...to be had at my finger tips.

We have decided that we want to do something celebatory. Not just the usual dinner but something "wow". Something really special.
Michael and I have our 20th wedding anniversary this month, next month he is turning 50, and Artie is leaving the nest and moving to Austin, TX and our best friend, Andy, has his birthday this month and wants to join in on the fun.
Our first thoughts were that we wanted to take a cruise on the Hudson River. We wanted something that would take us down to NYC and see the Statue of Liberty from the water and come back up. That was a no go...couldn't find anything that was doing that. Then I looked into smaller cruises. We could take an all day sail out of Kingston on the tall ship "Clearwater". It was commissioned to be built by Pete Seeger and it's mission is to promote envirionment issues dealing with the Hudson. That sounded fun but Michael thought that some of us would be bored. Bored? OK so I moved on.
I started to think of all things that I wanted to show the girls here on the East Coast and what haven't we done yet. Niagara Falls and Nova Scotia and Acadia National Park in ME. So I start looking into these possibilities. Niagara Falls is 6 hours away and we all agree that we don't want to be spending a lot of time in the car because we spend a lot of time in the car anyway and want to avoid that. I looked into flying and taking the train and taking the car ferry to Nova Scotia. Nothing is gelling together. I even looked into castles. I thought that it would be fun to spend the night in a castle and there a few here in NY. Then somehow this has all morphed into snorkeling.
Snorkeling.
We all love to snorkel. We have wonderful memories of being in the Bahamas and walking out our timeshare and snorkeling off the beach. Xan was just a baby and Artie must have been 6. Oh it was glorious. Why not go snorkeling?
I sit myself down in front of Expedia and my fingers are flying across the key board. We have so many variables. Because we travel and we want to squish this celebration in between shows we have about six different airports we could leave from. From Boston, Providence, Hartford, all the NYC ones, Albany, or Washington, DC. We can leave near where a show is ending or end up near a show that is just starting. We can fly to anywhere that there is snorkeling.
I started with the most northern island in the carribean and worked my way down. My fingers did the walking from the Dominican Republic to Aruba. I was there for about 7 hours straight. This is what I have done pretty much excusively for two days.
And we did call a travel agent to see if they could come up with anything better. You know, not really.
Nearing the end...I think. We have decided to fly in and out of Boston so that we can travel with Andy (but late last night I think that we might have changed our minds on this point) and we are either going to Jamaica or the Riviera Maya outside of Cancun. In both places we can stay on the beach and snorkel to our hearts content.
When I first started this search vacation packages were about $500 a person. I thought that that was reseasonable. But right before my eyes the cost of flying went up. Damn. Now we are looking at options from $600 (flight and villa) or $750 (for an all inclusive). How are we going to afford this? We talked about it yesterday and realized that we do all sorts of things that we can't afford and we want to do this so we will.
I must away to check out something that I thought of last night but refrained from getting out of bed to check on.
I"m obsessive about this kind of stuff...always thinking that there is a better deal to be had at my finger tips.