If you’re in New Hampshire and you order a pop in a restaurant, most likely you’ll get a blank look from the waiter (this depends, of course, how deep inside New Hampshire you happen to be). To get pop in New Hampshire, you must order either tonic or soda. Soda is what you order in Maine as well. Of course if you order a soda here on PEI, you might get pop plus ice cream.

This sort of thing often creates more pressing problems when you’re surfing the web in anticipation of travelling, especially travelling abroad.

For example, this spring we’d planned to go to France for a couple of weeks (a trip that eventually gave way to a kitchen renovation, but that’s another story). With wee Oliver along, we decided that the best option might be to rent an apartment or house or other self-contained place to stay. We’d just lived for two weeks in the Best Western Hotel in Charlottetown, and didn’t want to go through another experience of having to keep Oliver from crying so as to not awaken other guests.

What I didn’t know is that this sort of accommodations in France are usually referred to as gîtes. I searched for things like house rental france and rent apartment in paris but didn’t really find a motherlode of opportunities. It’s only when I saw a brief snippet of something on the Travel Channel last week in Boston on gîtes that I clued in, and sure enough this website is exactly what I was looking for.