The Hyphen House

A few years ago, I was watching a programme of house hunters searching for a holiday home in Slovenia. I had never heard of Slovenia. I was kind of embarrassed about that because it looked so beautiful. We are finally going to make our way there on an upcoming holiday.

Lake Bled, Slovenia by Mark Gregory via Flickr

When I mentioned to a friend that we would be in France for Christmas, she said she'd be in Aix-en-Provence with her family if we wanted to meet up. I knew not one thing about Aix, but her description got me interested and after a bit or research we decided to spend four days there. What a charming town!

"Budapest is the new Prague" said a friend of a friend. This was kind of a ridiculous thing to say, but it perked my ears to both cities. I looked them both up, we went eventually to both and loved them.

All this to say inspiration for travel can come from a number of places. In my early galavanting across Europe I stuck to the tried and true London, Paris and Italy plan. I thoroughly enjoyed those trips but am glad to have ventured further from the norm.

We love hotels. We especially love how comfortable they are and that someone cleans your room for you every day.

But when we added a child to our travel list we started to see the benefit of more than one room, a kitchen and a home base.

It also turns out that it can be quite a bit cheaper.

Then there's the added bonus of staying in a residential area. You get a flavour of local life instead of sequestered holiday life.

We have stayed in a second floor city apartment (with two sets of stairs before you reached the elevator, which was a good workout with a stroller), a fishing cottage, a basement level duplex on a cobblestone street, a historic home in a small town and an efficiency by a bowling alley (that one wasn't great, but it was cheap).

Sites we like:

Homeaway
Airbnb
Booking
Expedia
Flipkey

It's also wise to ask your international friends or peruse house-swapping forums. You might get lucky!

One of the biggest time-savers to packing is to take inventory of your travel items while you are actually on holiday so you can prepare for the next time.

I put a piece of paper in my toiletries kit so I can record what I've run out of. It's usually a pretty boring list like toothpaste, deodorant and q-tips. But it saves me time and also the threat of oversight. I also look through my carry-on for things like gum and chapstick that always seem to disappear.

I also try to do shopping to replace such items pretty soon after we return home. This will not rule out the possibility of a run to the drugstore the night before our next trip but it takes away some of the headache.

Lindsay_NYC via Flickr

I start planning for a trip months in advance. This gives me a concrete holiday to look forward to and allows us to spread out the cost.

"Calendar of Modern Times" by Kristoffersonschach via Flickr

For example, I purchase the plane tickets one month, accommodation the next and items needed for travel the next. You don't quite feel the weight of it that way.

Of course, if you are disciplined you could just save money over a period of months and purchase everything at once. But this is more realistic for me!