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Rental cars are more expensive today than ever before. No, it's not because the rental car companies have decided to raise their prices. For the most part, the raised prices come from taxes and fees that the city and the state governments have been charging. No matter what it is that the government wants to raise money for, they usually turn to the rental car companies.

They realize that if they tap car rentals to tax instead of something else, the voting public probably will not be angry with them. Most of the time, when they raise taxes on rental cars, they are taxing people flyng in from somewhere else. Those aren't voters who can affect local elections. There's no problem hitting them up for a lot of extra fees and taxes.

If you do want to pay those extra greedy taxes and fees, there's a way. Don't hire from the airport. Those are the rental cars the politicians want to hit up. Instead, hire from downtown. Those are likely to be cheaper.

There are some things that the human instinct just induces people to do – even if no one tells them to do it. Humans on nearly every continent have built something like pyramids at one time or another. There are ancient pyramids in North Africa, Europe, Central America and even something like them in India. Humans built these in ancient times when they didn't even know of one another. It was just human instinct that made them do this.

But there could be a practical reason why everyone in ancient times built in this shape. When you have a tapering shape like that, most of the heavy duty building work is on the lower levels. Since pyramids have narrow tops, not as many stones have to be hauled up there. When one builds stepped pyramids like they did in Central America, hauling stones to the top would have been easier.

While smooth sided pyramids were the most common in Egypt, they built stepped ones too, sometimes. There are about 80 pyramids in Egypt built along the banks of the River Nile. They built them over a whole millennium, starting with the year 1640 BC. As popular as these structures were, surprisingly, no one really knows how exactly they were built. There seem to be no proper records that describe the building process. As far as anyone can tell, the stones were dragged on rollers to the top on long ramps.

When someone brings up staying at a B&B on a trip out somewhere, the image you get is usually of a cute little place run by a nice retired couple who are really not in it for the profit. Well, that's not really how bed-and-breakfasts work these days.

Ever since the Internet came along and allowed people to advertise their business, all kinds of people have begun to jump on board – people who wouldn't be in business if it wasn't very easy through the Internet to get a few customers.

These days, bed-and-breakfasts aren't really bed-and-breakfasts most of the time. For instance, AirBnB.com, the online service that allows you to book a room with any self-styled bed-and-breakfast anywhere in the world, often lists places that aren't even businesses. People with a spare room often put it up in the hopes of making a little quick money. A real bed-and-breakfast is supposed to be licensed; these places on the other hand, usually, are not.

There are all kinds of lodging options available to you anytime you take your family out on vacation. You could choose to stay at a hotel, a motel, or even a rented home. Few people though actually think of luxury vacation home rentals as possibilities. It's possible that the very idea appears too expensive to them.

Luxury vacation home rentals are typically apartments or homes of one description or another that come fully furnished. Rentals don't typically feel any different from a hotel. It's just that these places are bigger, more comfortable and you have much better privacy than you ever could ask for at a hotel.

The trick of course is finding a luxury rental that's priced so that you can afford it. Try these methods.

You'd be surprised how there can be a luxury vacation home rentals out there hiding in plain sight. Often, you don't have to actually find any secret websites that give you deals or anything. Just try the tourism board in the town you wish to visit. Ask for a tourist information packet, and they'll send you a bunch of information on all kinds of things you can do their information about where to stay. Usually, they have some pretty attractive discounts going for vacation rentals.

The travel companies love to quote Thoreau for his quote about autumnal tints when they try to write brochures to appeal to leaf peepers – tourists who travel to marvel at the brilliant show of color that nature comes up with as its last hurrah before shutting down for winter every year.

Foliage tourism is big business in America. Each one of the New England states attracts about half a billion worth of tourism from the leaf peepers every year. At least they did before the recession took hold. More and more states now are beginning to take note of how great business can be in this area. States like Texas and Alabama – not your usual fall color places – are happy to announce their own foliage tourism programs these days.

Of course, it's hardly a great idea for a business to invest much in a natural phenomenon. One stiff rainstorm could sweep through the place and take all the leaves with it. It would put an end to the foliage season in 10 min. And then, even when these things don't happen, it's hardly possible to predict when leaves turn.

Every year, I like to take my children to the zoo. They are great animal lovers and it is one of their favorite family outings. I always allow them to get one thing from the gift shop, and we all have a great time. I have to say that seeing my children react to the zoo animals gives my wife and I a lot of laughs!

My son always likes to start at the reptile house, and I think a big part of that is the fact that his little sister hates the reptile house! In fact, oftentimes I will take my son to the reptile house while my wife and daughter wait outside and have a snow cone. While snakes and lizards are not my favorite zoo animals, I do have to admit that I get a kick out of watching my son make the gestures and mannerisms of a snake or lizard when he thinks I am not watching. Whenever we leave the building, he always has this mischievous look on his face, and my wife and I know he has something planned for his sister.

My little girl always wants to go and see the giraffes and zebras. I asked her one time why she likes these zoo animals so much, and she said it is because they remind her of horses, which are her favorite of all animals. She loves to get as close to the giraffe exhibit as possible in hopes that one will lean its long neck down so she can pet its muzzle. I always try to tell her that the barrier is too far away for it to reach her hand, but she tries anyway, and the little determined look she gets on her face is so cute that my wife and I can't help but laugh!

As every married couple knows through talking to their friends and watching wedding plans go awry at other people's weddings, you always need to be prepared for unexpected expenses. When it comes time for their honeymoon though, they relax. They believe that they've done all the planning they need to do. They stretch out on a beautiful beach somewhere. Well, for any honeymoon on a budget (which would be practically every honeymoon), you always have to be prepared for the unexpected.

When you're traveling to a distant location, you can never know for sure that everything's going to go according to plan. You always discover that you've underestimated something or that some someone's neglected to tell you about a few costs.

For instance, it's easy to decide that you'll fly to the Bahamas and since that's a six-hour flight away, that you don't really need to work in any extra money for food at the airport. The thing is though, that you could easily forget that you've booked a flight that's not all that direct. To save on expenses, you could have booked a flight that included a layover. What do you do then?

You keep seeing these travel deals all the time on Facebook and Twitter – flights at $10 a night, hotel rooms at $90 a night, car rentals a $10 a night, trips to the Far East where you get a seat for your wife for free – are these cheap travel deals for real?

Not only are there real, everyone already knows they are real, too. Internet-savvy holidaymakers and travelers have known for quite a while that the social networking sites – Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and the others – make all kinds of exclusive deals available to anyone who's willing to follow them on the social networking sites. You get cruise line deals, restaurant deals, chores, car rentals and so on.

Every travel industry company has a Facebook page and a Twitter presence. If you're interested in cheap travel deals and don't have an account on the social media places, you’d better get started right now. Once you're there, look for all the travel companies that you know of and do what you can to follow them on Twitter or like them on Facebook. Right away, the cheap travel deals will come to you.

Some people consider a visit to their state's fair a kind of annual family event that a year just wouldn't feel the same without. Others consider them a real anachronism that bores them to death. Either way, whether you attend or not, it's your tax dollars at work there. While you may be able to get out of visiting state fairs, you don't ever get out of paying to support them. Usually, state fairs aren't able to manage on the price of admission and all the food sales they make.

In the Oscar-winning movie My Cousin Vinny, fashionable New Yorker Joe Pesci shows up in small-town Alabama to try a case. He goes into a local diner for a meal and finds the chef shoveling large chunks of lard onto the skillet to make pancakes. He looks at this in disbelief and asks the chef “Have you heard of the ongoing cholesterol problem in this country?"

You'll find that state fairs are kind of like that with the food they serve. You'll find stalls there that sell banana sandwiches fried in butter, beef jerky coated in chocolate, funnel cakes – there's just no telling what kind of food you'll find them serving there.

People keep buying of course, because it takes them back to a time when food was just uncomplicated and they could eat whatever they found. In short, while you can find any atrocious recipe you want at the state fairs, you really need to watch out for your health.

The hotel industry had its worst possible year three years ago in 2009. And while things have been picking up somewhat since then, they aren't as great as you would think. If you have been licking your chops and thinking you could get them for whatever low price you had in mind, those kinds of hotel deal aren't available. The hotel corporations are holding the line on the prices they charge. What they do to sweeten the deal is to offer better extras.

No, they aren't giving you better amenities – to cut back on those too. Instead, they offer you a free extra night, free gift cards, free parking and other such things. This is the last year they'll do this though. They are really looking forward to how the travel industry will truly recover in 2012.

Know how American has quit nearly every third-party travel website? They did that because for every sale they made through one of these websites, they had to pay a huge commission. An airline can afford to do that because there aren't that many airlines for you to choose from. Eventually, you will have to come to American for something or the other. When it comes to hotels though, there are thousands of them out there. They can't really quit Travelocity or Expedia.

They say that the whole vacation house swap thing only became popular once the hit movie The Holiday took the idea out to the masses. In the movie, Cameron Diaz is a rich LA type of person who decides that she's had enough of the highflying lifestyle for a while. She decides to swap her house with a stranger from faraway England – a life in the quiet countryside. They both love the change – living life as a local would in another country.

It got a lot of people thinking – how great would it be if people could actually swap houses. They would suddenly be stepping into someone else's life. In a whole other country, to boot. It wouldn't be like staying at some nice polite hotel. It would be the ultimate in tourism – living the life of a local in a faraway place.

You could look in their drawers, in their cupboards, see how they used their kitchen, their wardrobes, look at how they stocked their bookshelves, look at the kind of schoolwork their children got . Why, lots of people would do a lot to be able to spy on another person's life in their own town.

Know why the airlines are so tightfisted about battening everywhere they can on the flying public? It's because they can't batten on their workers. In the general workforce, only about 10% of all workers are unionized. Nearly one out of two air transportation workers on the other hand are unionized. It's very hard for the airlines to try anything funny with them. And oh – you hate those $25 baggage check-in fees that the airlines routinely charge, don’t you? Those are directly because of how unionized the baggage handlers are.

You probably think you're being a smart money saver stuffing as much into your one suitcase as possible. For baggage handlers though, those heavy bags are to be manhandled from carts to the plane, to the conveyor belt and so on. There are all kinds of health problems they have to put up with because of this.

Baggage handlers in general have a better reputation these days than they used to. A large part of that is down to how there are fewer bags lost in transit these days. But is that really what's going on? Are baggage handlers really deserving of credit for this?