Welcome to the September Issue of Glen Cove Computing News. This month's feature article Making Travel Plans on the Internet will give you some tips on booking your vacation through the Internet. In this eleventh issue of Glen Cove Computing News you'll also find:
For those of you looking for the usual technology-oriented feature article in this newsletter check out last month's feature: DNS: Dichard Nilhouse Sixon? or skip down to the Internet Technology of the Month. Now for the rest of you, I decided it was time to show what you can do with all of the information that's now available on the Internet. Writing about the new technology that's available is all fine and good, but every once in awhile we need to step back and see what benefits come from these advances. As an illustration here's my experiences with making travel plans on the Internet.
I've been on the Internet now for almost six years and before this year I never would have imagined planning an entire vacation using the Internet. When I first got on to the Internet with a shell account there were few travel resources available and the World Wide Web was just a crazy idea in Tim Berners-Lee's mind. Oh sure you could use Gopher or Usenet to find some second hand information, but nothing of much use.
With the advent of the World Wide Web the number of travel resources online has increased dramatically since that time. When my wife and I were planning our Anniversary Trip this past February, we decided to plan the entire vacation using the Internet. Every year for our anniversary Trip my wife and I fly from San Francisco to Seattle and spend 7-10 days traveling around Washington State and British Columbia. During our last trip we passed through the San Juan Islands on the way to Victoria Island and decided that we would spend our next trip exploring them.
We started our travel planning by going to Yahoo and doing a search on "San Juan Islands". Making travel plans online is similar to a treasure hunt. You often have to dig down through many layers of the web to find the information you need. We found 34 matches for the San Juan Islands when we did this search and discovered the The San Juan Web site. The San Juan Web site had extensive information on the two largest islands San Juan and Orcas. We first looked at San Juan, which is the most heavily populated of the islands, and found it to be a little touristy for our tastes. Hoping for something a little more remote we clicked on the link to Orcas.
Welcome to Orcas Island! was the first thing we saw when the page had loaded and were greeted by a photograph of Orcas with a snow covered Mt. Baker in the background. After checking out some other photographs of the island in the Photographic Display, we decided that Orcas was what we were looking for. Since my wife and I aren't into camping outside in the middle of winter, we began our search for a place to stay on Orcas. We followed another link from the Orcas Island page to the Orcas Island Business Directory which had sixteen listings for Lodging, Resorts, and Bed & Breakfasts. After paring it down to just the B&B's we began searching for information on each of them.
Some of the B&B's on Orcas had their own web sites, but for those that didn't we used AltaVista to search for sites with information on them. We found information and photographs of each of the island's B&B's on a number of different Bed & Breakfast associations including Special Places, INNroads, and TravelAssist. In the end we decided to stay at the 
Turtleback Farm Inn, which turned out to be an excellent choice. The Inn is located in Crow Valley and overlooks eighty acres of forest and farmland in the shadow of Turtleback Mountain. It has a spectacular view of meadows and duck ponds, with Mt. Constitution providing the backdrop to the east. Our room was great, the breakfasts incredible, and Bill and Susan Fletcher were by far the friendliest and most helpful innkeepers we have ever met. We were there for five days and four nights and by the last day I was ready to move to Orcas. Luckily for the 3500 full-time residents there are no large-scale businesses outside of tourism on the island. If it was easy to find a high paying job on Orcas I'm sure it would be overrun by newcomers (like me) and lose its rural charm. I guess I'll have to wait until I retire.
The next step in planning our trip was figuring out how we were going to get to Orcas. Now the only affordable way to travel to the San Juan Islands is by the Washington State Ferry. Luckily the San Juan Web site has posted the ferry schedule, maps and rates. From this page we found that the earliest ferry left Anacortes at 8 am and got to Orcas by 9 am. Of course to catch this ferry we would have to find someplace to stay around Anacortes the night before. We had passed through Anacortes on a prior trip and weren't very impressed. On our previous trip we had heard that Whidbey Island, just south of Anacortes, had some great B&B's. Again we used INNroads and found the 
Guest House Cottages, a B&B that had gotten a four diamond rating from AAA. There are six guest cottages in the middle of 25 acres of woods. No one is asked to ""rough it'' in the woods; each log or frame home is decorated with country antiques and equipped with everything from fireplaces, to featherbeds, to microwave ovens, to VCRs. We enjoyed staying here so much that we almost canceled our reservations on Orcas and stayed for a week. Luckily we didn't as the Turtleback Farm Inn turned out be equally fantastic. Still there's no doubt we'll be back at the Guest House Cottages next February when our anniversary trip rolls around.
Now I have to admit I did cheat a little when it came to booking our flight arrangements for our trip. We always fly United which doesn't yet book flights through their web site. Instead I booked our flights through the United Connection forum (go united) on CompuServe and had the tickets mailed to us. If you don't have CompuServe, United also offers United Connection as a software package for $24.95. As for our car rental arrangements they were made through Alamo's web site. The vacation was a complete success and we just finished planning our next trip to Australia, again using the Internet. If all goes well I'll probably end up writing about it in a later issue of the GCC News. If we end up staying in a B&B with the biggest roaches in the Southern Hemisphere I'm not sure I'll be alive to write another issue 8-}. For those of you who are planning a trip, here are some travel resources that I hope will be of use to you. Remember if you've already decided on a destination, you can also use the search engines (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, etc.) to find more information.
The Internet Site of the month for September is Fodor's: Your Smart Choice for Travel. All the usual travel information and resources you've come to expect from this respected travel guide publisher, plus some helpful search features. Choose a destination from around the world and launch Fodor's quick and easy Trip Planner to find out where to stay, check out restaurant reviews, and get insider tips. Also, be sure to consult the searchable Restaurant and Hotel Index and the Know Before You Go checklist.
I used this site extensively in planning our vacation to Australia, as it had hotel, restaurant, and other travel information on Sydney and Melbourne. The Trip Planner allows you to build a customized miniguide to sixty-six destinations around the world. The Trip Planner will lead you through a series of checklists where you input your destination and exactly what you want in the way of hotels, restaurants, travel info, and more. When you're finished, it builds a personalized guide that you can print out for easy reading or to take with you on your trip.
Cartoon of the Month
Thanks to Gabe Martin for placing his comic strip in the public domain. See more of Gabe's work at
The Internet Technology of the month for September 1996 is QuikLink Explorer from QuikLink Software. QuikLink Explorer is a replacement system for your Netscape Bookmark, Mosaic Hotlist, and Internet Explorer Favorites files. Working with the more popular web browsers, QuikLink Explorer takes you where you want to go with the click of a button. No longer do you need to maintain separate lists of your favorite sites for each browser you use. You can also use QuikLink Explorer to convert your lists between browser formats or turn them into web pages. The easy to use interface, similar to the Windows95 Explorer, makes web surfing fast and efficient, saving you time and money!
I've tried other bookmarking programs and this is without a doubt the best one out there. You can download an evaluation copy of QuikLink Explorer 2.0 from their web site. While you're there you can also download the QuikLink Explorer 3.0 beta. Another great thing about this program is the price ($10) and the fact you can register it through CompuServe (go swreg).
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