I know I go on a lot about how a vacation home rental - aka self-catering in the UK and Europe - is a great way to save money, live like a local and have total freedom on a visit to the UK. If you are coming with a few friends or a big family, you just can't beat the savings. And the standards are usually very comfortable.
Even better, it's not too late in the season to find some excellent value deals on vacation home rentals, in good locations, for this summer and early autumn.
But I also think that finding a cottage or cabin to rent in a foreign country is a bit like figuring out the bus schedule in a new city. Where do you begin? How do you find out about vacation homes? Who can you trust?
The best way is to start out with a few good websites. That's where I come in. I've been looking around and checking things out for you:
Somewhere deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border, at CERN - The European Particle Physics Laboratory - the chambers of a gigantic machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are being cooled to absolute zero. When that happens, sometime in August, the world's biggest ever physics experiment will start, designed to reproduce in micro-miniature (we hope), the Big Bang that most scientists believe began the Universe.
The science blogsphere has been buzzing about this experiment for years - with doom sayers suggesting that starting up the LHC could produce new particles called strangelets, monopoles and, gulp, even black holes that could consume the Earth.
I hasten to add that some of the best brains in the world have looked into this and have concluded that no, the end of the world is probably not nigh. But...
If you are in Liverpool this summer, you can get the lowdown on the Big Bang Experiment, learn all the facts and, possibly, scare yourself silly at the free, Big Bang! exhibit at the World Museum Liverpool. The exhibit, put together by London's Science Museum, is touring the country and will be in Liverpool until September 22 - that is if we are all still here...
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