MyTripJournal Discount

When I presented information about MyTripJournal, I had wondered why one would subscribe through Woodall's, rather than directly through MyTripJournal.com/. Today I found out the answer. If you are a memeber of Woodall's Diamond Club, you get a 15% off the MyTripJournal subscription prices.

The Diamond club is free, and in addition to the MyTripJournal discount, benefits include a monthly, online newsletter and discount coupons for campgrounds. If you are not a member, click on the heading for this post to go the the Woodall's sign-up page.

When it sounds too good to be true...

In this week's print column I mentioned that finding places to stay in Hawaii did not always go so well. As I said in print, I learned that you have to ask a lot more questions than I initially asked.

We rented a cottage in the small town of Ka'a'a'wa, on the windward (eastern) shore of Oahu. The Web photo of the cottage looked charming, and the conversation I had on the phone with the owners went very well. While I was talking to them, I heard chicken sounds in the background, and the owner said that he wanted us to understand that they were in the country, and that there were chickens in the area. We wanted to the stay in a more rural area, so we said fine. What the owner failed to tell us that the chickens were theirs, and they had the run of the property - and the houses.

When we arrived, we found the cottage looking like it did in the photos, but the structure was not in the best shape — there was a lot of cosmetic work to make it look good. The bedroom had french doors leading out to a small deck, with a view of a backyard pond and waterfall with a mountain behind. That was good. What was not good was the fact that there were no screens in the door, and with no air conditioning, we had to keep the doors open all the time. There was a bamboo shade, but it was not secured at the bottom. On the first morning in the cottage, I went out for a run, and Eddie woke up to find a chicken in the bed with him! When we complained to the owners they were surprised that it bothered us, and told us that most of their guest enjoyed the chickens (they had only been renting since April, and we were there in June).

On the Big Island, the cottage we rented was purported to be in an orchard. In truth, the orchard was a lot on volcanic soil with a few fruit trees. The photos on the Web made it look much nicer than it was.


The condo we rented on Waikiki was fine. It was comfortable, air conditioned, had a lanai with a view of the water, and was very reasonably prices.

The moral of our story is that if you use the Web to find non-traditional lodging, get all the information that you can be for making a deposit.

MyTripJournal

The second of the Blog options I am covering at the Monday, March 13 Computer Club Metting is MyTripJournal, at www.woodalls.com/mytripjournal/ and MyTripJournal directly at www.mytripjournal.com/. These are both essentially the same, only one goes through the Woodall's Web site. You can create a blog/journal with a 30 day free trial. If you decide to go with MyTripJournal, there are two levels of pricing, standard and premium. The cost for the standard package is $19 for 60 days, $39 for 6 months, and $59 for one year. The prices for the premium package are $29, $59, and $89 respectively.
Click on the title of this post, and it will take you to the MyTripJournal home page.

I created a demo on MyTripJournal, at http://woodalls.mytripjournal.com/quinn/. The password to enter is quinn.

Blogspot

One of the Blog options I am covering at the Monday, March 13 Computer Club Metting is Blogspot, at www.blogger.com/. Blogspot was created in the dotcom boom of the 1990's, and was recently purchased by Google, and is free to all users.If you want to create a Blogspot blog (like this one) click on the link to GET YOUR OWN BLOG at the top right of this page, or click on the title of this post, and it will take you to the Blogspot home page.

The blogs I have created on Blogspot are OnMouseClick, which is the companion blog to the TR Times column, and the one you are reading now, and TripDemo at tripdemo.blogspot.com.

More about searching for accommodations online...

It is amazing that when using the most popular Web sites for travel reservations, you can get different prices for the same accommodations - or one site will tell you there are no rooms available, while another will confirm a reservation. If you are researching online, don't be afraid to move past the first screen of information. You can keep "making a reservation", and getting additional information, until you are asked to enter credit card information, and then you can exit without entering the information. And don't be afraid to call the hotel chain with questions, or to confirm a rate. You may even get a lower rate with a phone call. It is also advisable to check for rates for organizations or unions you belong to - these rates may be lower than the AARP/senior rates.

Blogs are posted in chronological order

I created this blog for the readers of the TR Times to learn more about blogging. Blogs show the newest post first - which in this case isn't what I wanted. The first post you will see, after this one, is an example of photos with captions, which I posted a few days after my initial entries. The post after that is the one that describes the process of blogging and is a companion to the column in the TR Times.

Photos with Captions

For this post I wanted to see if I could enter photos with captions - and I did. I just had to do a bit of cutting an pasting to get it right.


Photo of a remote beach on the leeward side of Oahu.


Cliffs meet the sea in a rocky shoreline that makes swimming away from the sandy beach hazardous.

Creating a Blog is Easy

It took about five minutes to set up this blog. The process is very user friendly. First you enter a username, password, and title for your blog. Then you give the blog a URL, which is the Web address. When using www.blogger.com, you put in the first part of the URL (in my case it is "onmouseclick"), and the rest of the URL is ".blogspot.com". That's all there is to it.

You are then presented with a text-box, which works just like a word processor. In the top-left corner of the text-box is an icon for spell-checking (strangely, when I used it, the word "blog" was not recognized), and an icon for adding images. As you can see, I only added one image to this post, but you can add as many as you want. In the top-right corner is the link for previewing your entry. Below the text-box you can edit the time, allow or disallow comments on your post (I allowed comments, so feel free to make comments or ask questions), save as a draft that you can return to later, and publish your post.

You can edit your posts after they have been published — how cool is that? As a blogspot user, you can also maintain more than one blog. So if you want to have journal blog for your family, and a political rant for your friends (and enemies), no problem.

You will notice that I haven't added any information to the right side of my blog Web page. If I decide to stay with this, I may just make some additions. For now, I think I've created a pretty good companion to this week's OnMouseClick column in the TR Times.

Some Photos from Hawaii

I added this post so see what it would be like to add several photos to a post. These photos were taken on the island of Oahu, during our visit to Hawaii last summer. I am going to write a little about our visit to see how the photos and text layout.

We spent five and a half weeks in Hawaii, three weeks on Oahu and the rest of the time on The Big Island. Our son, Brian, is in the Army and stationed in Hawaii, although now both he and his wife are serving in Baghdad. His posting in Hawaii is at Ft. Shafter, which is just outside Honolulu, so our time on Oahu was planned around visiting with him.

The first photo in this post is the view from our condo/apartment on Waikiki. The other photos were taken on the leeward side of the island, which is very remote and unpopulated.