Islands

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Why a car changes everything in Crete The guy at the Chania counter slid the form across and tapped a line near the bottom. Twenty-two euros a day, he said, and your excess drops to zero. My wife caught my eye. We already had that covered, bought online for a fraction of the price, but he didn’t know that yet, and the small Fiat Panda we’d reserved three weeks earlier for about thirty euros a day was sitting in the lot with a scratch on the rear bumper I was about to photograph. I’ll come back to that scratch, because it nearly cost us a deposit we never should have been on the hook for. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Thailand, in One Sentence My wife nearly booked us onto a Gulf island in October. I remember her turning the laptop around in our kitchen, grinning at a half-price bungalow on Koh Samui, and me having to be the killjoy: that is the exact week the Gulf gets its heaviest rain of the year. We went two months later instead, in December, and stood on Railay Beach on the Andaman side under a sky that hadn’t seen a cloud in days, water like warm glass, paying high-season rates and not minding one bit. The lesson cost us nothing because we caught it in time. It’s the one almost everyone misses, and I’ll come back to it. ...