The Past Weekend

March 12, 2007

Whew, what a busy weekend – or at least it seemed like it. I thought I had finally put all of Suzanne’s vacation questions/issues to bed for the upcoming Alaskan cruise on the Celebrity Mercury. We booked our airfare, hotel and transfers to and from the cruise ship. We booked our excursions for the cruise. What else could be left?

Suzanne is very anal on planning of vacations. She spends hours and hours – wait, make that weeks and weeks of time doing research for our vacations. I don’t mean that in a bad way because we are better prepared for these vacations than anyone else I know. Plus, I don’t have to do the research and she really loves and thrives on it. It’s just that I don’t really know what I am going to pack in which suitcase for a vacation that is still 3 months away. This weekend, I had to spend time with her and the kids and plan out the activities when we arrive and Vancouver and then after the cruise before we fly out the next day. Sometimes I would love to just take a vacation and wing it – or maybe relax and not do something every second. That’s where cruising works out wonderfully. Time on the ship is your time. If we took a land vacation, I would need to go back to work to recover from all the vacation activities. Again, I really do like that she does this, but it can be a bit overbearing at times.

She also took care of all the airfare, hotel and transfers for all of my family for this family reunion cruise. As most of my readers probably know, we also run a cruising blog over at Cruise Talk. I keep trying to get her more interested in doing cruising stuff over there, but her interest appears limited. It would be really easy to adapt the site to include travel agent type services. I have offered to set it up and such and to get her accreditation. Quite frankly, I was a bit surprised that she hasn’t been more interested in it. I guess she likes planning out her own vacations more

I also found time this weekend to work on some of my in project websites that I am developing. I hope to wrap up the newly designed 158th site for my America’s Army clan in the next couple of weeks. I am moving it away from it’s current CMS and moving to WordPress like this site. It’s been an interesting voyage with lots of learning. I am amazed at how much I have learned writing a bunch of plugins to do things that I needed on the old site. I should have a preview available soon.

Sean and I also dug out an old Civil War boardgame that we hadn’t played in a while. The game is Battle Cry. It’s a very war/strategy game that doesn’t take hours to play. The game is labeled as intermediate level difficulty which is good for Sean since he is still learning military tactical games. I guess he is learning well because he totally dusted me in our recreation of Bull Run. We have several more grandiose scale games, but usually find it hard to devote the 3 or 4 hours it takes to play them.

The family also got together for a family movie night on Saturday. We watched Mission Impossible III. We don’t go to the movies very often and just choose to wait for them to come out on DVD. I actually enjoyed this movie, certainly more than the first two movies. While still far fetched, it seemed to tone down the unrealism substantially from the previous two and managed to hold my interest throughout the movie.

Suzanne and the kids get a week off from dancing this week, so the whole family will be home each night this week. That’s a rarity for us.

Vancouver Arrangements All Set for Alaskan Cruise

March 8, 2007

Well, last night we finally made an executive decision on the plane tickets to Vancouver. We ended up using frequent flier miles for 2 tickets and purchasing outright 2 tickets. We will have to go out of the way through Dallas to get there, but the total expense for the 4 of us to get to Vancouver is only $1300 total. If we had purchased 4 tickets outright to Vancouver it would have been well over $2400. We also have some crazy flight time, because of the mileage tickets, but Suzanne and the kids will get to spend a week in Texas after the cruise with her family.

We also took care of the hotel arrangements, pre and post cruise. It seems there is some sort of concert event the night before the cruise and a regatta that weekend, so we were not able to find any good hotels in the down town area for less then $250. There were a few that appeared to be available online for over $300, but I’m not even sure that I could have actually booked those if I had followed through with all the booking steps. Downtown Vancouver is a great place to visit, so we had hoped to be able to spend a little time enjoying the sights the morning before the cruise, but it looks like the area is nearly all booked up.

The end result was that we booked a hotel both pre and post cruise near the airport. The hotel has free 24 hour transportation to and from the airport. That will make it very convenient for us as we are scheduled for a late arrival. The hotel booking also includes free breakfast.

Suzanne also booked a limo van to come pick us up at the hotel and take us to the cruise ship the next morning. The van will easily hold the 8 of us and even has a little trailer should we need the extra space for luggage.

Finally, for after the cruise, Suzanne booked a rental car for us to pick up right near the cruise terminal. The rental car will cost about the same as a cab ride to the hotel, but we’ll be able to see a bit more of Vancouver by having the car. We’ll stay at the same airport hotel, and then depart early in the morning for the airport, where we’ll be able to drop off the car.

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