Travel Cards and City Passes

I came across something called a "Go Pass" the other day.  It looks like you can buy a pass that will cover entry fees in to various attractions in a particular city and you effectively get up to 50% off the entry fees.  It looks like quite a good deal, particularly if you are planning to do a lot of touristy things.  However, sometimes these places claim to be reducing the price considerably but the discount isn't always what they claim.  I'm tempted to get one, but the downside is that you are then kind of committed to spending a day or 2 days seeing all those places, even if you don't feel like it when you get there!!

Has anyone used these?  If so, are they as good a deal as they appear?

I've also been looking at city transport day passes - these look like quite a good deal also.  In Chicago a 24 hour pass is only $10 for unlimited travel on buses and trains, which seems a pretty good deal.  We will be needing to get from the airport to downtown on our arrival, sightseeing and then from our hotel to the Harley dealer in Glenview (about 20 miles north of downtown) to pick up the bike to start our journey on the Mother Road - so $20-30 each for  3 days in Chicago seems like a good deal.  It looks like San Francisco does a similar kind of deal covering buses, trains and the tram cars.

If anyone has any good advice or knowledge of these things please let us know - all help/advice gratefully received!

More Tinkering

We are still making some minor adjustments and changes to our plans.  When I made most of the hotel bookings, some locations were showing little or no availability for hotel accommodation, particularly the smaller towns in the North West area.  Just on the off chance, I looked again recently, and found that there is now some availability in locations that were previously full.  I've mentioned before that I've made most of the bookings through Booking.com, which is great because you can cancel or amend right up to the day before arrival.  Presumably they must only have a certain number of rooms or hotels at any one time and maybe extra come up at different times.

Anyway, we had originally planned to stay overnight in Port Angeles, on the north coast of Washington state, but we couldn't get any accommodation there.  I looked at Port Townsend, a bit further along the coast and opposite the bay from Seattle, but that was full too (apart from really expensive places).  Fortunately, I've now managed to find what looks like a nice budget hotel right on the harbour in Port Townsend, close to the downtown area (Harborside Inn).  The location looks fantastic, the hotel looks OK (what you would expect for the price really) and all the rooms overlook the harbour/bay.  Port Townsend seems like a really nice place to visit, very quaint and colonial!

Harborside Inn

The Pacific North West

The Olympic Peninsular

Here's a taster of what to expect when we get to Washington State - can't wait!

The Olympic Peninsular