Tuesday evening. The skies are gray. And we’re a million miles away, thinking about some of the following things…

1. Like another low-cost carrier sale. TUIfly is selling off winter one-way fares for €11 apiece, taxes and surcharges included. On sale through midnight on Sunday, October 28, these fares are good for travel from November through February.

2. Like Slovenia. Thanks to the Guardian’s Mat Smith, who teases us with tales of night tobogganing in Slovenia.

3. Like green lifestyles, courtesy of our friend Denise Young’s La Vie Verte blog, which appears to be churning out green posts by the truckload.

4. Like free museums. In January, the French government will offer free admission to 14 museums and monuments for a six-month trial period. The cultural sites with waived admission include the fab Cluny Museum in Paris.

We purchased a Belgrade-Ljubljana one-way JAT ticket on Sunday night, for travel in late July. We were, as the Brits say, chuffed.

The ticket came to just RSD5,942 (€74; $99). The JAT search engine worked fine, and we were approaching that magic, banal moment that drives all online air travel purchases: the invitation to print an e-ticket.

But the moment didn’t arrive. Instead of seeing a screen confirming our purchase, we were greeted by a screen informing us that we’d merely reserved our ticket, and that we had just four days to drop by a JAT office to purchase it.

Happily for us, there’s a JAT office here in New York. Yesterday morning we made our way to the JAT office on Madison Avenue to pick up our ticket. After a brief chat with two very friendly ladies, we were told that we’d need pay with cash or a money order. We ran down to an ATM to obtain cash to buy the ticket, and there it was: our handwritten, old school JAT ticket, for under $100. Its bright red duplicate and accompanying booklet of contract conditions and notices were reminders of the old, pre-Internet days of travel booking—as was the (unexpectedly) completely satisfying experience of purchasing a ticket from live, actual people in an office covered with airline posters and calendars.

Photo by Eriol

It’s Wednesday, a.k.a. midweek madness freak out day.

On our minds:

1. The Tirol tourist site. First of all, there’s no regional tourism logo as timeless as that white-on-red “Tirol, “the dot of the “i” safely lodged in the cross of the “t.” But beyond that, the Tirol tourism site is just so crisp and gorgeous that we’re suddenly, unexpectedly, ready to pack our bags for a summer wander through the Lienz Dolomites. (See Lienz, above. Pee-ritty, right?)

2. Doing research for our upcoming Balkan jaunt, we came across Hotel Park, a Ljubljana hotel that looks like a kick-ass place to rest our Cheapo heads. Hotel Park appears to be characterized by that simple central European modernist feel that makes us limitlessly happy. Plus we like the rates: €60 for a double in high season sounds awfully nice.

3. We’ve mentioned ace Euro budget flight finder flycheapo more than once. We realize that we’ve neglected another useful budget airline digest site: attitude Travel, which provides LCC info for Europe and beyond. Check out attitude’s European low-cost carrier map right here.