Car Insurance

Every night when you come home and pull into your driveway you take a long look at your brand new convertible. This is your dream car. You scrimped and saved for a long time to get it and it is your pride and joy. It purrs like a kitten and you relay enjoy driving it. In short, it is a dream come true.

But winter is coming and you don’t want to use your dream car in the snow where it will be subjected to road salt and chemicals that will, literally, eat it alive. So you want to store it for the winter and have it ready for spring.

Classic car enthusiasts usually go through a driving season of two or four months and then store the car for eight to ten months. Or maybe you have a home up north for the summer and move south for the winter and have a car at each location that sits while you are away.

Or you have to go away for a few months on business, or are in the military and have been deployed overseas and can’t take your car.

Comfort Inn, Leisure Centre

Ireland has a new hotel at the infamous Togher interchange, linking Cork, Dublin and Limerick. In fact the Comfort Inn and Leisure Centre PortLaoise is Ireland’s first motorway hotel and provides full-service facilities including 24-hour reception, 90 rooms, with complimentary high-speed Internet access, bar and restaurant, meeting rooms, and a dedicated leisure and fitness club offering a 20m indoor heated swimming pool, with 30 ft ceiling and spectacular glass walls, a children’s pool, sauna and steam room and exercise room for the latest cardio, fitness and resistance training. The club also offers a wide selection of beauty therapy treatments. Aug 26, 2006

Grand Central Trains
Grand Central Trains is the name of a new railway company that has announced plans to introduce services between Sunderland and London Kings Cross on Sunday 10 December. A recent Court hearing rejected GNER plans to stifle the operator even before it made its first service. Grand Central points out that it will get no government subsidy. First class passengers can expect to enjoy traditional seating patterns with wider, reclining seats and adjacent power points for phones, personal entertainment or laptops. Standard class passengers will benefit from intercity levels of comfort with improved seating and leg room, which will have the added advantage of providing additional space for luggage. Power points again o be provided for working, personal entertainment or phones. Grand Central says that cyclists will be welcome aboard.

For all the contentiousness surrounding how to modernize Los Angeles International Airport, most everyone agrees that rental car companies need to be merged at one location.

More than 40 rental companies are scattered in the vicinity of LAX. By centralizing their operations, traffic going into and out of the airport’s central terminal area would be reduced.

“By consolidating the rental car deliveries, you have a more compact and controlled and very much lower volume of rental car shuttles into the airport,” said Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who has teamed with L.A. Mayor James Hahn on a proposed LAX Master Plan.

Under the Hahn-Miscikowski proposal, rental car companies would be brought together at a new facility at West 98th Street and Airport Boulevard. Passengers arriving at LAX would take an elevated light rail tram, called a “people mover,” to the site. Several lots of rental cars would replace what is now long-term parking at Lot C.

Consolidated car rental facilities are common at other airports, such as San Francisco International Airport. But unlike those facilities, where a shuttle bus is used to ferry passengers from all car rental agencies to the airport, the LAX proposal would focus on people-mover transport. Still unclear is whether car rental agencies would still be allowed to pick up and deliver passengers using their own shuttle buses.

The proposed facility could create a more level playing field for smaller car rental agencies that currently can’t afford to provide service directly to the terminals. Instead, they now send courtesy vans to Lot C, where passengers arrive from terminals on shuttle buses.

L.A. City Councilman Bernard Parks, who proposed his own LAX Master Plan earlier this month, said he would like the consolidated rental car facility to be south of the airport, near Aviation Boulevard and Imperial Highway. Under the Hahn-Miscikowski plan, that location is designed for an inter-modal transportation center that would take passengers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Green Line station to airport terminals via the same people mover that stops by the rental car facility.

Denny Schneider, vice president of the Alliance for a Regional Solution to Airport Congestion, a group of community organizations and elected officials from localities near the airport, said having the rental car facility closer to freeway access would make it easier for travelers not familiar with L.A.

By contrast, Lot C is surrounded by surface streets, said Schneider, whose group has allied with Parks on his LAX Master Plan. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had people in rental cars ask us if they’re in Beverly Hills yet,” he said.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, PAYLESS CAR RENTAL INTROduced a corporate account program designed just for small-business travelers. It offers a 5 percent discount off the lowest rate available at the time you make your reservation (typically including low promotional rates). Because the rates at Payless are usually significantly less than the rates at major car rental companies to begin with, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better deal. Keep in mind, however, that Payless caters mostly to the leisure travel set, so you may occasionally find yourself in a long line with the straw-hat-and-sandals vacationing crowd. But at least you’ll know you’ve shaved a few dollars off the travel budget. Payless has rental facilities in 120 cities in the United States and abroad.

For the third consecutive year, Enterprise gets the prize for its no-nonsense approach to car rentals. Enterprise is the Wal-Mart of car rentals (with more than 6,000 locations), so expect low prices but few frills. You won’t get frequent-flier miles and the other perks that bump up rates at other rental car companies. Enterprise’s rates are about 20 percent less than those of its competitors, but you can still rely on clean cars, helpful employees and plenty of on-airport locations. Frequent renters can get even lower rates when signing up for its Corporate Class program. And for five out of the last six years, the company has ranked highest in the J.D. Power and Associates Rental Car Satisfaction Study.