Mr. A and I have never really gone on a vacation together.  We’ve gone camping for the weekend two decades ago, but once our children came along we mostly stayed home.  Especially in the last decade since we’ve owned milking goats. It’s not easy to find someone to babysit your critters when you live out in the boonies and one of the chores is milking.

We looked into going a couple of weekends ago, but started to hyperventilate when we starting estimating how much it was going to cost to travel across the United States.   When we saw it would cost around $1000 just for the flight and hotel, Mr. A said we could build my office for that amount, so maybe we shouldn’t do it. We agreed we shouldn’t go.

But then a few days later Mr. A mentioned to his dad about the trip and the next thing you know, Mr. A’s dad says he has airline credits which had to be used within a couple of months and said he would be happy to let us have them.

All of a sudden our vacation was going to happen!     We asked AJ if he could milk for us and he agreed, so we quickly figured out when we wanted to leave and come back.  Mr. A relayed that information to his dad who purchased the tickets.  Once we knew everything was a go, I started looking for hotel deals.

Since I’m on this special diet, I need to have a refrigerator in the hotel room. I started looking at Expedia.com and they didn’t have that as an option.  When Mr. A asked me if I was going to use “one of those sites like Travelocity” I decided to switch over to Travelocity.   That allowed me to specify that we needed a “kitchen” (which is a microwave and refrigerator), which made it a lot easier to narrow down the hotels which would work for us.

We weren’t going to rent a car at first.  Besides when I registered with the hotel through Travelocity I saw that car rentals started at $97/day.

I called the hotel to find out how we should get from the airport to the hotel, and the guy apologized since our airline doesn’t fly to the airport which they are nearest to, saying we’d be at the mercy of the taxi drivers, which would charge at least $50, so I should call the shuttle service. Well, I found out that was going to cost $43 each way.  The lady said I could set up my reservations right then, but thankfully I decided to wait.

The next morning an email came from Travelocity with some offers and I decided to just check and see how much it would cost to rent a car.   I was amazed to see we could rent a car starting at $18 a day!  So we decided to rent a car.  That made both of us feel a lot better about everything, now we have more freedom.

The hotel room is going to cost just over $400 for three nights, and the car will cost just under $100.   I think another $200 should cover our food, gasoline, trips on the Metro and other expenses.  So it looks like we’ll be spending around $700 on this vacation.

If you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning you’ll know that Mr. A and I were remarried after being divorced for 15 years.  This mini-vacation will coincide with the date of our first marriage.  We’d have been married 24 years if we’d stayed together.

I’m really looking forward to this little vacation!