101 days to go... random ramblings

• Had a bit of a scare yesterday morning when someone pointed out that our Panama Canal cruise had vanished off the Princess website!  The cruise lines do sometimes have to drop a cruise - or sometimes they get an offer they can't refuse from someone who wants to charter the whole ship.  And, it's not unheard of for people to first find out that this sort of thing has happened when their cruise disappears from the website.  Eek.  Good news though, it must have been just a little glitch because it's back again  :-)

• I'm still slowly working my way through the to-do list for the holiday.  It still seems just a little too far away to be real, but if the next 101 days fly by as quickly as the last 101, then I'll be sitting here typing that we're about to leave home in no time at all!

• I'm waiting for Royal Caribbean to open up bookings for the short excursions on our Caribbean cruise.  The other day I was having a general look at what's available, and I got to our stop on an island called St Maarten.  The island is actually part of two separate countries - the port where we stop part of the Netherlands, but the other side of the island is French.  Quite a few of the excursions - including one I was looking at - go to the French part.  So, the country count for this trip might go up to 16! 

• Am getting back into my ancestry attempts again - the England and Wales census of 1911 has just been made available.  This won't help with my mum's family, or with Paul's family, who were all already in Australia by then, but it might help with tracking down some more information about my dad's parents.

Avis doesn't want Canberra customers any more!

All of a sudden what was going to be an easy part of the trip turned a bit troublesome.
Usually the trip between home and Sydney airport for this sort of a trip is a no-brainer - we hire a car.  Cheaper than flying, often quicker because you can leave exactly when you want to. Although it's more than 300km, there are less than 10 sets of traffic lights - it's multi-lane highway or freeway almost the whole way and there are rarely any traffic issues unless you get caught up in Sydney peak hour.  And it's definitely more convenient than flying, specially since the trip between home and Canberra airport has to done in a Canberra taxi - unreliable so you have to book one for hours earlier than you need to be there just in case they don't show up, radio always on some hideous talk back station, air conditioning never on even if it's 40 degrees outside and astonishingly expensive ($70 for 21 km to the airport) - usually I avoid them like the plague.
I've already booked the Avis car to get to Sydney at the start of the trip, no problems.
However, I've tried a couple of times over the last two months to book a car for the trip back from Sydney, only to have the website tell me that they are "sold out" for that day.  Turns out though that of course, they expect to have plenty of cars Sydney Airport that day and every day.  The actual issue is that they aren't prepared to hire one of them out for a one-way trip to Canberra.  One-way trip to Melbourne or Brisbane - that's fine, but not Canberra.
Other Avis outlets in Sydney will hire a car to me for that trip, but only with a $60 one-way fee on top - and that's cheap compared to the outrageous prices Thrifty, Hertz and Europcar have offered for the same sort of trip.  The cheapest one-way hire any of them have on offer ends up costing more than twice what I'd normally expect to pay.
So, we'll now be flying back from Sydney to Canberra for not a lot more money than hiring the car.  We'll get home later than we would if we drove - there are many Sydney-Canberra flights each day but most of them are in tiny planes with serious carry-on restrictions.  The first 737 flight to Canberra is about five hours after we arrive in Sydney, so I guess we'll spend some time in the Qantas Club  :-)
And, I'm going to avoid the taxi issue by booking a limo for pretty much the same money as the taxi would cost  :-)
I'm disappointed in Avis.  It's not a huge deal in the overall scheme of things, but I used to always be able to assume that I could hire a car to travel between Sydney and Canberra any time I need to, and now I can't. And, judging by the various forum postings I found while trying to work out what on earth was going on, I'm certainly not the only Canberra resident who has been caught out by this one recently.  I can only assume that Avis has done this because they decided that they're losing money (or not making enough!!) on one-way hires.  I wonder if they factored into that equation the number of previously loyal customers who will now start looking at other ways to travel instead?