Me: 38, still a school SLP, still the resident travel points and miles addict, still the family trip planner
Nick: 37, still selling Fords through the commercial division of a local car dealership. Still the resident passenger prince
I’m not even sure where this trip starts. I guess we’ll start last year with April vacation. As we sat in the Albuquerque Sunport, we discussed future vacations. Southwest had opened for February vacation a couple days earlier, while we were driving all around the state of New Mexico. I’d been intending to finally visit Disneyland and Southern CA this February vacation and Arizona for April vacation, but over a month of stalking JetBlue flights to San Diego had yielded…nothing. And…we’d booked a cruise for this April vacation. So we talked things through. And we totally overhauled plans.
While sitting in that Albuquerque airport, we booked roundtrip flights Boston to Tampa for February vacation. Then while on our layover in Denver, we (I) revised one of our flights to give us a more comfortable layover on the way home. And we got final permission from mom to use her RCI points for a week in Orlando. She’d been begging me to use her RCI points for awhile, but they don’t typically fit my vacation style.
Once back in NH, I hurried up and booked a night on points to start our trip at the Hyatt Regency Clearwater Beach. Chase Ultimate Rewards Points transferred to Hyatt meant I got a room that was going for about $700 a night (WTF) for the price of parking…a whopping $38 with tax. And then after some RCI analyzing, I booked a week in a one bedroom at the Hilton Grand Vacation Club Tuscany Village in Orlando for the remainder of the trip.
At some point during the summer, Southwest changed my flights, and I was eligible to change to flights in and out of Manchester. And then they revised my flight home again, and I was ABLE TO GET US ON THE NONSTOP FROM TPA TO MHT FOR NO EXTRA CHARGE! Guys, this was like a $1000 savings for the two of us one way. I never would have paid that much money. But what a game changer for this trip.
On Black Friday I bought massively discounted tickets to Sea World and Busch Gardens through Undercover Tourist. And for months I booked and rebooked rental cars. We discussed plans. Disney announced that the Festival of the Arts would run through the Monday of vacation, so we added a day at Epcot to our plans. Then Nick realized that we’d be in FL during Universal’s Mardi Gras season so he requested a day at Universal for that. We’ll see about that one.
The countdown got lower. I dodged ten billion germs in January and February (I guess I did my time with the month of walking pneumonia in November), survived so much cold air in January that they had to do a full week of indoor recess due to extreme cold, shoveled a winter’s worth of snow in 3 weeks in February (and ran out of room to put said snow), ran between 3 schools testing kids, and attempted to make plans for the trip.
I got plans situated and festival food lists made. And then…4 days before departure, I got a phone call from mom shortly after I got home from work that pretty much turned life upside down. My grampa had died in his sleep. Now…he was 100, so this wasn’t totally unexpected. But at the same time, there had been no real indicators other than him being 100. After a scary summer and fall, courtesy of the side effects of a surgery that probably shouldn’t have happened, a hospital in Manchester had restored him back to his pre-summer surgery health, and we’d gotten grampa back in time for the holiday season, and as a result, he was back to living mostly independently…at 100 years old.
While I was more than willing to adjust travel schedules, in the end mom and my uncle were insistent that grampa (who always told me to have the next trip booked before I returned from one) would be devastated to disrupt a vacation. Add in the fact that additional time to plan made it easier on my Virginia based stepsister to get home for services and…after a whirlwind couple of days, we were still headed to FL as scheduled.
Thanks to a LOT of reports that needed to be written, an unexpected daytrip up north to help mom with funeral arrangements, and an evening spent making photo boards and funeral clothes shopping, I packed (and bought our Universal park tickets) the day we essentially left.
Because our flight was leaving Manchester Airport, a whopping 10 minutes from my in-laws’ house, at 5:45 Saturday morning and my in-laws (bless them) were keeping the dogs for us for the week, we stayed at their house Friday evening. So I packed when I got home from work. I had quite the audience for this.
But…eventually the packing got done, and we made it to my in-laws’ house around 6:30 or so. Kim fed us, we chatted for a bit, and then Nick, Gizmo and I headed upstairs, where Nick slept much better than Gizmo or I did.
So what were the trip plans? Well…stay tuned…
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