Every year when spring arrives I get bitten by the vacation bug. I never plan a vacation too far in advance because of my obsessive personality. I am a plan maniac. So with spring comes my crazed action of vacation planning. What shall we do this summer I ask my family? "I choose a cruise", with that settled I set out to book a cruise but where and when that is always a problem, who has time off and where does everyone want to go? "I choose the Eastern Caribbean", with that settled I get everything going. Did I mention I make all the plans so that I can make all the decisions? I guess I am a control freak too. Enough about me lets talk about me, and my vacation. I spent every day for three months reading books, watching shows on travel and on line investigating, chatting and searching for information so I can plan the perfect vacation. Note: I must give my humble thanks to everyone from Cruise Critics, you guys are great, you give such good advice and so much information, and you guys are funny too. Now with our cruise booked and every possible detail planed to death, off we go on our summer vacation. The anticipation is just as much fun as the actual trip, booking the flight, cruises, hotel, car, tours etc. Getting the airline tickets, doing the document dance when the cruise tickets come in and getting confirmation from hotels, tours etc. That brings us up to one week prior to leaving and all I did that week was shop for everything I could possibly think of that we just might need, but will most likely never use, and didn't. The moral of this story is yes you can over buy, over pack and over plan, I am living proof.

Tuesday August 12th - I receive a call for the American Airlines informing me that they were over booked for our flight from LA to Miami and if we were willing to leave on an earlier flight they would like to upgrade us to first class. Well that took me about 5 seconds to make the decision to accept there offer. We were on the redeye out of LA and sleeping in first class all the way to Miami. It was a hell of a lot better that crammed in coach. Note: the following information is on how we travel for cheap. We save up air mile in three different ways so that we never pay for our air travel. The first is we use a credit card from our credit union that gives us air miles and let me tell you we us it for everything and I mean everything we can possible think of. I pay this card off every payday so that I never have to pay interest. It helps if you can access you account on line and use automatic transfers. Second through my husbands work they give out points for incentive and can be used for various things including air miles. The two good things about these methods is that when we book our flights we also get frequent flyers air miles which accumulate for our next flight and around and around we go trip after trip just paying for our taxes which cost us $28.00 each this trip from San Diego to Miami.

Thursday August 14th - We all went to work today and opted for a night flight to get a jump on our vacation. Our flight out of San Diego was scheduled for 7:30pm the airline once again bump us to a earlier flight leaving at 7:00 that was OK as spending extra time in LA was no big deal, It was fun people watching, you never know who you will see in LA or what for that matter. Ok (Gripe #1) In San Diego on the American Eagle flight check in security line, they made everyone take off there shoes and put them through the x-ray, for security reasons that was ok but that left you walking through the line without shoes, it was gross, hundreds of people walking barefoot on the airports dirty floors. I am thinking about writing a letter to our local news so they can do a story about the dirty feet in San Diego because it really sticks. HaHa Read more