This is a followup blog post to a post from our 2007 trip to Switzerland – The Coffee in Switzerland is Great!

Jura Capresso Coffee Maker

Steve and I love coffee. I drink 2 – 3 cups a day and I want them to be perfect. At home we have Jura Capresso Impressa E8, an older model similar to the Jura Capresso F50, and we love it. It was expensive, around $800.

You put water into one side of the machine, whole coffee beans into the other and you are ready to go. Select the strength and the amount of water, then press the button. The beans are ground and it makes an excellent cup of coffee, topped with a foamy layer called the “crema”.

We use Starbucks Organic Yukon Blend, $11.95 for one pound. It probably last 2 weeks, so that would be about 70 cups (5 cups a day) – $0.17 per cup.

Nespresso Coffee Maker

Another option for great coffee at home is the Nespresso. We used one in July 2007 when we rented a chalet apartment in Leysin, Switzerland – Chalet Chimere.

You purchase coffee “capsules” (pre-packaged one serving ground coffee), put one in the machine, set the water level, press the button and you get a coffee. The photo shows Steve putting one of the coffee capsules into the machine.

And the capsules are both the upside and downside of these coffee makers. The capsules are great, but they are expensive. You can only buy them from Nespresso (you join the “Nespresso Club”) and they are about $0.55 each. So, 55 cents for a cup of good coffee – compared to about 17 cents for the Capresso. But the price of the Capresso is $800, while the Nespresso is less than $249.

Purchase from Amazon (list price $249) – Nespresso C100/T1 Essenza Automatic Machine, Titan Gray

Read more about the Nespresso from Girasoli – Shave Ice and Gelato – My Christmas Present to Myself.

My serious coffee drinking friends have real espresso machines, where you grind the coffee, put it in the holder, tamp it down, put it in the machine, put in the water, pull some mysterious lever, and produce a perfect espresso – but that always seemed like too much work for me. Plus it looks like those machines are about to blow up.

Coffee by Country

• Coffee in Boulder (where we live) is fantastic. There are many independently owned coffee shops all over town – The Cup, Laughing Goat, Logan’s (in my North Boulder neighborhood), Vic’s (a local chain), Trident – plus a Peet’s and several Starbucks.
• Coffee in the US in general is better than it was a decade ago. Starbucks has spread through the country. Even the chain restaurants like Wendy’s and MacDonalds, have good coffee now.
• Coffee in England is good. Those Tea Rooms don’t just do tea, they usually make a good cup of coffee too. You will find Costa Coffee shops all over England and there are Starbucks too.
• Coffee in France, Switzerland and Italy is great.

Resources

• Wikipedia – Nespresso

The March photo on the Slow Europe Home Page, taken last summer in the Cotswolds (England), is a Norman doorway in the church in Windrush. The day I took that photo, we visited two villages with exceptional churches – Swinbrook and Windrush.

Swinbrook

Swinbrook, a small village on the River Windrush east of Burford, was made famous by the Mitford sisters who grew up in nearby Asthall in the early part of the 20th century and are buried in the Swinbrook church (all but one who is still with us). The photo shows the graves of Nancy, Unity and Diana near the entrance to the church.

Nancy Mitford wrote the novels “The Pursuit of Love” (1945) and  “Love in a Cold Climate” (1949).

The Swinbrook church is well worth a visit. It has a large Perpendicular window on the east side which floods the church with light. Inside is the exceptional Fettiplace Monument with two 17th century three-decker wall tombs. The tombs have statues of the persons within, showing them laying on their side looking out to the church, instead of the traditional laying on their back on top of the tomb, looking towards heaven. There are also medieval chancel stalls. See my photos of the Swinbrook Church.

“A delectable village, whose rough sloping green is enlivened by a small stream, and whose church must on no account be passed by.”
The Complete Cotswolds, a Jarrold White Horse Guide

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This is a big weekend for vacation rentals. HomeAway.com is running an ad in the Super Bowl! This will introduce vacation rentals to millions of North Americans and put vacation rentals in the travel accommodation mainstream. My website SlowEurope.com gives you the tools you need to find and book vacation rentals in Europe, but I am not running a Super Bowl ad. Instead I am writing this blog post to give my view of vacation rentals.

What Are Vacation Rentals?

Italian Villa in an Olive Grove

Vacation rentals are called many things – villas, vacation homes, holiday cottages, self catering, short term rentals – but all these terms refer to the same thing, a fully furnished and equipped apartment or house that is rented out by the day or week. Vacation rentals are an alternative to staying in hotels or B&Bs when traveling.

Vacation rentals have been a popular type of vacation accommodation in Europe for decades but they were usually booked by Europeans. Most Americans traveled on tour buses and stayed in hotels. In the last decade Americans have discovered this alternative accommodation and have changed the way they travel in Europe.

In the last ten years vacation rentals have become popular in North America, thanks to the HomeAway websites. Years ago you could rent a cottage at the shore or a condo in Hawaii, but when traveling anywhere else you stayed in a hotel, usually one from a national chain. Now vacation homes of all shapes and sizes are available for rent in most parts of the US and Canada.

Read everything you need to know about vacation rentals in the Slow Europe Vacation Rentals Guide.

It All Comes Down To a Vacation Rental, an Owner and a Traveler

Vacation rentals are big business, but they are also literally a cottage industry. A cottage is for rent, a traveler rents it. It all comes down to a vacation rental, an owner and a traveler.

• Some owners have their property represented by a vacation rental agency. The agency takes the bookings and payments. They may look after the property for the owner. The vacation rental agency does not own the property.
• Other owners decide to purchase a listing on a rent-by-owner website like HomeAway and take the bookings and payments themselves.

No matter if you book with an agency or directly with the owner, you are booking an individually owned property and many times when you arrive it is the owner who greets you (or who has put the key under the flowerpot and left the House Book for you).

Continue reading this post …

Apartments at Sant'Antonio

Nico and Elena Pannevis run the Sant’Antonio Country Resort, an estate  outside of Montepulciano, in Tuscany.

Thirteen vacation rentals (villas, cottages, apartments) and six languages (Italian, English, Swahili, Dutch, German, French) on an idyllic olive growing estate that started life in the 12th century as a Monastery.

The estate has large gardens (with over a kilometer of Bay Leaf hedges), views north to Lago Trasimeno and south to Monte Amiata, a large pool, underground parking so nothing disturbs the view and (my favorite) Internet access! The vacation rentals, in renovated historic buildings, are beautifully furnished and equipped.

The prices are affordable – studio apartments for two start at €720/week in high season (mid-June through mid-September), two-bedroom apartments start at €1,250.

Read our interview with Nico and learn more about this special spot in Tuscany.

Slow Europe Profile – Sant’Antonio Country Resort

We have great reviews of Sant’Antonio. I have not stayed there myself but some of my well-traveled friends have stayed there -  Sheena, Colleen, Jane. Each of them have stayed in many Italian vacation rentals and they all rave about Sant’Antonio. Sant’Antonio is at the top of my list for my next trip to Italy.

Read our reviews of Sant’Antonio.

updated January 29, 2010

HomeAway, the Austin TX based company who owns most of the major Rent-by-Owner websites (HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, VacationRentals.com, etc.*) will have an ad in the 2010 Super Bowl!

Finally, vacation rentals will be on the scoreboard!

The ad features Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reviving their roles as Clark and Ellen Griswold in the 1983 movie “National Lampoon’s Vacation” about a family on a vacation to “Walley World” (a great movie!).

Brian Sharples, founder and chief executive officer of HomeAway® says: “We’re going to use the Super Bowl broadcast to launch an exciting campaign highlighting the benefits of vacation rentals to reach more than 100 million people.”

Look for their ad on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2010 on CBS.

Update: The ad will be a “trailer” for a 15 minute web movie, starring the Griswolds, that they will have on their website. They expect five million visits in five minutes and have spent over one million dollars upgrading their hardware to handle the load.

Vacation Rentals Are a Great Travel Accommodation

View from our balcony in Cetona, Tuscany

I am a long time lover of vacation rentals as an accommodation choice when traveling in North America and Europe (and other places but I have not been to those other places – yet).

I started the Slow Travel website and community in 2000 to share my love of vacation rentals with other travelers. Over the eight years that I ran that website, thousands of people joined the community, posting on the forums and writing reviews and trip reports. Many of them were new to vacation rentals, but many, like us, had been traveling that way for years.

Steve and I stayed in our first vacation rental in the summer of 1988 in Grindelwald, Switzerland. Since then we have stayed in 57 different vacation rentals (103 weeks) in Europe – almost two years of vacation rental travel! And that does not count our North American vacation rentals in Hawaii, California and Arizona.

Vacation rentals have been popular in Europe for decades, but they are new in North America. We have always had vacation rentals in a modest form – summer cottages you rented in the countryside, motels with individual cabins, condos for rent in Hawaii – but it was only with the popularity of the Internet and the birth of these Rent-by-Owner sites, like the wonderful VRBO.com, that the idea of vacation rentals as an alternative to hotels broke through in North America.

The HomeAway Empire

You know the business is a big one when they advertise during the Super Bowl. In 2006 HomeAway acquired most of the major Rent-by-Owner websites, starting with the biggest – VRBO.com. HomeAway took a scattered bunch of Rent-by-Owner websites and turned them into a coordinated vacation rentals empire.

Continue reading this post …

Barcelona

Barcelona is one of the most popular European travel destinations. It is located in northern Spain, in the Catalonia region near the border with France, on the Mediterranean coast. Modernism, a variant of Art Nouveau, was born in Barcelona in the late 1800s. Gaudí designed many buildings in the Eixample district of Barcelona.

Max, a transplanted Italian, lives in the Sants – Montjuïc district and runs The Urban Suites.com, 20 suites and apartments (vacation rentals) just a ten minute walk from Montjuïc hill. He wrote an article about his neighborhood, telling us some of the things to do and see there.

Slow Europe Article -  Sants – Montjuïc District in Barcelona, Spain

I have not traveled to Spain recently (the last time I was there was in 1972 – probably things have  changed), but it is near the top of my travel list (under “France” and “get my ass back to Italy”). Barcelona would be a great arrival city. Fly into Barcelona, spend a week, enjoy the sea and sunshine, then take the train up into south-west France. Or my dream of driving along the Mediterranean through Spain, France and Italy*. A possible plan for my 2010 trip!

* Inspired by the book “Feeding Frenzy: Across Europe in Search of the Perfect Meal”, Stuart Stevens, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997 Buy from Amazon.com

Lanzarote Guidebook

The Canary Islands, located around eighty miles off the coast of West Africa close to the Tropic of Capricorn, are a Spanish owned volcanic archipelago of seven islands that was once thought to be the remnants of the mythical lost city of Atlantis. The Canaries are essentially the European Caribbean, boasting year round sunshine and daytime temperatures that range from 70 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit (20 to 26 degrees Celsius), making them a hugely popular holiday destination, especially with British, Irish and German tourists.

The Lanzarote Guidebook is packed with useful information and some great photos of the island. The new Winter 09/10 edition can now be downloaded – fast and for free – from the Lanzarote Guidebook website.

Researched and written by long term island residents, the Lanzarote Guidebook contains all of the information that holidaymakers and independent travelers need to know, as well as lots of handy inside tips. It is published quarterly so the information is always accurate and up to date.

Nick Ball who created the Lanzarote Guidebook, wrote an article about the Canary Islands for Slow Europe:

Slow Europe Article -  Lanzarote in the Canary Islands

The Kindle is an electronic book reader available from Amazon. I have been using a Kindle since it was first released in December 2007 and I highly recommend it.

The new Global Kindle (released earlier this year) works in many countries. Previous versions worked in the US only. Now people in other countries can buy the Kindle and Americans can travel more easily with their Kindles. The limitation before was the cell phone network. The new Global Kindle works on a 3G wireless cell phone network that works in many countries.

Watch for Hidden Charges!

BUT if you take your Global Kindle purchased in the US to Europe and download purchases via the 3G wireless network, there are extra charges – $1.99 each time you download a book and $4.99 a week to download newspapers/magazines!!

To avoid these charges, or if you have an older Kindle that only works in the US, download items to your computer and transfer them from your computer to your Kindle. Read more on my article about the Kindle (updated today).

Slow Europe Article – Traveling With Your Kindle (updated)

Do Travelers Need the Global Version of the Kindle?

This morning I would have said “yes” and was thinking of getting the new version before our next Europe trip. But now that I see the extra charges for using the 3G wireless when out of the country, I probably won’t buy the new version. We always travel with a computer and it is easy to go to Amazon.com on the computer, download books/newspapers/magazines to the computer, then transfer via a USB cable to the Kindle.

If you do not travel with a computer, then this new Global version of the Kindle is better for traveling than the earlier US-only versions. Also if you are not going to have good Internet access when traveling. You will be able to get your New York Times every morning!

And, really, the charges are not that excessive – I was just shocked to see them because I assumed there would not be extra charges.

Amazon Kindle

Read more about the Kindle on Amazon (affiliate link).

My first blog post in almost three months. Why? Because we moved. And moving is not as easy as it used to be.

The blue sky of a Santa Fe spring

After nearly 20 years living in Santa Fe, we put the cat in the 4Runner, everything else in a moving van, put a “For Sale” sign in front of the house, said goodbye to the Sangre de Cristo mountains and drove 400 miles north to Boulder Colorado. Still living in the Rocky Mountains, still in that place where the mountains meet the plains.

The middle part of our lives were spent in that old adobe house in Santa Fe. I lived there longer than I lived in any other house. I lived in Santa Fe longer than I lived in any other town. The ashes of our old cat Butch are buried under an Apricot tree that we grew from a seed. The bones of our old cat Spike are probably on top of the hill where Tom Ford built his house (we think the Coyotes got Spike). We planted every tree, bush, plant and piece of grass in that huge yard. After 20 years the Lilac bushes are finally as high as the windows (things grow slowly in Santa Fe).

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On Slow Europe we publish travel articles written by the vacation rental companies (agencies, owners) that we feature in our Find Vacation Rentals section. These are people who have good insider knowledge of their travel destinations. We have two new articles about Italy.

Slow Europe Article – Food Shopping for Vacation Renters in Italy by Pat Byrne of Italy Perfect

You find the perfect vacation rental in Italy, you arrive and check in. Next you have to head to the shops for supplies and groceries. Pat tells you how to find the stores, what they are called and gives some food shopping tips. Pat, who runs Italy Perfect with her sister Lisa, travels to Italy frequently to look for new properties, check on their current properties and shop for groceries!

Slow Europe Article – Lake Bracciano (Lago di Bracciano) by Fiorenza Rossetto of WelHome

Rome is at the center of the Lazio region in Italy, but there is more to Lazio than Rome. Lake Bracciano is a beautiful area with lakes, hills, historic towns, Roman ruins and Etruscan remains. All less than an hour north of Rome. Fiorenza lives on Lake Bracciano and offers vacation rentals in the area, plus a cottage on the grounds of her villa. She shares her insider’s knowledge of the area with us.