One Week and Counting

One week from today the family and I are going to be taking our "summer vacation" to Disney World! We can't wait. It has been well over a year since I have taken any length of time off, and I have had a fairly hectic several months with tight deadlines, angry customers, and lots more travel than I'm used to lately, so it's coming at a much needed time. Kim has been doing her extensive research that she is famous for and has found us some incredible deals. Seriously I think somebody should hire her to do this stuff! If anybody has plans to go to Disney World you should definitely pick her brain when we get back.

I thought you might get a kick out of our extreme cheapness as exhibited in our convoluted travel plan for WDW. We have a Visa card that earns Southwest Airlines points, and we have earned enough points for 4 round trip tickets. I also have American Airlines miles enough for 1 round trip but not 2 (I do now but I didn't when we made these reservations). We considered having one person fly on American and the other 4 fly on Southwest, but that would mean that one parent would have ALL of the kids. So we considered buying just one ticket on Southwest. Until we saw the price of that one ticket. Then we considered having one of us fly on American and pay for one more ticket on American so that we would only be paying for one ticket on American, which would allow us to balance the parent/child ratio. Until we saw the price. Then we realized that when Southwest Airlines gives free round trip tickets, the way their pricing works it's really 2 one-way tickets, so 4 round trips is 8 one-way tickets. So here's what we finally ended up doing: On the way there Kim, Large, and Small will use 3 one way tickets on Southwest, while Medium and I fly on two one-way tickets on AirTran (which our friend Greg who works for Expedia helped us to get a good deal on - making them much cheaper than the other options we considered). We'll meet up at the airport and will proceed to the Happiest Place on Earth from there as one reunited, happy family. Then for the flight home, we will use the 5 remaining one way tickets on Southwest, which means that we'll actually be on the same plane! I know, I know, we're really ridiculously cheap.

One bit of bad news though - we have found out that WiFi is $10 per day there!...so I'm not sure we're going to be able to keep up with this NaBloMo thing while we're there. I had been assuming that there would be some access to free broadband internet in the park, but not so according to what we read today. Our only hope is that this iPassConnect thing that I have through work will let us get online while we're there - otherwise I think I'll have to drop out of this challenge, just as the guy who challenged me in the first place did :-) I'm definitely not paying the $10 - or if I do I definitely will only do it a time or two.

PS: To any bad guys who may be reading this and planning on robbing us blind, we have a ferocious dog and nosy neighbors. And we're going to have the whole house booby trapped with a bunch of those laser things that only Jack Bauer can get past. So don't even think about it!