Nearly all the travel guides now feature Internet sites for more information and many will include e-mail and fax numbers for hotels if you want to book ahead. Recently, when planning a two-week trip to Spain, I booked all our hotels by e-mail and my credit card. Also, I was able to book a sleeping compartment on an overnight train from Madrid to Barcelona. My one regret was that I didn’t use the Internet to reserve seats for a bull fight in Madrid.

I could have done it, but it was to be our first full day in Madrid and I was worried that we might have had an airplane delay and miss the fight. So, the day of the fight, when we arrived at the huge bull ring which had thousands of people milling about, the only seats available were the equivalent of $100 each, much too expensive for us.

The Library’s video collection includes travel videos on many different countries, and in some cases on various cities within some of those countries. By viewing videos before making the trip, one becomes more familiar with the area and also learns about some special places of interest. Several years ago, before vacationing in France, I remember viewing a library video on the island of Mont-Saint Michel, off the cost of Normandy.

Part of the video included a scene of a chef at a particular restaurant preparing a gigantic omelet. The host of the video tour guide made such a big deal of the omelets, that when my wife and I were on the island, we found the very same restaurant and dined on omelets.