Google Maps

Google Maps now has maps of most of Europe, including Paris and Amsterdam. This is very exciting.

For me, anyway.

Amsterdam Audio Tours

This site offers a couple of walking tours of Amsterdam.

I'm particularly excited about the Rembrandt tour.

Itinerary Changes

Also, after poking around looking at fares and flight times, I've had a bit of a rethink on the itinerary.

To whit, I believe it will be more advantageous for us to fly into Paris and out of Amsterdam.

So I have changed the sidebar to reflect these changes.

Another apartment rental site

A rental site called Paris Attitude, found via the Paris Voice Magazine web site.

This one looks like it has some good inexpensive rental units. And lots of them.

Added to the sidebar.

Cinèma Trail

Cinèma Trail is a new website produced by PDIF.com, the official tourist website for Paris, to coincide with their new promotion campaign "Paris au Cinèma". Here is an article from the New York Time about it.

I must say I love the idea behind the promotion, but the web site is a bit flawed in the execution. For instance there is a section called Wanders and Walks. Now a title like that would lead one to believe that is contained walking tours of locations used in various films, but not really. It instead offers general descriptions of films shot at in a particular location without providing details.

I was hoping for something more along the lines of the Rick Steves walking tours. In particular, a map with spots marked off and a short description of what was shot there and when.

I think this is still a good idea, and perhaps someone will come up with something along these lines sometime.

New Domain Name

I just set up a new domain name for this site:

www.atravelogue.com

It was the best I could do. Anything good involving travel or travelogue was pretty much taken.

I've adjusted the title bar up top to reflect the new name.

101 Uses For An iPod

One of the things that I like to do when planning for a trip is to seek out shops that pertain to my areas of interest. For example I am a great fan of comic books so, when in another city or country, I will find a local comic shop to visit and then I will write down it's location in my little Moleskine so that I can reference it while traveling. I've been doing this for all my trips since my first trip to France in '03. The only problem was that sometimes I would have difficulty finding the address if I had not written down nearest cross streets and all that.

About a week ago I stumbled on to a solution to this problem. It came to me while perusing this site, which has chopped up subway maps for various cities for storing on an iPod. I realized I could do something like this for the various stores and restaurants I had made note of.

So I went to Mappy.com and entered the addresses of the places I was interested in, made a screen capture of the map, took it into Photoshop and sized it down to fit on my iPod screen. The resulting map looks something like this:



I then load this into iPhoto and sync it with my iPod. And voila, ready to roll.

I know this probably seem terribly anal, but as should be obvious from this blog, I like to use the tools and technology available to me. You should see the detailed itineraries I make for the trip. Now those are anal.