Monday morning! I’ve already broken up a dog fight and spoken in three languages, and I haven’t even showered yet. So, I deserve to make a sweeping generalization:
I don’t love travel agents. They seem to be transported here from our grandparents’ generation; back when, in order to buy an airline ticket, one could go the Tom Ripley route and buy it at the counter in the airport, or else sit down in a storefront office plastered with improbable pictures of exotic lands to receive your red-backed, purple-printed, multi-page tickets.
What I mean to say is, they don’t seem to have caught up with my generation’s idea of what a vacation is – I don’t want to stay in a Holiday Inn; I don’t want the overpriced Continental breakfast; I don’t want patronizing tour guides and stuffy buses; I want to KNOW a place.
For my limited preferences (Western Europe), I do just fine on my own. But one day when I have enough money and time, I’m going to venture out of my comfort zone and when that happens, I’m going to want some help. And this moment, dear readers, will be helped along by only one other:
Because I love this travel company so much – and no, I don’t know them personally, but I want to, desperately, and will certainly call on them when I need to – I will retype their intro from their adorable but maddeningly flash-driven site below (copy edited, because that’s how I roll):
Trufflepig is three young men with a mountain of experience in travel. Out in the field we’ve been guides, researchers, bike mechanics and bellhops – working on the ground in more than 45 countries. At our desks we’ve planned trips, chartered yachts, balanced budgets and arranged travel the whole world over. We take our own photos, write our own words, research our own trips, and trust our own nose. We are the “Farmers.”
Trufflepig aims to provide travelers looking for help in planning trips with the sort of expertise that only comes from genuine knowledge and experience on the ground. We distill an ocean of travel information into a bottle of Burgundy. Or Badoit. Or moonshine. Depending on your tastes.
Our aim is to be trustworthy and consistently piggy. Trufflepig is young but serious, serious but excitable, excitable but professional, professional but different, different but honest.
Honestly, now, are they not the most perfect travel planners known to mankind? OH, and apparently Jacques Chirac says, “They know so much about cheese.”
I think I’m in love.
They also have “pigs” – friends and contacts all over the world who help them out, of which I want to be one so badly.
All of this gushing is to say that, knowing my readers the way I do, each of you has a dream vacation – one you know would never be the way you imagine it, because it would involve way too much research and you’d be fretting over what you might be missing the whole time. So, dare to dream – and see what these guys can do for you. (And let me know how it works out! And tell them I want to be a “pig,” too!)
Miss Expatria 
Love the name! Love the copy! and you totally belong with them. they would surely recognize you as a member of the tribe. only difference is you should cease considering yourself an expat and be the citizen of the world you really are. you have too much joy to define yourself by where you don’t live….
—sorry about typing, have my baby on my lap
i dug your message. you sound like a right pig. why don’t you call?
I found Trufflepig via an article regarding less expensive vacation options. When I read about pricing on Trufflepig’s website it states that prices start at $700 per person per day. That seems awfully high for a couple seeking an alternative to expensive European travel. My S.O. and I have travelled to Europe many times for about $250 per person a day including airfare, decent hotels and a rental car.