Travel Question...

[geminigirl]

I realize we've got a while before we book tickets, but with the cost of moving hanging over us, and knowing that September means three paychecks, I'm trying to pre-plan our two known winter trips, to my Mom and Dad for Thanksgiving in November (and since Orlando to New York is a popular flight, I'm not too concerned about that...I can comparison shop for tickets on airlines we like) and to Canada in December. Last year, we flew all the way through-Air Canada from O-town to Toronto, and then Air Canada Jazz from Toronto to Sudbury. Thing is...the Toronto-Sudbury flight cost as much as the Orlando-Toronto tickets. We were thinking that instead of flying striaght through, it might be less expensive for us to rent a car in Toronto and drive up. (The cheapest way to do it would be to fly into Buffalo, but that would add two to three hours onto the drive, and in potentially bad weather, at a holiday, and dealing with a border crossing, I'm not sure that's the best plan, so we've sort of decided that in the time/money equation, the couple of hours we save crossing the border is better for us than the fiscal difference.)

Anyway, onto the question. I've rented cars before, but only in the US, and it's always been when someone else is paying for it, or at the last second with Enterprise, who had a deal with the place I used to get my car repaired in Virginia. I think I know what the requirements are to rent a car in Canada, but I'm not sure what travel sites people like to find the best rental car deals.

Favorite sites for rental car deals when you travel?

(If you're in the Toronto-ish area, we're planning at the moment to spend a night on either end of our trip in Toronto, and might be up for socializing, though we might plan an extra day or two, since I've never seen Niagra Falls and would really like to. And while it might make more sense to do it in the warmer weather, I think our plan is to go via Ottawa in the summer, and see friends there. The drive from Toronto to Sudbury is apparently a better choice in the winter than Ottawa.)

Comments

[geminigirl]

I asked last night, because I was curious. (I've only gone from Toronto to Sudbury by car in the summer, on the way to cottage, about a week before the Civic Holiday.) He said the route from Ottawa to Sudbury is mostly two lane roads, whereas 69 is four lanes for much of the journey, so if there is a traffic problem it takes far less time to extract yourself from it.

[schillerium.livejournal.com]

While that's true, most of the problems I've encountered on that route have been on the two-lane segment. I once spent three hours stuck on Woods Road north of Parry Sound, because the highway in both directions and Woods Road itself were all blocked by three simultaneous car accidents; another time I spent two hours stuck because a car accident happened at the precise spot where the four lanes merge down to two; another time I was stuck for an hour because the company working on the next few kilometres of extension north of Parry Sound saw fit to blast a rock cut at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

But again, I suspect sometimes that the universe has a vested interest in making my life a pain in the ass, and throws problems at me that other people never have to go through.