Never point with just one finger…

I’ve been doing battle with a new computer that has Windows 8.1. Need I say more? I’ve happily been using Windows 7 for about three or four years and I really understand it. Windows 8 is a whole 'nother ball game! And I don’t know the rules.

So, to get my mind off the problems of trying to figure out how to restart the computer—which I have to do regularly since I’m installing all my favorite programs—and how to find the programs I’ve just installed, I’ve been getting back to planning our spring trip.

I’ve been away from the planning end of the trip for several weeks (I know I promised to start writing this blog more regularly but life has gotten in the way!) but my daughter asked for our checklists and that got me thinking again about the cruises and the flights and the hotels and the tours and and and… I found a few neat websites. How about this http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/50-things-a-traveller-should-know/. There are some interesting items on this list like knowing the names of at least four German sausages (Bratwurst  [minced pork and beef], Blutwurst [blood sausage]—blecchh!, Bockwurst [veal with some pork], and Weisswurst [white sausage made with veal and bacon]) and knowing how to express ‘No’ in Turkey (you don’t shake your head, instead, you raise your eyebrows and tilt your head up).

For yet more information you never knew you wanted to know, there are these sites, from the mundane http://stuff4kids.hubpages.com/hub/Ten-Fun-Facts-About-Toilet-Paper to the extremely useful http://www.omniglot.com/language/ and http://www.traveletiquette.co.uk/. 

About those checklists. As our children know, we not only have checklists, we have checklists of our checklists. We have cruising checklists (including warm weather cruising and cold weather cruising), we have timeshare checklists, motorhome checklists, and travel-by-car checklists. Nevertheless, we persist in going places and forgetting the most basic items. Last week we went to Phoenix for Randy’s birthday and forgot toothbrushes, toothpaste, and combs. We went to Seattle last year for a zoo trip and I forgot my camera! What is finally penetrating is that if you have checklists to make sure you don’t forget anything, you have to actually LOOK at the checklists.