Preparing To Book!

This week was our "vacation bid" week at work, meaning the time when we book or "bid" our weeks of vacation for the following year. I am very pleased to report that I got everything I wanted. I have the holiday week off in August, a week in February to go up and see Carrie after she has the baby and two weeks off together in April to go to Arizona and California.

Ryan and I have started seriously shopping for flights the past two days and things started out good, but then started to take a bad turn. On Wednesday I found us flights on Travelocity from Maine to Arizona with only one stop over for $450 each, taxes in, round trip - which is damn good for travelling so far. We mulled it over and kept searching. Then the best deal we could find was Air Canada flying out of Fredericton for almost a thousand dollars, so double the first price we found. We were like "uh-oh"! We were also finding that a lot of the airlines were now selling out for the dates we wanted. Ryan went on a mission yesterday while at work and managed to find us the first deal I was talking about from Maine with the only one stop over for $488 each, taxes in, etc. Only forty bucks more but this is booking through the airline directly as well, which gives us the flexibility to modify the booking (which booking with the travel website doesnt - once you book it on the travel site, it's set in stone. Better hope you don't get sick or anything else happens) and by booking with the airline directly, we save the surcharge that Travelocity charges for making the bookings, so we're probably coming out ahead in the long run.

So Ryan has "held" the tickets and he's going to confirm them today. It's hard to believe that this trip is actually coming together! We've talked about it for years now and once Angela moved to San Diego we thought we should go for it. We have Ryan's parent's place to stay at for free in Arizona, we can stay with Angela and Darren in California, we're never going to be able to travel to these places any cheaper and we might as well do it now before we have a family.