Today I'm finding myself easily distracted from the work at hand. Nothing new about that, but I thought I'd try to give my associative paralysis a shape by jotting down what is on my mind.
1. London. Matt and I are headed to London in late spring and summer. For months now I've been developing a list of neighborhoods, restaurants, commercial districts, bars, museums, and specialty markets in London, all of which I plan to visit and blog about with the determination that comes from the knowledge that eight weeks is an all-too-short block of time. I probably shouldn't admit this, but Time Out's 1000 Things To Do in London has been wonderfully suggestive. It's full of free (and cheap) activity ideas.
2. Something to write in. Last summer in Barcelona, I bought a set of Astrid Stavro notebooks for La Central. Each notebook in the set is lined with a different form of punctuation. They're beautiful and delicate.
3. Regional travel. I'm trying to fight my instinct to view London as a launching pad to places like Istanbul and Riga and instead focus on the British Isles (Devon, Cornwall, the Channel Islands, Wales) and other near-by places (West Flanders, Brussels, Lille.) In recent years, Europe has been a place I've traversed hurriedly in the interest of time. My second-most recent European adventure involved an Athens-Vienna train/air hopscotch followed by a triangular jaunt from Barcelona to Valencia to Madrid; the most recent one split up nine days between Calabria, Amsterdam, and Friesland. These itineraries were perfect for me, but I'm curious to see what might happen when I can actually rely on a major European city as a base and thus curb the instinct to travel far and wide.
4. EasyJet's new routes. Fares on several of the routes easyJet has taken over from GB Airways are hardly cheap. The London Gatwick-Paphos fares, though in keeping with comparable fares on Thompsonfly and Monarch, are quite pricey. Case in point: a Gatwick-Paphos roundtrip in mid-August, using easyJet's lowest fare finder, comes to £256.98. Perhaps this is just a function of the terrifying exchange rate, but over 250 quid doesn't seem like a low-cost fare to me.
5. LCC reconsolidation. It looks as if Centralwings may be the first low-cost airline casualty of 2008. Thanks to AirScoop for the tip.
