You’re Invited!!!
To the official end of the alexandluke social media road trip!*
When: December 1st at 4:30 pm
Where: Oakville Volkswagen, 1355 North Service Road, Oakville Ontario
There will be nibbles and speeches and photos and secrets and more! We would love to see you there – so mark it in your calendar!
*we know, we know – we haven’t been to Hawaii or Vermont yet – but here’s another hint about alexandluke chapter 2… chapter 2 is NOT all about Hawaii or Vermont, however, we WILL be heading in the direction of Vermont on the way to our final destination, so Vermont WILL be visited in the New Year – that is a promise.
Travelocity’s Border Blunder
I called Travelocity the other night after the Top Secret Hotel™ I booked was in a different country than I specified. I wasn’t too upset as it seemed like a problem that could be easily fixed by their customer support staff – I specified that I wanted a hotel in Canada and I was booked a hotel in the United States – this was clearly a mistake. I anticipated the operator on the other end apologizing for the mistake, canceling the reservation, apologizing again, and then wishing me a good night. After all, I have called a different travel-booking website with an issue regarding me being assigned a smoking rather than non-smoking room and it was resolved within minutes. If I could get a refund over the smoking orientation of my room, I should surely be able to receive a refund for being placed in an incorrect country. Right?
Forty-five minutes, two customer service representatives and a supervisors later I would learn that this is not the case. This is my story:
Alex and I arrived in the city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario after a long day on the road. We pulled into the local Swiss Chalet, ordered some soup, and powered up our laptops to book a hotel online. When we don’t have suggestions we always (and, I mean always) book secret hotels. In case you don’t know what a secret hotel is, Priceline, Travelocity, and Hotwire all offer hotel deals where they specify the star rating of the hotel, the rate, but not the name of the hotel. Because the name of the hotel is not being advertised, the rate can be up to 55% off the rate listed on that hotel’s website. The catch is that after the ‘Purchase’ button is clicked you’re unable to cancel or change your order. If you’re upset that you’re in the Days Inn, you have to live with it. In the past we have been upset for being placed in a hotel on the periphery of the city, or being placed in a hotel with a star rating it clearly didn’t deserve. But, that’s part of the Top Secret Hotel™ game, and if we were twenty-minutes away from where we wanted to be then it’s our own fault. However, when the twenty-minutes away places us in a different country, we feet we have a valid dispute.
I attempted to book a hotel in the city of Sault Ste. Marie in the province of Ontario which happens to be right across the United States/Canada border from a city also named Sault Ste. Marie in the state of Michigan. I knew this going into my booking and was very deliberate in my selection to make sure I was selecting Ontario. I selected a room for $57 Canadian Dollars, clicked purchase, and was informed that my hotel was in Michigan. I immediately called Travelocity to correct the mistake.
Click ‘Continue Reading’ to read the story’s conclusion
Wasaga Beach
Tomorrow morning we will be on Georgian Bay’s The World’s best Radio Station 97.7 The Beach!
You may remember that co-hosting the morning show at the beach was one of the first things we did on Day 3 of alexandluke.com! We had a lot of fun with Jeremy and Marianne last time we were in town, and we expect that tomorrow will be even better (as we have a lot more stories this time around)!
*Eastern Standard Time
Ontario Bound!
Tomorrow marks a very important day in the story of our social media road trip experiment. After lunch, we will be taking a hike from our lakeside cabin at Falcon Trails Resort in Manitoba, to check out an eco-friendly cabin on a lake nearby. The reason this is noteworthy is that part of said lake is actually in Ontario – the province where it all began! Following the hike, we will be driving over the border and on to spend the night in Thunder Bay Ontario!
Ontario! Our home province! After 230 days of North American exploration!!!
You might be curious to know how we are feeling on the eve of our return to home soil. Well I can only speak for myself, but I have to say that I am actually rather excited. Turns out, there really is no place like home. For the duration of this project, when I was as far away as Skagway or Key West or San Francisco, I didn’t have even the slightest inkling of being homesick. I knew my home was where I left it, and I was entirely content to keep driving deeper and deeper into the heart of the continent and away from the familiar without a thought of what I had left behind.
I never have been one to feel the pangs of homesickness, even when I lived overseas, which is why it came as a surprise a few days ago, when all of a sudden I could not rid my thoughts of my two psychotic dogs, a refrigerator I can access whenever I want, and that iconic Toronto skyline. I cannot wait to go home.
After some consideration, I have decided there are a few reasons for this unexpected and late-onset homesickness. For one, my recent battle with the flu not only weekend my immune system, but I think it threw me off my emotional balance as well. The next time you come down with the stomach flu, I challenge you to endure the entire ordeal without a single thought of your mom, or your childhood bedroom, or those little toast fingers that seem to make any sickness disappear at least a little bit quicker.
But the other thing, and I think this is the real key here, is that as soon as we departed on our drive south from Yellowknife, I began to accept that I was on my way home. Have you ever noticed that when you are on a trip, be it a weeks vacation at an all inclusive down south, a trek around South East Asia, or a semester abroad, that once you know you are nearing the end, and you think about what awaits you, that you start to get a little bit anxious for your home life or your regular routine?
Now throw in the added emotional triggers from the rapidly increasing regularity of sappy holiday ads on the television, and the waft of gingerbread and peppermint I get every time I walk into a pretentious coffee shop (which is more frequent than I’d like to admit) and you have yourself a recipe for homesickness.
However, and this is a BIG however, I don’t want you to get the idea that the alexandluke social media experiment is over. If you have been following closely and know what our map of progress looks like, you will know that we have a few regions left to visit. They are (in no particular order) Vermont, Hawaii, and Nunavut. As we have explained in the past, Nunavut is not a place we can take ol’ Burt Reynolds, as there are presently no roads to this territory. But thanks to the hints of a clever Northern follower, we figured out how to book really economical air tickets for the end of November! Needless to say, we will be documenting and sharing this adventure here on alexandluke.com.
As for poor Vermont, who kept getting voted over time and time again, his day will come. Mark my words, we will get to Vermont, and it will be triumphant! It will also be sooner than you might think. And Hawaii, some might say the most coveted of all American destinations, will have to be patient for our arrival, as we have not cracked the case on that one yet.
Some interesting things have been happening behind the scenes at alexandluke.com, and some big, I mean BIG, announcements will come in the next few weeks that will reveal that all important question “What on earth will you two do when this is over?”
So fret not, our road trip is taking a turn towards home, but the journey continues. Even though a week from now you might find me buried under a mountain of homemade cookie crumbs, know that underneath, I’ll be gearing up for the next adventure and that crazy notion of homesickness will be a distant memory!
Stay tuned!
- alex