My wife and I have always wanted to have a vacation in Hawaii. I have no idea when we might end up going there, but it’s definitely on the list of places to visit at some point in the near future.

Every once in a while one of us starts looking at various vacation spots. It’s usually my wife that does this, but I look sometimes too. One site that I visited recently had a number of hawaii travel packages listed and they sounded enticing.

It seems that more and more people are visiting Hawaii and staying in Villa’s rather than big hotels or resorts. That sounds appealing to Trish and I. I think that staying in a villa or vacation home would be much more relaxing. It feel more like a home away from home since you’d have access to all the amenities that you’d be used to in your own home like the use of a kitchen, laundry and so on.

Another plus is that many of these Hawaii vacation villas are located very close to the beach and ocean. Imagine getting up in the morning and watching the sunrise over the ocean? Or having dinner on the villas patio and watching the sun go down. I know that we’d enjoy that.

Ah! I must stop talking about this right now or I’ll find myself with a credit card in one hand and the phone in the other as I make reservations for a Hawaii vacation!

One of these days we plan to take a vacation in Europe. I’ve been to Ireland in the past, but other than that neither of us have been anywhere else in Europe.

Like so many others who plan vacations to Europe no trip would be complete without visiting England, France and Italy. I’m sure that if we were able to take a holiday of a month or more we’d go to a few other Countries as well.

We still don’t know when we might be able to take this dream vacation but it can’t hurt to begin planning where we might stay, what cities we might visit and what historic sites we’d want to see.

Take Rome for example. This city is so old and has so some much history. We could probably spend a month there alone and still not see everything that we’d like to see. There are several museums that we’d visit. I also think it would be wonderful to see the Pantheon, the Catacombs, St. Peters and Vatican City, the Colosseum, and the Forum as well as so many other historic sites.

There’s even a wide assortment of Hotels to stay in. We could stay in a 5 star suite at Hotel Fori Imperiali Cavalieri in the heart of the historic center, or perhaps for the sake of keeping our expenses down stay in the 3 star Hotel Siena Rome which is also in the heart of Rome and appears to be quite a nice hotel with all the amenities that we’d need.

As many of you already realize, where you stay when you are on a trip far from home, whether it be business travel or vacation can make or break your trip. Which means that choosing the right hotels along the way is as important as it is to choose the correct travel and tour itinerary. So I plan on doing some research on the hotels that we’d like to stay in, in Rome and any other cities on our dream vacation.

I came across Easytobook.com and I like that they show each hotels rating as well as a brief description on each of the city pages. Once you choose a hotel that you think you might want to stay in your can learn more about it by clicking on the hotels link where you will find more information about the hotel, photos, a map of it’s location within the city and many other forms of information related to the hotels location within the city, and information on how to book or cancel your reservations.

It’s a great site to visit in order to learn more about tourist destinations within the city of your choice - Rome in our case - and to book your hotel stays. I’ve bookmarked this site so that I can do more research as we plan our future Roman vacation.

A woman living in a small community west of New York City was startled when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a black bear looking back in at her.

“I was making a pot of coffee, and I turned around and there he was in the window looking at me,” said Lorraine Grossman.

The womans scream spooked the 211 pound bear who ran and climbed a nearby tree. He reached a height of 40 feet and wouldn’t budge. The woman found herself entertaining more than 50 neighbors who gathered in her Maplewood home to watch the bear in the tree for five hours. The bear didn’t do much more than yawn though.

“He’s really kind of cute,” said Joanne Penaluna.

State wildlife officers eventually shot the animal with a tranquilizer dart. After hanging on for about 10 minutes, the bear dropped into a net. It was taken away, tagged, then released at a state wildlife management area.

“It’s not something you get to see every day — bears falling out of trees,” said Pete Samek, whose 5-year-old daughter, Lucy Rose, watched from his shoulders.

Bears usually hibernate from December to March, though they can be easily roused, said Larry Katz, chairman of the animal sciences department at Rutgers University.

“It’s a little early for them to be waking up,” he said. “Someone or something probably walked over the area where it was hibernating.”

Authorities said the bear, a male estimated to be 2 or 3 years old, might have been snacking on birdseed and likely wandered in from the nearby South Mountain Reservation.

As soon as I came across HotelReservations.com a few weeks ago I was sure to bookmark it. We don’t do a lot of traveling, not lately anyway, but I’m keeping this site in mind for the next time that one or both of us ends up traveling and needs to make Hotel Reservations. I know we’ll find rooms that are in good hotels and for reasonable prices.

As I said we don’t travel much so that should put a little bit of weight on the fact that I have bookmarked this site. Why did I bookmark it? Well, because I know that when we do travel to just about anywhere in the world I can go to Hotelreservations.com and find not only hotel rooms to book right then and there, but car rentals, and flights too.

This site actually fulfills many vacation needs. As I’ve browsed through the site I’ve found that if I’d prefer to book a vacation rental - perhaps a ski chalet in the winter, or a summer house on the beach I can probably find accommodations at these types of lodgings too. It’s not just hotel rentals.

In fact, they even have complete vacation packages. You can click on their vacation package tab, then fill out a little bit of information such as the type of package you are looking for - flight, hotel and car or any combination. Then choose your departure city, and the city you’d like to visit.

Just for the heck of it I went through the process and decided what kind of packages they had for flight and hotel, for the weekend of Friday January 19th to Monday January 22nd from Toronto to Los Angeles for two adults.

I found that I could sort my results by price, hotel name, price or even city (if I’d chosen to have more than one travel destination). The first result at the top of the list, is I presume, the hotelreservations.com pick. They suggested hotel Angelino, with a total cost of $1464 for two adults and three nights hotel accommodations. I suppose that’s not bad. I then sorted by price and the lowest price I got was $1130. Now I know that prices for flights and hotel accommodations can be higher or lower depending on what day and what date you are traveling so I would suggest fooling around with departure dates in order to find the best prices. Perhaps if I’d chosen to book from Thursday to Sunday or different dates, I might have found a few lower prices.

I do think this is a site worth visiting. Please do visit hotelreservations.com for yourself and see if you think it’s as great a site as I do.