I just finished up a week of biking around the Alentejo region of Portugal, on a tour with Bike Tours Direct of the USA and Turaventur of Portugal. (Watch for a story later in Perceptive Travel.)

Sometimes you can’t hit a country at the exact right time because of school or work schedules, but when you do, it’s a glorious thing. I’ll let the photos do the talking, but to say I saw a few million flowers would be a gross underestimate. This was an especially rainy winter in Portugal and that translated to plenty of wildflowers in the spring. As in a record number of them.

So not only was I biking along country roads at the perfect time weather wise (pleasant warm weather, not too hot, no rain), but I got a big floral bonus on top. Clean air perfumed by roses. And orange blossoms. And dozens of different fragrant flowers.

In the Alentejo region of Portugal, there’s not much traffic either, especially mid-week in the spring. So much of the time the only sounds were chirping birds. When a rare car was coming, I heard it well in advance.

Later I’ll do a post on prices in Portugal. It’s a good deal all around for mid-range travelers, especially compared to the rest of Western Europe. Backpackers have a lot of advantages here, but have to work at it a bit on finding cheap places to eat out.

We were on the Castles and Wine tour in Alentejo, so I can tell you the wine here is a real steal. One of the best values I’ve seen anywhere in the world. And a lot of the castles are free. More on that later…

By its very nature, family travel is more expensive than a single person or a couple hitting the road. This is especially true if you need to fly, which you pretty much always need to do if you’re leaving your own continent.

It doesn’t have to be as expensive as many parents believe, however. You don’t need a $25,000 tour and you also don’t need seven nights in an expensive resort. If you visit The World’s Cheapest Destinations and take your time, in the end you can spend far less than you would have driving to Disney World for a week.

Family travel requires more work, however, and you can do a lot better with proper planning than you would just winging it. So if you’re a new parent or one that would like to travel more, spending a little time and money on the right book can save you plenty of cash—and hassles.

I’ve been checking out a new book called Family on the Loose that does a good job of answering any questions you might have and answering a whole lot of others you should have had. It’s a thorough, well-organized book that leaves no travel stone unturned.

It’s by Bill Richards and E. Ashley Steele, two blogging parents with two daughters they’ve taken with them to 13 countries away from home. Obviously they hadn’t read The World’s Cheapest Destinations before embarking on these journeys since all of them were in Canada or Europe, so if there’s anything lacking in this book it’s advice on traveling in countries less developed than our own. With all the less savory aspects that go with it.

Most tactics for family travel are similar no matter where you’re going, however, so as a primer on how to do it right, Family on the Loose is a great resource. It is organized in three sections: Ready, Set… (planning); Go (flights and on the ground); and Traveling Home (preserving memories, international exploration at home). Packed in there are very useful chapters, text boxes, and checklists for what to remember or at least consider.

I especially like their advice on getting the kids involved at any age and there’s a cool packing checklist that uses pictures—so non-readers can still grab what they need from their dresser. There are table games to play at a restaurant while waiting for food to arrive, city scavenger hunt forms, museum activities, and other nice additions besides just advice on how to book a hotel and get around town.

Family on the Loose lists for $13.95 paperback and is under $10 for the Kindle. Get a copy here.

While I’m on the subject, Dale and Michelle Bartlett handed me a copy of Have Kids—Will Travel when I was speaking at the last TBEX bloggers convention. It took me a while to get to it and this family travel post was my incentive. 

As with the authors of the first book, this family also spent most of their travel time in Europe, so it’s focused on metros, trains, and budget airlines that are so prevalent there. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with a book like this though as even an experienced traveler like me will find tips and websites that were unknown before. I found myself dog-earning pages to go back to later when I was online.

This was a family of six people on the road, so if yours is too large to cram into a typical hotel room, this book will get you thinking about other options like home exchanges, park cabins, and using loyalty points for connecting rooms. With that many people to transport, this family has learned a thing or two about cheap flights and making the most of frequent flier miles as well.

You can see more at their site Havekids-Willtravel.com or get a copy of the book at Amazon.

If you do want to venture out with your family into the developing world, where things are cheaper but sometimes more difficult, my go-to recommendation has long been the Rough Guide book on Traveling with Babies and Young Children, but it seems to be out of print now. Next best is Lonely Planet’s version, but they devote as much of the book to destinations as planning and travel. Your best bet is probably to pull up the website for your local library and see if they have one or both of them. If you love one after checking it out, buy it.

Do you typically go to one or two sites to check hotel prices before booking? Do you change those sites depending on the region?

Even if you do, you’re probably paying too much.

One of the companies I’ve partnered up with over at Perceptive Travel is Trivago. Since I’ve starting using them to search for the best hotel deals, I’ve seen dramatic differences between the various online travel agencies and you can rarely point to one of them as being consistently lower in price than others.

A lot of American travelers haven’t heard of Trivago because they’re based in Europe. The closest thing to it here is Kayak, but I don’t have to look at 3 display ads from outside companies and three blocks of Google Adsense ads on Trivago. And I don’t have to uncheck boxes that will send me to three more booking sites. (If Kayak already gives you the best results, why do they want to send you to Orbitz or Priceline? Because they get a few cents every time you leave the boxes checked and those windows open, that’s why).

So this site delivers multiple results like Kayak, but it loads faster and has a cleaner interface, without a bunch of distracting ads blinking and expanding on the sides of the page.

Trivago pulls from 141 booking sites in all, so if you search for a Budapest hotel deal, you’ll get 1,149 hotels in the results. Whoa, that’s a lot of hotels! When I searched Miami Beach hotels for an upcoming trip, there were 365 of them to choose from. Thankfully you can narrow this down by price, distance, ratings, or popularity on the general side, lots of specific factors (like star category, amenities, and type of hotel) on the left sidebar. If I drilled that Budapest list down to 3-star hotels within a mile and a half of the city center, I got 13 results. All but one were $100 or less.

Here’s why using a metasearch site like this matters though. In those results, the lowest price for various choices came from six different booking sites. Sometimes Agoda was lower, sometimes Booking.com, sometimes Vivastay or EasytoBook. This is why just going to Expedia every time is a bad idea, especially for international locations.

I also like this site because it gives you different room options from various sites. So you may see a difference of $10 for a standard double, but a difference of $50 for a junior suite. Or you may click on a hotel on the same block and find a similar junior suite $60 less than that.

There’s a lot to sift through in some cities and that can be a bit daunting. But if you use the filters to home in on what you want, you can book through Trivago feeling confident that you’ve gotten the best possible deal, whether that deal was from Splendia, Agoda, GetaRoom, Venere, the hotel chain site, or a dozen sites you probably never would have checked otherwise.

If you’re going to potentially save $40 or more on your hotel bill, a few extra minutes spent on research would seem to be a good payoff.

Follow this link to find your cheap hotel deals.

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Most travelers don’t see much of the Buda side of Budapest when they visit Hungary’s capital. Few make it any further than the Fisherman’s Bastion and maybe Buda Castle.

It’s understandable as most of the bars, restaurants, and hotels are on the flat Pest side. But Buda has the greeenery—and the Children’s Train.

I probably wouldn’t have even known about this train had I not gone out on a cool tour with Underguide that spent the day on the other side of the river. (Remember that when you automatically pooh-pooh guided tours: some of them rock.) We took a series of metro rides and trams, then hiked the last bit to the starting point. So getting there was part of the fun too.

Here’s what the ride was like:

This is one of those classic narrow-gauge trains that bumps along old tracks. This one passes through forests and behind some grand homes in the hills. It’s a world away from the compressed urban grid of Pest.

It’s called the Children’s Train because kids aged 10-14 join a program to work there, taking tickets and giving signals to conductors when the tracks are clear. The tickets are a bargain at about $3 one-way, or $1.50 for children.

When you get to the end, you can turn around and come back or follow a path to a chairlift going up and down the mountain. I’d advise taking it down as you get terrific views of the mansion districts and the city spread out before you. The chairlift is slightly more than the train, around $3.25 one way.

See more on the Children’s Railway site in English.

It’s not hard to hear a lot of gloom and doom in the news these days, but if you’re a traveler, this is shaping up to be one of the best summer vacation seasons in a long time.

Good news for the Yanks

For Americans, this is probably a temporary gift from the gods that we should all take advantage of. Our ineffectual congress and weak housing market aren’t going to suddenly do an about-face and our long-term fiscal debt issues still need real bipartisan compromise to tackle. Also something not very likely in this climate. Compared to Europe though, we look like a superhero standing next to a patient in a hospital bed—our battle scars be damned. So the euro is hovering around 1.25 to the dollar and more than a few pundits have said it’ll go to parity if Greece drops the euro and Spain and Italy default. When the euro goes down, so does the Hungarian forint, the Bulgarian lev, the Czech crown (from 17 to 20 in the past year), and the rest. Not hand in hand, but on the trend line. The expensive destinations in Europe are not as expensive this summer and the cheap ones are cheaper.

In the rest of the world, it’s a mixed bag, but the U.S. dollar is way up against some key currencies for us. Right now you get 14 Mexican pesos to the dollar, compared to 11 or 12 most times I’ve been there over the past decade.  You get 55 Indian Rupees now for a buck instead of 45 this time last year. Exchange rates are better in more expensive Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.

But let’s face it, the way most Americans travel is…in the USA. So gas prices dropping from $4 to $3 a gallon is a big deal. Take that road trip before the nutjobs in Iran start shouting again. I doubt we’ve seen the end of fuel price spikes. Someday soon though, offending airlines might actually do the fair thing and ratchet back those hated “fuel surcharges.” Or at least stop slapping frequent fliers cashing in miles for them. (I’m talking to you British Airways.)

Good news for the maple leaf backpack crowd

For Canadians, your currency is as strong as its been in decades and the natural-resource-based economy has allowed you to prosper in the current commodity climate. Like Americans, you take a lot of vacations domestically and have to go quite far to travel internationally, so lower fuel prices can make a big difference in the budget. At 1.3 loonies to the euro (sometimes less), Europe’s costs are at a record low for the canucks. Go!

Plus the math’s easier these days. At near-parity with the U.S. dollar and Australian dollar, you can cash in loonies for something else that’s easier to exchange around the world and not have to do double-math on what you’re spending.

Do Aussies really need another reason to travel?

Breakfast in Bali

You Australians are currently blessed with an exchange rate your parents probably never dreamed was possible. Places that used to cost them a bloody fortune are now cheaper than home. As with Canada, an economy based on the extraction of things in the sparsely populated ground can mean boom times when said things are in demand. So while Australia has gotten crazy expensive for citizens from the rest of the world (okay, except Japan and Scandinavia), when you take your local earnings abroad it’s party time.

Like the rest of us though, don’t assume this good fortune is going to last. It’s probably not sustainable to count on rich commodity prices forever, especially gold, and China’s not going to keep buying whatever the world can mine forever. Travel now and make good memories.

Where does that leave Europeans?

It’s hard to find a silver lining in Europe, but despite your faltering currency, most of the world is still cheaper than where you live now. And hey, if you come visit us in the U.S. you can fatten up and buy some electronics on the cheap.

Otherwise, take advantage of  your own continent’s problems and roll out your own personal stimulus plan. Grab one of those unbelievable package deals to Greece or the coast of Spain. Rent an apartment in Barcelona or Athens from an owner that needs the money. Buy a vacation home on the cheap from someone who really needs to unload it. There are a lot of bargains out there on places you can reach by train or a budget airline.

Take advantage of what may be temporary

In five or ten years from now, we may look back on this summer as one of the great opportunities to travel well for less. Don’t let it pass you by.

[Top Flickr photo by Naharb, Vegemite one by joeywan]