Just wanted to suggest to the person traveling to Hawaii with a toddler that you look into renting a condo in addition to hotel options. You don't get the fancy pools (but your kiddo is young to enjoy those) or the kids club so if you want those, then stick with a hotel, but it's nice to be able to eat a lot of your meals at home both in terms of saving some money and working around the child's attention span. If you select Maui as Josh suggested, I would look at Wailea if you can afford it, Kihei if you want more affordable but close to Wailea, or Kapalua if you want something in between and a little less crowded. The Kapalua Bay Villas are nice and right on the water with great views and nice pools and beautiful grounds.
I understand the hesitation surrounding student loan forgiveness, especially because as mentioned here, that cost eventually gets handed to taxpayers (nor does it solve the bigger problems of inflated costs of education in future years, and the circumstances surrounding individual borrowing at for-profit schools). However, it seems to me that relaxing the terms around repayment (expanding income- and public service-based repayment), unburdening interest rates accrued on loan principal, and also providing some sort of tax relief for the payee would be avenues for helping get borrowers better relief. Bankruptcy law might also deserve a look. Student loans are meant to be an investment in pulling more Americans into the higher education system, which should benefit both the individual and the American economy more generally. So-- trying to think of ways to lessen student loan burdens on the whole, maybe tax-incentivized repayment features, caps on interest generation, and loosening of some repayment terms would go further than blanket-level loan forgiveness.
Full disclosure-- I hold a significant amount of student loans from public university- it took me a long time to support myself through the end of my graduate degree. As much as I'd personally love student loan forgiveness, I think more practically that there could improvement to a number of repayment features.
Just hit up Maui's west coast in December w/ my 2.5 yr old. The high hotel cost was offset by $99 airfare direct from Long Beach, CA (due to rainy / pre-holiday season travel + promotional fare for a new route, I think). Was a great time. The baby beach in Lahaina has no waves and even a few sea turtles popping their heads out of the water. Expect to mostly be trekking between pool and hotel room though, which is also just dandy, particularly with decent Mai Tai service. Best advice I got re: travelling with toddlers was take your low pre-trip expectations on how much you will do & lower them further. You might then actually achieve them & enjoy yourself.
I travel and do contract work and was recently on O'ahu for about four months in spring-summer of last year. I highly recommend using the GyPSy app. It's an audio tour guide while you drive around that give you really interesting historical information while you drive - pointing you to look in different directions. It gave a great history of the islands (I used one for each island) and it also points you to points of interest that are worth stopping for to take pictures or eat. There's a rival GPS tour guide app called Shaka Guide that I downloaded, but didn't use. I liked the voice and style of the GyPS app better. https://gypsyguide.com/
I've been planning on taking a big euro trip in summer 2023 with my wife (we've never been before). I had never heard of Rick Steves before -- would anyone recommend going on one of his trips?
I’ve never done one of his group tours but I always buy his guidebook for where I’m going. I know the tours are geared toward people who are “not tour group people” — only about 24 participants, lots of walking — but I can’t speak to them directly. Where are you thinking of going?
There's a 14 day "Best of Europe" tour that starts in Rome, goes north to Florence and Venice, involves a trek through the Swiss Alps, veers over to Germany, and then ends in France. Seems like a lot to pack in to two weeks, but as someone who has never been across the pond before, it sounds like a nice sampler. As an experienced traveler, would that be too much or would that be a good "first time in Europe" trip?
I've been to most of the places on that itinerary and I think it would provide you an amazing and enjoyable overview of Europe. You'd see a tremendous diversity of interesting and beautiful places. The Lauterbrunnen Valley in particular is a stunning place that Rick rightly encourages tourists to prioritize over more famous Swiss destinations like Zermatt. (I'll post some photos of my 2019 trip there in a future weekend newsletter -- it's such a storybook setting that it almost looks fake.)
The main question is whether you're the sort of person who would find that level of motion to be invigorating or exhausting. An organized tour will make all the transitions easier than if you were planning the trip yourself, but it's still a matter of staying in seven different hotels over a course of two weeks, walking about 4 miles a day, and often spending several hours a day on a bus (albeit often on scenic drives). If you're confident you'll be going back, you could easily spend 14 days in just Italy or just France, seeing an itinerary that's just as packed with beautiful sites but with a slower pace and shorter travel distances. And then you could hit your other sightseeing targets on a later trip.
The other advantage of a more geographically limited itinerary is you can optimize weather: If you do this whirlwind trip in May, Switzerland will still be in low season and may still have snow on some hiking paths; if you go in July, Italy will be hot as hell. Rick's own advice is to travel the Alps and northward in summer, south of the Alps in spring and fall. (I would modify this advice to say spring or fall, not summer, is best for Paris.) A trip that covers so many parts of Europe can't have the ideal weather everywhere.
Just wanted to suggest to the person traveling to Hawaii with a toddler that you look into renting a condo in addition to hotel options. You don't get the fancy pools (but your kiddo is young to enjoy those) or the kids club so if you want those, then stick with a hotel, but it's nice to be able to eat a lot of your meals at home both in terms of saving some money and working around the child's attention span. If you select Maui as Josh suggested, I would look at Wailea if you can afford it, Kihei if you want more affordable but close to Wailea, or Kapalua if you want something in between and a little less crowded. The Kapalua Bay Villas are nice and right on the water with great views and nice pools and beautiful grounds.
Kapalua is beautiful. It gets more rain than Kihei and Wailea, but that also makes it greener.
I understand the hesitation surrounding student loan forgiveness, especially because as mentioned here, that cost eventually gets handed to taxpayers (nor does it solve the bigger problems of inflated costs of education in future years, and the circumstances surrounding individual borrowing at for-profit schools). However, it seems to me that relaxing the terms around repayment (expanding income- and public service-based repayment), unburdening interest rates accrued on loan principal, and also providing some sort of tax relief for the payee would be avenues for helping get borrowers better relief. Bankruptcy law might also deserve a look. Student loans are meant to be an investment in pulling more Americans into the higher education system, which should benefit both the individual and the American economy more generally. So-- trying to think of ways to lessen student loan burdens on the whole, maybe tax-incentivized repayment features, caps on interest generation, and loosening of some repayment terms would go further than blanket-level loan forgiveness.
Full disclosure-- I hold a significant amount of student loans from public university- it took me a long time to support myself through the end of my graduate degree. As much as I'd personally love student loan forgiveness, I think more practically that there could improvement to a number of repayment features.
Just hit up Maui's west coast in December w/ my 2.5 yr old. The high hotel cost was offset by $99 airfare direct from Long Beach, CA (due to rainy / pre-holiday season travel + promotional fare for a new route, I think). Was a great time. The baby beach in Lahaina has no waves and even a few sea turtles popping their heads out of the water. Expect to mostly be trekking between pool and hotel room though, which is also just dandy, particularly with decent Mai Tai service. Best advice I got re: travelling with toddlers was take your low pre-trip expectations on how much you will do & lower them further. You might then actually achieve them & enjoy yourself.
I travel and do contract work and was recently on O'ahu for about four months in spring-summer of last year. I highly recommend using the GyPSy app. It's an audio tour guide while you drive around that give you really interesting historical information while you drive - pointing you to look in different directions. It gave a great history of the islands (I used one for each island) and it also points you to points of interest that are worth stopping for to take pictures or eat. There's a rival GPS tour guide app called Shaka Guide that I downloaded, but didn't use. I liked the voice and style of the GyPS app better. https://gypsyguide.com/
I've been planning on taking a big euro trip in summer 2023 with my wife (we've never been before). I had never heard of Rick Steves before -- would anyone recommend going on one of his trips?
I’ve never done one of his group tours but I always buy his guidebook for where I’m going. I know the tours are geared toward people who are “not tour group people” — only about 24 participants, lots of walking — but I can’t speak to them directly. Where are you thinking of going?
There's a 14 day "Best of Europe" tour that starts in Rome, goes north to Florence and Venice, involves a trek through the Swiss Alps, veers over to Germany, and then ends in France. Seems like a lot to pack in to two weeks, but as someone who has never been across the pond before, it sounds like a nice sampler. As an experienced traveler, would that be too much or would that be a good "first time in Europe" trip?
I've been to most of the places on that itinerary and I think it would provide you an amazing and enjoyable overview of Europe. You'd see a tremendous diversity of interesting and beautiful places. The Lauterbrunnen Valley in particular is a stunning place that Rick rightly encourages tourists to prioritize over more famous Swiss destinations like Zermatt. (I'll post some photos of my 2019 trip there in a future weekend newsletter -- it's such a storybook setting that it almost looks fake.)
The main question is whether you're the sort of person who would find that level of motion to be invigorating or exhausting. An organized tour will make all the transitions easier than if you were planning the trip yourself, but it's still a matter of staying in seven different hotels over a course of two weeks, walking about 4 miles a day, and often spending several hours a day on a bus (albeit often on scenic drives). If you're confident you'll be going back, you could easily spend 14 days in just Italy or just France, seeing an itinerary that's just as packed with beautiful sites but with a slower pace and shorter travel distances. And then you could hit your other sightseeing targets on a later trip.
The other advantage of a more geographically limited itinerary is you can optimize weather: If you do this whirlwind trip in May, Switzerland will still be in low season and may still have snow on some hiking paths; if you go in July, Italy will be hot as hell. Rick's own advice is to travel the Alps and northward in summer, south of the Alps in spring and fall. (I would modify this advice to say spring or fall, not summer, is best for Paris.) A trip that covers so many parts of Europe can't have the ideal weather everywhere.
this is excellent insight -- I really appreciate it!