Last month I was on a train in Italy when I received an incoming call from an “unknow number.” Upon seeing that, I cringed and my stomach sank. You see, I’d had that same “call” on two other occasions while traveling in Europe. It was from my web hosting company back in the USA notifying my account (meaning my website and my blog) had been suspended.
I have used the same web hosting company for over ten years, however in recent years things have made a drastic turn for the worse. It is long story and I’ll not bother you with the details, let’s just say I learned my lesson the hard way.
The odd thing is that I always got the “unknown caller” when I was not in a position to do anything about it, usually I was in Europe. The person I talked never varied, it was always the same voice, although he never used the same name twice. The story varied at each call beginning with “my website had overrun its space on the server and I need to pay more money to get unlimited space.” The next time the same guy (using a different name) said several of my domain names had expired and as a last ditch effort I would have to pay lots of money to reinstate them. The next call I got was because my webspace was using too much bandwidth and I should pay more money to get unlimited bandwidth. The final call came, as I mention, while on the train last month. This time my “problem” was that someone “hacked” my webspace and it was “gone.” They had a backup, but I would have to purchase new webspace and pay for someone to restore my data at a huge cost.
That was the last straw! I just let everything sit in limbo for a couple of weeks until I could get back home. Luckily, I had a full backup of my website and a backup of my blog from late-March 2010. So, over the last few weeks I’ve restored my BLOG and totally reworked my website. Hours and hours of my time, but with a reliable and well researched web hosting company, I feel a lot better.
The moral here is NEVER trust anyone without checking them out. When I got to digging into that web host provider, I found scores of complaints and very similar stories to mine. Apparently, he/they have fooled a lot of people. If you are insterested check it out on the web:
The crooks are : Global Internet Services (GISOL) http://gisol.com
My research revealed fraud at many different levels:
Historically, people have always butchered my last name. It’s pretty simple, and phonetic too… McGuffin. Yet all my life it has been pronounced incorrectly. Here are just a few of the variations: McGriffin, McGruffin, McGaffin, McGuhhh, McGovern, and so on.
I was in Ireland recently and had the opportunity to say or write my name on a daily basis. Only one aurally-imparied lady got it wrong. I guess that just goes to show you that the Irish and I have some common roots.
June 10, 1997
After all the travel yesterday it was nice to sleep in a bit before breakfast. Our hotel is located on the highway just outside Colmar so we really did not have an opportunity to experience the town last night. By 9:00 a.m. we had finished breakfast and were leaving the hotel for the short drive to Colmar.
As it turned out, Colmar is a nice little town- more German than French. All the houses are half-timbered with white stucco/stone walls. Lisa, our tour guide, took us on a walking tour of the town center. I got the feeling that she had never visited Colmar and was trying to show us the “guide book” descriptions of town. This was well and good for about thirty minutes, but after that the kids became restless and were ready to venture off on their own.
Finally, we split up and decided meet back at the bus after lunch. Charlotte and I wandered the cobbled streets, visited several fabric stores and dress shops, and decided on a spot for lunch. We chose an outside table and ordered a crepe filled with beef, onion, cheese, and potatoes…yummy! Then to top it off, we had a crepe filled with sorbet, raspberries, strawberries, an assortment of other fruits, and loaded with whipped cream. This was amazing!
We got back on the bus and everyone was on time! Guess my chat did some good. While planning this tour I had insisted on traveling the “wine route” that traverses small towns and vineyards just southwest of Colmar. This too was uncharted territory for both the driver and our guide. But we made the most of it! The countryside was dotted with little wine producing farms each with its own domain and producer. We kept seeing these great bird’s nests all over the place. Soon we discovered that storks were known to nest in this region. This got everyone on the bus on the lookout for nests in the crooks and crannies of steeples, silos, and towers.
David’s note – If you are just tuning in, let me get you up to speed here. Back in December, I decided to write about the first big group tour to Europe that I had a part in planning. The year is 1997 and we’re in Colmar, France.
June 9, 1997
Finally, we arrived in Colmar by 9:00 p.m. It was a long day with the trucker’s strike, the stop in Chartres, and then the long drive across the plains of central France. The staff was waiting dinner on us when we got to the hotel. The tables were set with water and the starter, all that was left for us to do was sit down and be served. The menu consisted of an onion tart, egg noodles and baked chicken, and an unsweetened and utterly bitter yogurt for desert. All was good except for the desert! We tried some Alsacian wine (a Riesling and a Gerwurtztraminer) and it was quite dry. I really did not care for it even though I had 50 ml of each.
Lots of little things had been going on over the last few days; you know how it can be traveling with a group of kids. Being in a foreign environment just seemed to complicate matters. Budding romantics, who would normally have nothing to do with each other, had suddenly decided to answer the mating call. Then, there were the girls who were mad at each other because they were hanging out with others than their little click. Also, there was the normal stuff that pops up on any tour like not following instructions, being late for a rendezvous, poor table manners, not paying attention to the tour guide, and other such stuff.
I had had enough, so I called for a group pow-wow in the back parking lot at 10:00 p.m. Our rooms were on the first floor so when the appointed time for the “big chat” came, I noticed everyone climbing out their hotel room windows. Ughhh…another thing to add to my list of don’t do’s! I had the chat, we all agreed to improve, and now it was time for bed. It was about that time we discovered there had been a bum sleeping in his make-sift home of cardboard near the dumpster. This freaked most of the girls out, especially when they realized their windows had been wide open for anyone, including the bum, to crawl in and steal their stuff. As it turned out nothing was missing, but the bum had been holed-up in one of the vacant hotel rooms until we arrived and started making such a stir.
Reflections: That ” unsweet and utterly bitter yogurt” I now know to be a French speciality. Little did we know at the time you were supposed to add sugar and berries to make a delightful dessert!
David’s note – If you are just tuning in, let me get you up to speed here. Back in December, I decided to write about the first big group tour to Europe that I had a part in planning. The year is 1997 and we’ve just traveled all day on a bus from Paris to the Alsace region of France.
As it turned out we did a lot of driving today. The hours added up with the trucker’s strike, taking the back-roads, and the long distances to travel. However, getting off the highway and out into the countryside was a good idea.
REFLECTIONS
Often when traveling in foreign countries, and especially on a bus tour, you tend not to notice the places between destinations. It’s just so easy to get on that bus each morning, let the driver drive, and forget about everything other than where you’re going next. This happened to me thirty years ago on my first trip to Europe. We’d all have a great time for a day or two at each destination, but when it came to our “travel” days all we could do was to sleep on the bus. At times many of us didn’t even know in which direction we were traveling or how far it was. I remember traveling from Tel Aviv to the Goland Heights, sleeping all the way, not knowing how far it was, in what direction it was, or how long it would take us. Basically we all just rode the bus, slept from one tourist sight to the next, and repeated the process day after day.
Getting off the highway for the first time gave me a new perspective on travel. I realized there were people in France living just like I do at home in my small rural town. As we traveled that day from Chartres to Colmar, my outlook and perspective changed too. France is a big country, especially when you start driving through it, and there is a lot of diversity. Until that day, my only perception of France was that which I got while visiting Paris. No wonder we have preconceived ideas about the French people! Paris is wonderful, but it is not a sound representation of the whole country just as New York City is not what immediately comes to mind when we Americans think about the USA.
Since that trip in 1997, I’ve done a lot of driving in France. Many times I’ve rented a car just so I could see and experience the country. Driving really makes you experience the trip. You can’t sleep at the wheel, you have to be alert, so consequently you begin to notice the little things. Kids playing in the school yards, teenagers hanging out, women visiting and shopping, men gathering for a drink or chat at the local bar… it’s the same stuff we do at our homes. The only difference is it is done in a different manner.
I guess the entire point here is that when traveling we should try to see things from a perspective other than as a tourist. There are a lot of people in this world and traveling makes us realize that we really aren’t all that different.
After lunch we walked back to the bus, gathered up everyone, and headed out of town. Originally our plans were to take the motorway back to Paris and then head south, but the trucker’s strike changed all that. Instead, we took a small two-lane road heading southeast through the countryside. This, being my first experience off the beaten path in France, was an eye-opening journey. We traveled through miles and miles of wheat fields south of Chartres that reminded me very much of those I’d seen in Oklahoma and Kansas.
As we neared the area of Burgundy, the fields turned to mountains with evergreens at their tops. The valleys were filled with grapevines stretching from one small village to the next. Somewhere around Dijon we stopped for a break and many of us purchased little jars of their famous mustard. No “grey poupon” here, just well seasoned mustard laced with that famous white wine.
Dijon gave me a different perspective on France, its people, and its culture. Until this time I’ve only visited Paris, and I soon learned that was not the best representation of the country. Here in Dijon we got off the bus in the town center and walked down the main street peeking in shops and checking out the mustard, olives, culinary items, and wine. I picked up on a different dialect and with it a different attitude for the local folks. They were different than the Parisians.
Yes, I know, the local people we interacted with were shopkeepers who ultimately were there to sell us tourists some of their stuff…but they were nice about it. They weren’t like the Parisian shopkeepers who spoke English in a haughty and curt voice. Here in Dijon they spoke very little English but seemed to go out of their way to help us with our shopping. Between our silly “sign language,” the two or three words we knew in French, and their limited English vocabulary, we all had a great time buying bread, cheese, mustard, and wine.
Later we sat down at a cafe and were presented a menu entirely in French. There was no “tourist” menu as there had been in Paris. Charlotte saw a pile of french fries loaded with ketchup at a nearby table and set out to find them on the menu. After all the pitiful food we’d had on this trip, fries looked really good to me too. So here we were, sitting at this cute little French cafe in Dijon’s town center trying to figure out what the French word for FRENCH fries was!
Well, we couldn’t locate it on the menu, so finally when the waitress came over to get our order she pointed at the table and plate of fries. The waitress laughing said, “ahhh, french fries…pommes frites!, avec ketchup?” Not quite getting the translation but hearing “ketchup” Charlotte knew she had hit pay-dirt and voiced a confident oui, oui, s’il vous plaît!
So goes the story of how we got our first order of FRENCH fries in Dijon, France!
