Pretrip
Cast of Characters:
Me: 32, exhausted school SLP, Disney dork, vacation planner, still working on that Christmas spirit concept after 6 years of retail Christmases
Nick: 31 (yeah, yeah, I robbed the cradle), my husband, who believe it or not is still an optician, he’s a jazz music fan, and a fan of food
Last year over Christmas break, we had subzero windchills. Said subzero windchills continued for something like 3 weeks, with just a brief break, before more weeks of that. During that hellish period (I’m convinced hell is a cold place, not a hot one), I started doing random searches on the Hilton website, while cursing the fact that I was spending my winter vacation hibernating, and hiding from the cold. No joke, it was so cold that I even refused to go to the movies, because the walk across the parking lot would be too miserable.
During one of those random searches on the Hilton website, I found what I considered to be a fantastic price for a weekend in New Orleans leading up to Christmas this year. I booked it, and then waited months for Southwest to open up booking for late December, to know whether trip booking would progress further.
May rolled around, and Southwest opened their booking. Flights were not what I was hoping for when I booked a Saturday to Monday hotel stay. But, with a little shopping, we worked things out, and flights got booked. Step 2 towards making this happen!
Once all the details were in place, the base of the trip was this: Friday 12/21, fly on JetBlue from Boston, non-stop to New Orleans, after work. Stay at the Hilton New Orleans Airport for the night. On Saturday 12/22, move to the Hampton Inn Downtown/French Quarter for two nights. Fly home on Christmas Eve, via Southwest. It would be a whirlwind, but we were both beyond excited.
I did some very basic early planning, and then it all got sidetracked. The school year started much crazier than anticipated (How many move ins did we get this year?! How did I end up with a year’s worth of evals before Christmas?!), and as an added bonus, I turned into a home nurse when Nick had surgery the 3rd day of the school year (He’s fine now...I may never recover fully from packing an open wound).
So basically, it was 2 days before departure before I spent 30 minutes on TripAdvisor to make a list of must see Christmas stuff in New Orleans. I called that good enough for planning, double checked reservation stuff, and much to the dismay of our little dog Gizmo, packed my suitcase, expecting departure day to be nothing short of chaotic, especially with bad weather expected and a full moon the day after that last day of school before the break for Santa’s visit. The night before departure day I dropped the last of the Christmas stuff at its destination, since we would be spending Christmas Eve at Nick’s parents’ house, and then starting the holiday rounds immediately Christmas Day. And then printed boarding passes and crossed my fingers that I would be breathing a giant sigh of relief, boarding an aircraft in 24 hours.
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