seryn

I've been browsing local B&Bs for a short trip. I found 3 regions of interest. Best part is that many of these places are having deals. The current top choice is half off. Another choice is half off in November. The third choice got vetoed because it was near our favorite pumpkin farm and as corrvin says, "Organic shouldn't mean inconvenient." I get why tiny little farmlets have limited hours and limited stock, but I get really tired of places selling stuff which require appointments.

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I've also gotten "approval" for booking the trip to Maui. This is completely contingent upon whether the local airport with the non-stop flight is doing body scans (not sure how you tell). And it's waiting hotel approval. SO is drag-arse about the trip anyway, and I don't travel well, so it seems like I need to get him invested in some aspect or it will absolutely suck.

My hotel choice is based largely on the Oyster.com information. I also picked the most expensive place. Everyone likes the Four Seasons. I'm not sure I'm a FS kind of woman. I mean I've got leg stubble... It is, surprisingly, not very much more expensive than other Maui hotels, though it's difficult to compare directly. Other hotels have specials. The FS never does. The FS doesn't charge a resort fee. Other places charge up to $50/day. Some of the hotels charge for parking. Some don't. Nowhere has included breakfast. And the hotels have zero interest in giving you an actual bottom line, tax-included total.

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Maybe the mini trip-ette idea will fail completely and we'll never want to go anywhere ever again. If I'm going to have a sixth trip in a row completely bomb, I'd rather it be a $200 B&B "weekend" than a $5K Maui trip.

Vacation plans are proceeding according to prior history. I'm overwhelmed by all the choices and dismayed by all the work involved. So now that I've chosen a hotel, discovered that non-stop flights exist, I have realized it's impossible to say "Any dates, 5 or 6 nights, with THAT hotel, and THAT flight; search all of September and October this year." Then I realized that I'd be paying a minimum of $750/night and that was before food and before all the excursions I wanted. Adding in the helicopter tour, the sunrise bike tour, and a boat/snorkel tour.... we'd be looking at at least $5500 with food.

I won't like it that much. I looked into options that would economize and realized fairly quickly that I didn't want to go if I felt like I should bring instant oatmeal packets and energy bars so I could "afford" the trip. Obviously there are places which could be scaled back without going to the extreme, but I'm the only one who really wants to go at all, we really should just pick somewhere else. My SO doesn't like to be outside very much. He said, "If you want to go to Hawaii, that's fine, pick somewhere that has good wifi so I can hang out in the room." You can see why I think we shouldn't spend all that money to go to Hawaii. I'd phone a friend, only I don't have any real life friends who would want to and could pay their own way. Not to mention my belief that couples who vacation alone should probably stay home and save the money for their impending split.

Now I'm looking at things we can drive to. But we've been just about everywhere in California at least once. Sometimes we didn't go to the big name attraction... Like we were in San Luis Obispo, which is the nearest decent size place to Hearst Castle, but we didn't go on the tour. We've been to San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, San Francisco, Napa Valley and the coast there, Mendocino, Yosemite, Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta. We've driven out of California into Oregon and Nevada a couple times each. I'm not saying that there isn't more to see around here, but that once you've been everywhere once, it's hard to choose to go back when there wasn't anything especially amazing the first time.

We like it here and around here. We know where everything is. But home itself always appears to be needing something. If I sit still long enough the vacuum cleaner seems to get highlighted. When I open the refrigerator to find there's nothing ready to eat but I know my SO won't want to go out after eating lunch with his coworkers. No one else ever changes my sheets. We need to go somewhere for it to feel like a holiday.

I'm not saying we can't spend any money, just that I can't justify the expense of going to Hawaii when I've chosen aspects that make it not a good value.

This always happens. After a couple weeks of effort and looking at plans and logistics. I'm mentally exhausted and don't want to go anywhere.

Since our vacation plans fell through after we talked while there was no internet here... we realized we'd both assumed the other person was gung ho. And we were both actually meh.

Now we're back at square zero. ... we want to go somewhere where there's something to see/do that cannot be done at home. We've gone on weekend trips where we just stay somewhere nice-ish and eat out, but the last one we almost spent the day shopping at Target because there was nothing to do there.

I want to do something hands-on but stay somewhere posh. I'd like a crafts camp or something at a nice country inn, but it would have to have some parallel tracked courses because crafts aren't popular with both of us.

I wouldn't mind a (supported: suitcases trucked along, etc.) biking type holiday if it was mostly flat and the weather was good. It's just weird how almost all those outdoorsy type trip ideas assume you're Edmund Hillary. I like being outside but I'm not hugely athletic. It's really hard to have a "Sunday drive" kind of biking tour, like the Lake District rambles popularized by British authors, if you live in the city. But there's really no reason to assume I'm going to be able to walk 15-25 miles a day given my current routine.

We're not really willing to fly anywhere. They treat regular people like criminals and let the actual criminals onto the planes. Might as well do jack squat and treat people decently. But I guess I could reconsider all options. Still, absolutely no New York. No "The South". No Africa. They have to speak a language we can get by in. That's pretty limited at this point to non-Arabic and non-Asian countries.

At this point, I'm so overwhelmed that even big ticket things underwhelm me. I was explaining that we didn't want to go to the Grand Canyon because it's just a pretty hole in the ground and they probably don't have food there since it's a national park. Mostly though, it always looks crowded or effing frigid. As in, "Where's your coat, you moron? Don't you know you're in the mountains?"

I already live where there are more people per square foot than there are chickens per proportional area in a factory farm. It's stopped being novel a while ago. The food's good, and during the week there are lots of nifty restaurants within walking distance.

Go ahead and suggest things assuming price is no object. I'm very frugal, but I'm not expecting a hotel in Paris to be the same price as a motel room in flyover country.