Slow Europe

We spent the winter in England and it was wonderful! The weather was cold, but mostly dry and sunny. Days are very short (pitch black by 5pm in January).

Read our travel journal on our Cotswolder blog.

I wrote a blog article for the Tuscany Villas website. Read the article here: Experience the Real Tuscany. This is the first in a four part series about Vacation Rentals in Tuscany.

It has been several years since we have been in Tuscany - seems like we have been working through an England obsession on our last few trips - but writing this article brought back to me how much we love Tuscany and I think we will go back soon.

I met Jim Stiller who runs Tuscany Villas and Italy Villas at the Atlanta Vacation Home Expo earlier this month. Their agency is based in the US, Ireland and Italy. Their site makes it easy to search their listings (over 1000 just for Tuscany) and they have good support people that you can phone for help.

Hello Travelers! I have been running my “Views from the Slow Lane” blog for several years on the Slow Travel website, which I used to own and run. I sold the site to Internet Brands last year. I am still part of the Slow Travel community and like what Internet Brands is doing with the site, but I decided to move my blog to my own site.

Slow Europe is my current project. Steve and I are working on it, but it won’t be ready for several months. Slow Europe is going to be what Slow Travel started out as (but changed as the site grew and the community developed) - a guide to finding vacation rentals in Europe. There will be lists of my recommended vacation rental agencies by country and region. Agencies that I have used or worked with during my Slow Travel days. Agencies that I think we, as travelers, can depend on.

I will also talk about “listings sites” where you can rent directly from owners. Slow Europe will show you all the ways you can find vacation rentals and will describe typical booking procedures and what to expect on your vacation. It will also point to relevant review sites, like Slow Travel, to help you make your decision.

For now, I will write my Europe travel notes on this blog. Please comment if you have something to say or ask about a blog entry.

Now that I am not consumed with running Slow Travel and endlessly talking on the forums, I have more time to keep my blog up to date and interesting. Stay tuned!

I have been using Movable Type to run my blog for years. It is not the simplest blogging system (Blogger wins that award) but I liked the extra features you get, even though you have to work hard for them. The new MT4 release is quite different from earlier releases. I installed it last December then dug in and figured out the template system, the widgets, the style sheets and was pretty happy with it. I ran my Cotswolder blog on it for the first months of 2008.

My main complaint with Movable Type is the overdone styling - divisions inside of divisions inside of divisions (divisionitis). It takes forever to figure out the stylesheet. I like the sidebar widgets, but they are complicated and have to be defined in HTML - there is no easy to use interface.

Last weekend, after spending three days working on the Movable Type stylesheet and widgets so I could move my “Views from the Slow Lane” blog from slowtrav.com (my old site) to sloweurope.com (my new site) I reached my limit with Movable Type. It was over a silly issue that I could have resolved - creating a page to show all entries for a category instead of their default page which shows only recent entries - but instead I stomped my feet, screamed in anguish, ate some chocolate, then downloaded WordPress. Then I spent three days setting up the stylesheet and templates for WordPress. Nothing comes easy on the web.

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Steve and I, and about 90 other Slow Travelers, are in Savannah, Georgia for a weekend party. Tonight was the pre-event - a cocktail party at the house the organizers rented. What a rush! Only about half our group was there - others arriving tonight and tomorrow - but it was great to see people we have met over our SlowTrav years and meet new people.

Steve set up a webcam for us and then wrote a program to capture one snap a minute from the webcam. I uploaded these snaps to Flicker. Photos from the Thursday party webcam.

We will have the webcam on Friday and Saturday night, from about 6pm - 10pm ET. Here is the Slow Travel Gathering webcam.