February 2021: Winter Vacation in NH: Pre-trip

Pre-trip

Finally, a trip! This one has been a long time in the making. Actually it basically is the result of last spring’s debacle. You see, when it became apparent that our April 2020 Disney Cruise was not happening for us, but before a) JetBlue allowed for the canceling and changing of flights and b) before life fully shut down, my mom tried to help us salvage our vacation by letting us use her RCI timeshare points to book a resort in Orlando. Obviously, with life shut down, and the resort closed for months RCI had to do something. No surprise to anyone, what they did wasn’t super impressive, but…

Whenever you do an RCI exchange, there is an exchange fee. So they put a credit for the exchange fee on the RCI account and refunded the points to the use year. The exchange fee credit had to be used by September 2020 just to get something on the books. So when I finally could breathe in July, given that we still had a cruise booked for April 2021, and Nick basically didn’t use his vacation time in 2020, we decided to use the credit for February vacation. Knowing NH was (is) being a little stingy with decreasing travel restrictions, and that our employers are following them, we decided to stick with northern New England. And when we started looking at resorts, we decided to stick with NH. This ended up being a VERY smart choice. By the time February vacation rolled around, there were exactly 2 states in the country we were allowed in without either a pre or post travel quarantine, and one of them was our own.

So for the deets...February 21-28 in a huge (sleeps 8) one bedroom unit at the Suites at the Eastern Slope Inn in North Conway, NH. Those who are familiar with my day trips probably recognize that this is an area we day trip to a couple times a year, so it should come as no surprise that I didn’t exactly do, or need to do much planning. Basically I did none at all, which given the fact that I’m trying to be a speech pathologist in a school in a pandemic was not such a bad thing...although I wouldn’t have minded the need to do some planning, because it is something I actually enjoy doing. And admittedly, my lack of advanced planning cost us the ability to do a couple of activities we had sort of wanted to, thanks to this reservations required, limited, and book too fast world we are living in right now. Oh well...maybe next winter.

So anyway...the months turned to weeks, then days. We dealt with 5 months (and more to go) of massive water restrictions at our house, this insane school year, and we both started (and I finished) the covid vaccine series. And then, with a dog who apparently still remembers what a suitcase means looking on sadly, we packed. 

And then I packed some more. Have I mentioned that a week in FL in February only requires a suitcase and a backpack? But eventually, we made it to vacation.