Off-site parking in Los Angeles is not very “off”

I hate paying for parking anywhere and would hate to add up how much I’ve spent over the years leaving my car at airports. When you’re flying out for a week or two and it’s not convenient for someone to drop you off, you’ve either got to pay a taxi (if it’s from home) or to suck it up and pay to park. If you live far from the airport, or you’re in an area where it’s sometimes cheaper to go one city over, you’re really out of options.

Thankfully I don’t pay nearly as much as most other people do when this happens. Half or less most of the time.

See, I rarely park in the actual airport lot—even at economy one—because it’s usually dramatically less to leave my car in a private lot nearby. I’ve never paid more than $7.50 per day to park in Fort Lauderdale, for example, until recently when I had to park in the airport garage when running late for a flight. (Long story.) There it’s $15 per day. If you’re away for a week, that’s $105. In a major city, it can be even worse.

In Orlando a couple weeks ago, I paid $6 a night to leave my car in the lot of the Airport Marriott, where I caught an airport shuttle in a flash. That’s another advantage of these places: usually they have a more frequent shuttle schedule than the airport itself does. When I used to park off-site in Nashville (BNA), they would take you within 10 minutes even if nobody else needed a ride.

I usually use a site called Cheap Airport Parking because they’re on of my advertisers over at Perceptive Travel. Even if they weren’t they’re the second-largest consolidator of these off-site options, so it’s worth checking them out. Here are some sample rates available most days of the week.

MIA Embassy Suites – $5
LAX Premier Parking – $3.99
EWR (Newark) Premier Parking – $5.99
FLL (Ft. Lauderdale) Hilton – $6
TPA (Tampa) Memorial – $3.25
MCO (Orlando) – 3 parking lots are available under $3 per day.

They continuously ask customers to rate parking lots on 5 criteria: location, facility, wait times, shuttle experience and personnel attitude. Based on these ratings they calculate the overall quality score of a lot and sort parking lots based on this score to promote the best lots. Parking lots know about this algorithm and try to serve the customers better in order to be on top in the list and get more customers.

Off-site parking options at MIA I’ve used.

They don’t serve every market—nobody does—but you can usually Google “airport parking” or “off site parking” and the airport code/city to find the options if the market is not on the list of sites like this one. It doesn’t work everywhere, since some airports are too small or inconveniently placed, like the PIE one I have to use sometimes out of Clearwater/St. Pete, Florida.

Most of the small ones (not that one) have reasonably priced parking though. Where my father lives in Greenville/Spartanburg, South Carolina, the overnight charge is $4 and you can walk from the lot with your wheelie suitcase to the entrance.

It’s time for the November issue of Perceptive Travel, home to the best travel stories from book authors on the move. Two of the features are on warm places you’ll probably want to visit someday. One is on a place that some people used to want to visit, but no more.

Bruce Northam finds the essence of Grenada, a Caribbean island of cinnamon and nutmeg that is a far cry from most glorified cruise ship ports and honeymoon escape capsules in that part of the world. See A Spiced Up Caribbean in Grenada.

On a trip back from South America, I stopped off in Miami for a while to soak up the South Beach scene like the celebrities and fashionistas who have preceded me. In a city so hot the basketball team is the heat, No One’s Too Sexy for Miami.

Judith Fein makes her debut in Perceptive Travel this month with a piece that we obviously did not publish to pump up our page views. She looks back on her visit three years ago to a very different Syria than what we are watching now on the news. See Syria in My Heart.

As usual, we bring you some new and noteworthy travel books worth checking out, this time including the new version of Road Trip USA and one on a different kind of road: the Appian Way.

Graham Reid is back to highlight some interesting world music from around the globe, including Cuba and Bulgaria, plus the latest from Balkan Beat Box.

We give away cool gear each month and this time three readers will receive the nicest toiletry kit they’ve ever owned, thanks to Property Of bags. You can get in on the action each month by getting on the newsletter list or following Perceptive Travel on Facebook.

If you saw the photo above without the headline, you’d naturally think it was taken in Thailand, right?

If someone told you this next one was from the same place, you might be willing to bet some money on it.

Not so fast. That’s not the Mekong River or Chao Phraya River past the trees. It’s the Hillsborough River in Florida. If you hopped on a boat and floated downstream, you’d soon end up in Tampa Bay.

Last year I wrote a post called Stuck at home? Go exploring there. It was about how even when you’re not traveling because of work or budget reasons, you can still get a dose of the exotic via ethnic neighborhoods or restaurants in your home town.

Four  months from now my family and I will be taking a very long series of flights to end up in Thailand. This trip to Wat Tampa (really called Wat Mongkolratanaram) took just 20 minutes in a car. This Buddhist temple is the real deal, with Thai writing all over the place, shoes off before entering, and lots of gold-covered statues everywhere. This congregation doesn’t keep to itself though. Every Sunday they have a massive Thai brunch where hundreds of outsiders come to chow down on a wide variety of dishes.

Some are familiar things you’re used to seeing in restaurants: green curry, Pad Thai, basil chicken, etc. Here though you can get a heaping mound of rice and two dishes for just $5 though. Spring rolls are a buck, sticky rice desserts are $1.50. You can get big bowls of Thai soup, chicken satay, herby Thai pork sausages, and other goodies.

As you can see from the photos, presentation is not the top concern here. This is an operation meant to feed a very large number of people, so you go in expecting something like you would get on the streets of Bangkok or in a Chiang Mai market, not pretty plates with carved fruit pieces and flower garnishes. (You can buy orchids in the small market here though, along with Thai cooking ingredients like fresh ginger and lemongrass.)

That was fine with me since I love Thai street food and can’t wait to plow my way through the sois again. And while the prices at Wat Tampa can’t compare to those in Thailand itself, the three of us chowed down to the point of being stuffed for under $25. And we had leftovers to bring home.

Is there something like this in your city? Probably so if you look around. Maybe a Greek festival, an Indian Hindu temple, a Hmong street market, or just a hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant serving workers, not Zagat-wielding restaurant hoppers. Go exploring the world without hopping on a plane.

If you’re going to be in Tampa and are looking for something different to do, this is one offbeat Florida destination that has nothing to do with alligators, theme parks, beaches, or kitsch. For more info go to Wat Tampa’s English site.

It takes money, not a magic wand, to get into this place

How can you afford to travel so long?

That’s a question familiar to anyone who has packed their bag and taken off for months, a year, two years…or more. In the eyes of most infrequent travelers, who only view travel through the lens of a short vacation, it’s an expensive endeavor. You save up all year or you put a fortune on your credit card that takes a year to pay off. So how can you do that for so long?

It’s a very different type of travel, of course, and a different mindset.

Three nights in Orlando equals _____ elsewhere.

I just took my wife and daughter to Universal Studios theme parks in Orlando. We could drive there from where I live now, so let’s take airfare out of the equation and just look at ground costs. I actually got three nights in a very nice hotel for free from winning first prize in a travel writing contest earlier this year. So I paid half this much, but the rate below is what most other guests staying there were paying. Here’s a 3-day tally of the damage (and we spent less on souvenirs and sodas than your typical visitor):

$780  -  Swan & Dolphin hotel 3 nights

$331 – 2-day park pass to Universal Studios & Islands of Adventure (with AAA discount), 3 people

$352 – meals at theme park and hotel

$ 30  -  parking at theme park, 2 days

$ 33 – parking at hotel, 3 days

$ 55 – souvenirs, locker charge, gas, tips, other misc. (No $100 Harry Potter robe purchased)

Grand Total – $1581 for 3 days

So, what do you think a backpacking family of three could do with $1,581? That would cover two weeks to a month in a whole lot of The World’s Cheapest Destinations. Or it could be a darn great week living it up in some of the “honorable mentions” even, like Mexico or Panama.

It’s a different kind of comfort and stimulation, which is part of the equation in long-term travel. But just taking what a typical family spends on the theme park tickets, overpriced meals, and parking for the day would cover a whole lot of thrilling adventure activities in a place like Guatemala, Ecuador, or Vietnam.

One last note: these theme parks are jam-packed every weekend and school holiday with families laying out this kind of money. Recession or not, people are obviously willing to pay a lot—and wait in line a lot—for a few minutes of artificial thrills.

Did we have fun? Absolutely. I love amusement parks and my daughter was overjoyed.

But go travel long-term in cheap destinations and you can make those thrills last much longer. (Well, unless you go to Petra…)

Mexico, minus the scared people

A few weeks ago I took part in this article from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance titled 4 Sweet Deals for Last-minute summer travel.

I like this story because it emphasizes the contrarian traveler approach of taking advantage of an advantageous situation—one that may not last. The four destinations profiled are all ones that are suffering from too much 24-hour news channel time, so they’re being shunned.

Ireland and Greece have been all over the news since the spring because of their economic woes. The news channels, especially Fox News, love nothing more than telling us how scary Mexico is. (Hint, it helps pump up the numbers for those anti-immigration rallies. Never mind that we’re supplying most of Mexico’s guns and driving up the prices of all their drug exports.) The Gulf Coast of the U.S.? Well, when’s the last time you watched an hour of TV news without hearing about the BP oil spill?

So, there are deals galore in all these places, even though the pubs of Ireland and the islands of Greece are pretty much the same as they were a year ago—just cheaper. The beaches and towns of Mexico (outside the border zones) and the beaches of Florida (outside the westernmost Panhandle) are pretty much the same as they were two years ago—just emptier.

Turn off the TV and visit the spots the easily influenced are avoiding. The destinations could use your business and you will spend far less while avoiding the crowds.