time away

I think I may have mentioned that Jack and I are taking a vacation.

We leave tomorrow afternoon for Fort Lauderdale and then head north to Port Canaveral to board a ship headed to the Bahamas. We'll sail for a few days and then head back home on Monday. Descriptive words in my mind about the trip: lovely, warm, sunny, sand, ocean, summer clothes, no worries, no work, no cooking/cleaning/blahblah. I will take lots of pictures for posting on our return.

There is a story behind this vacation. Several months ago, I received information about some training in Fort Lauderdale that my boss thought I should attend. Since the company would cover my airfare, car rental, hotel, and food, I suggested to Jack that we could go together and stay a couple of extra days on our dime. He said that if I could find cheap flights--less than $200 each--we could go together. I watched and watched the internet, checking regularly for flights. About two months ago, I found flights for $189 per person to Fort Lauderdale, talked to Jack about them, and we agreed to book them. I was pretty much not-so-secretly delighted by my smart, diligent effort.

I then went to the original email about the training to determine which hotel was hosting the training so I could book a couple of extra nights. That is when I realized the training was going to be in Jacksonville. Not Fort Lauderdale. Jacksonville. Jacksonville is on the northern border of Florida, then midway down the state, you see Orlando, then way down at the southern tip of Florida, that's were you find Fort Lauderdale. Just a few miles from Miami. Not at all by Jacksonville.

You can imagine my shock. I do not make these types of mistakes. No No not me. But not me or not, I did. Just to change the flights would cost $100 each. Flights to Jacksonville started at over $500 each. So changing the flights would have cost me at least $800. In a panic, I called Jack to explain what I had just done. His response was, as I recall, to laugh and tell the guys in his office about what I had done. When he stopped laughing, he pointed out that we could take a vacation to Fort Lauderdale and I could attend the training in July in Oklahoma City. Now that's planning--Oklahoma City in July? Delightful, I'm sure.

Next I began pricing hotels in Fort Lauderdale. It quickly became apparent that this training trip that was originally supposed to cost us about $500 was now going to cost $130 per night for a hotel, plus the $250 for the rental car, plus any activities we decided to check out, plus food. At that point, Jack suggested we (and by we, he meant me) try to find a cruise.

Let me say that I got a great deal on a cruise, and although the trip will be more than $500, it will be less than our usual flying vacation, and there will be beaches and ocean and good food and time away together. Sounds ideal to me.

Except that Jack loves to tell people about his FREE $2000 vacation. I sense that before we are back home, everybody on the ship and everybody at the hotels and restaurants we visit and at the car rental counter will know the story of our vacation.

Jack is already referring to it as "Our Memorable Vacation."