Archives June 2013

Turkey is a superb holiday destination for its position alone. Being the most southerly country in Europe, this beautiful place benefits from blazing hot summers and warm winters. The azure blue waters of the Mediterranean mean that Turkey has some of the best beaches too.

Turkey Holidays with Thomas Cook offer a fantastic collection of all-inclusive packages. A family holiday in the sun has never been so affordable and so easy to book – go online at www.thomascook.com to find great deals on a wide selection of accommodation to suit all tastes and budgets. If you’re looking for a relaxing beach break or a jam-packed adventure holiday, then Turkey is the place for you. But don’t be mistaken by thinking that Turkey is just about flash hotels and sandy beaches; there are many hidden gems just waiting to be discovered.

Thomas Cook offers package holidays to many of Turkey’s fascinating towns including: Antalya, a fast growing city with lots to see and do. Children will love the Beach Park, Dolphin land and Aqua land and there are many historical sights, the harbour and old town to explore. For a more peaceful retreat, Beldibi is a quaint little village where you can kick back and relax on a hassle free holiday and take in the authentic village life. Belek is the centre of Turkey’s tourism industry with its impressive 4 and 5 star hotels and fascinating landmarks. The ancient Aspendos amphitheatre holds 20,000 people and is over 2,000 years old. It still holds fantastic open-air concerts today. Visit the beautiful Kurşunlu Waterfall, part of the Aksu River which is set amidst a pine forest – a place of great beauty where nature is at its best with over 100 species of birds.These are just a few of the fantastic resorts to discover with a Thomas Cook package holiday to Turkey, so book your holiday with ease and let one of the UK’s favourite tour operators do the rest.

*Sponsored post.

That’s right. We’ve done it again. This is the third reincarnation of ATC. Ah, from its humble beginning as a Dreamweaver site using homemade templates to a mid-level Dreamweaver site, to a modern, shiny site that has all the navigation, responsiveness and interactive features the 21st century of ADD viewers demands.

We pay homage to the old site, which was a masterpiece in terms of human patience as we slowly built, nurtured and tried not to strangle the difficult and bulky site. Slowly, we came to detest the limitations of Dreamweaver. It was hard to update static pages. Harder still to get the templates to do what we wanted, and it just looked like something from the 1990s. On the road, we needed a platform that didn’t mean every little change required a full overhaul. Hence, our conversion to WordPress.

The old site:

Of course we put a lot of love and work into every single page. Above is our beer page. Today you can see that same page with all the same content (images, text) in our new theme, which allows you to cursor over each image to see the background story behind each breakfast beer. I’ll miss the long scroll style of reading on the web. But I might be the only dinosaur who enjoyed that. As we add more features (and more photos!) check back on the beer page to see what’s happening in the world of early morning ales.

Above is our Guides page. I painstakingly made each graphic using my Bamboo in Corel Draw. I then made sure the sizing was PERFECT and loaded them into Dreamweaver one at a time. I created new pages in Dreamweaver and populated them with guide details. I handmade the maps that went along with each country, also in Corel Draw. Each page took about a week to write, create the graphics for, and then slowly assemble in Dreamweaver. Each page was painfully made with love.

Today you can see the guides pages in a flashier, easier to read fashion. And it didn’t take me a week to make each page. All the same text and imagery is there, just in a more readable fashion. We hope you enjoy the conversion.

Mike and I built the ATC website in late 2007 as a means of keeping in contact with our families in America while we lived in Shanghai. In 2009 we traveled for over a year. In 2010 we did the Mongol Rally and then settled again in China. In 2012, we had a baby and returned to the US. All of our years of adventure are on this blog and in these pages, and it’s been fun to have the website grow along with us. To the next few years with the new design– cheers!

I have a trip to Cancun coming up. I haven’t flown in a while and I’m really sick of how airlines are trying to make an extra buck by charging for luggage. And if they don’t do these they limit you to a specific weight allowance. Trying to get it right on the nose using a bathroom scale is pointless. I always go over. So, I bought a little mobile luggage scale. Now when I’m in Cancun and have a suitcase full of whatever I won’t have to guess at what 25lbs feels like. I bought THIS scale.

I tried it. It’s lightweight, which is good because once I weigh my bag I have to zip this sucker in with the other luggage to make sure I have it for the return flight weigh-in. The features are standard, but the cool thing is can display in either kg or lb. Now I won’t have to do any conversions in my head (which is good, because I can’t). A lot of product neglect this detail. It seems like a simple thing but I once heard that NASA was doing a project with the international space station and neglected to convert all their work into metric so the satellite shot off into the neatherregions of space. Even geniuses forget the little details are sometimes the most important.

My only complaint is it has an odd battery size. So, if it runs out of juice in Cancun I won’t be able to find a better to replace the one it has. On the other hand, I could just bring extra batteries.

I’ll write more about how the luggage weight worked out when we try it out on our Cancun trip.