Christian Renaud's Blog

Traveling Well

"It is better to travel well than to arrive" - Buddha

In the last year or so, I've spoken with a number of soon-to-be-frequent travelers, and passed along a bit of accumulated travel wisdom to each. My wife and I were talking about the merits of travel tactics at lunch again today, and it occurred to me how many tips and tricks you aggregate over the years. I've been a 'frequent traveler' (defined as being in the gold/executive tier of airline loyalty programs) for just shy of half of my life.

For what it's worth, and there are plenty of websites who would probably argue with me on each of the following points, but here are the rules I travel by and am rarely disappointed.

[Disclaimer, if you are traveling as a group tour or with children, these may be of considerably less utility to you, but you'll know which ones apply to your own circumstances]

Long before:  Pick an airline that goes to your expected most-frequent destinations, or the one with the largest presence in your local airport.  Sign up for their loyalty program (but not their credit card, they are not competitive for interest rates).  Stick with this airline.  Fly them whenever possible unless they are much more expensive than the competition (and consider shifting your loyalty to the competition). 

Why?  This is the latter half of the 'fly early, fly often' motto of travel.  The more you fly, the more frequent flyer miles you accumulate (useful for free trips and upgrades) but more importantly, the higher status with the airline you accrue.  Status = priority boarding, priority for standby lists (this will show up later), and priority for requested & impromptu upgrades to higher classes of service.

La Cave

"There is a devil in every berry of the grape"  - The Qur'an

Cellaring wine is a great hobby.  It frees you from the whims of stocking levels at wine shops or grocery stores, allows you to lay down wines when young (and inexpensive) and enjoy them in their age, and is an insanely difficult equation to optimize.  There are many multi-variable equations in life, but wine collecting has got to be one of the more complicated ones I've come across.

For starters, Wine is a living thing.  You can take a great vineyard, and vines that have produced fabulous wine over the centuries, and a freak rainstorm or heatwave will render this year's production worthless to all but vinegar producers.  Winemakers are a fickle breed as well, constantly tinkering with their post-harvest techniques in order to pander to the palette of this or that wine critic.  Then you have the problem of provenance.....what happened to the wine after the winemaker bottled it?  Did it sit in a nice cold, humid cave somewhere, or in the hot backroom of some wine shop, getting slowly cooked?  How was it shipped.....air conditioned and dark, or in the back of someone's pickup truck in the Arizona sun?

And that's just one bottle!  Last month I was looking forward to a tasting of wines from Saint Estèphe, a sub-appellation within Bordeaux.  One bottle in particular, a 1986 Chateau Cos D'Estornel, was at the top of my list to try, after a life-changing glass of the wine in 2004.  The wine-tasting night arrived, the blind tasting commenced, and I didn't find the spice box of Cos among the glasses.  There were some amazing wines, and some horrid ones, but the elusive chimera of Cos was nowhere to be found. 

Massage as Cultural Travelogue

Shiatsu.  Swedish. Thai. Rolfing. Abhyanga. Balinese Foot Massage. Reiki.

It sounds like the Monty Python Cheese Shop Sketch, doesn't it?

I've been a massage advocate since I can remember. Everywhere I've lived, everywhere I've traveled, I always hunt out local massage therapists.  There are an infinite variety of massage styles, and each country seems to have it's own methods and techniques.  It consistently amazes me that there is so much possible variation in 'massage modalities', when you assume there must be a finite number of ways to knead sore muscles.

During a lovely couples-massage my wife scheduled in honor of our wedding anniversary last night, I wandered through the room in my memory palace dedicated to massages I have received, and thought I'd share a fraction of them that seemed worth sharing.....

• Hotel Nikko Mexico City, 1997.  When the 250lb man, oiled from head to toe, wearing a speedo, walked in to give me the massage, I should have fled.  Make a note of that for future reference.