Great Travel Tools & Deals

Planning and finding great travel deals can sometimes be frustrating and time consuming. This edition of Ricks Travel Tales has a couple great tools that can help you make your future trip planning easier.. and save some money too!

Trip Planning

How many times have you tried to plan a multi-day trip, trying to capture all events, the associated reservations, schedules, and locations together that you can easily access anywhere? Sure, you can scribble confirmation numbers, hotel addresses, and flight numbers on a piece of paper. But what if you could put together an itinerary,  of all important travel info, including dates, flight info, hotel/event locations, confirmation numbers, maps and contact info all in one spot? You can!  

TripIt is a great web tool that can do just this. Set up a trip with the dates of travel, and then begin loading pertinent info for each date. Tripit will also automatically load reservations, flight info and events info directly from emails sent to your Tripit account. For those of you with smart phones, Tripit has an app that will allow you to access all this info from your phone too. 

Tripit will also allow you to "share" your plans with others. So no need to print out itineraries for spouses, friends or coworkers. Just add them to the "share trip" email listing, and they will have access to your trip itinerary!

Next time you are traveling give it a try!  TripIt

Travel Reservations

Most of us use popular travel search tools to find the best deals on flights, hotels, and vacation packages, hoping to get the best deals. Sights like Travelocity, Orbits, and Expedia have been the tools of choice... until now. 

A new travel tool with a proprietary search engine is now available! Rovia provides you with a travel tool to make not only flight, hotel and car reservations, but also cruise, all inclusive packages, villas/condos and and even group packages. The best part is, Rovia search results end up with rates usually better than the common search services! The site includes additional features such as info on weather, currency and travel documents required for your trip, and even a built in planner. If you become a Preferred Customer (free) you'll also receive $200k in flight insurance (on booked flights), special last minute deals and specials, and 30 minutes of Concierge Service, which can help you make your trip the best ever.

Check it out and use Rovia for your next travel experience. You'll be glad you did!

There you go, a couple great tools for your travel planning. I have used both, and would be more than happy to help you with either of these tools. Feel free to contact me directly if you would like more information. 

Rick Smith

Day Four - 2010 Summer Trip to Stillwater, Duluth, and Grand Marais, MN

Day Four - Final Day (from Duluth, MN to Waterloo, IA)

The reality of vacation being over is sinking in, and its back to Waterloo via Western Wisconsin, and SE Minnesota. We decided not to take I-35 back to the Twin Cities, but rather explore some more back roads in Western Wisconsin. Since we hit the casino the night before, we opted for the "convenience store coffee and donuts" and headed south east. 

Our 1st surprise of the trip was finding the Hole in the Wall Casino in Danbury, WI. We stopped for gas and a coffee fillup at a local tourist convenience store, and as we came out we saw a huge hotel being constructed. Guess what? It was opening day! So we had to check it out. The original Hole in the Wall Casino, was just a small single story building (in the foreground of the photo). The new casino and hotel was nice! And it was good to us! We left after about an hour with both of us ahead for this visit!


Back on the road, we passed beautiful farmsteads and wooded areas. Very peaceful, and what the Midwest is all about. Suddenly, Sue points out some strange things in a field, and as we turned the corner, we came upon the Franconia Sculpture Park. Now this was something you would NEVER expect to see, so we had to stop and wander. Some amazing works of art, all sculpted from everything imaginable. From old canoes, to bicycles, leftover steam shovel buckets, and animals formed from concrete.  I've only included a few here, but if you want to see all the photos I took of this park go to the Trip album at Picasa.  Here are a couple of my favorites -



It was time to move on. Our final stop was a winery in Cannon Falls. Despite about 20 miles of detour that we had to take to get to the winery, we made it.



Called the Cannon River Winery, this old car dealership was converted very nicely, to accommodate wine tasting, and hosting events. We arrived as some "motor home vacationers" were sitting and chatting about their adventures, while tasting some of the available wines. As I told Sue, "I hope we don't appear that way when we are on our journeys (you had to see/hear them to understand!).
Knowing this was our last day, and we still had a couple hours of driving ahead of us, Sue grabbed some wine and we headed out.

The trip to Minnesota was a great escape for Sue and I. After a long school year (and summer filled with baseball and softball games), it was nice to relax, and forget about things for a few days. As I write this, football, swimming, cross country, golf, and volleyball are all in full swing at Waterloo West High School, and with a new Athletic Director, and plenty of sporting events to cover, I know the next installment of Rick's Travel Tales cannot be too far off!


Stay tuned!