The devil is in the details

The money and the vacation

I got the money that was going to be used for my vacation (among other things) earlier this week. Yesterday I realized that I wasn't going to have as much leftover as I thought, thus meaning that I would have to scale back on the vacation that I was planning (and had been browsing on expedia for over a week). I was a little down and then another thought hit me.

On Tuesday night I had a long phone conversation with my best friend about different vacation destinations (because she's been everywhere) and she gave me lots of recommendations. The other half of our conversation was about how her boyfriend had taken her to peruse engagement rings so he could get an idea of sizes and what she liked. We talked a lot about how she felt about the matter (she thinks it is to early for him to be thinking about it) and whatnot.

And suddenly, on Wednesday I realized that (duh) this perusal of engagement rings meant that she was going to be getting married, possibly in as soon as a year. And that perhaps I ought to have money on hand to cover many of the expenses that would be associated with her getting married. I went through a little crisis where I wondered whether I should go on vacation at all or whether I should just save all the money as a cushion for unexpected expenses like one's best friend's wedding.

In the end I decided to continue planning my vacation and just scaling back the cost. I am going to spend the weekend looking both at cheaper ways to do the destination that I had decided on and also to research some places that I hadn't thought about as much before. (thanks for the suggestions guys, keep them coming.) Criteria=saftey, particularly for solo female travellers; lots to do so; ease of transport to the things to do; preferably by mass transit or walking, I have no desire to drive; and cost. I'm not sure about beachy places both because I feel like I'd get bored easily and because I sunburn so easily and don't want to have to spend my time indoors covering myself with burn lotion. As far as Canada is concerned, I've been to Vancouver, Whistler, Calgary, Banff, Ottowa and Quebec City once and to Toronto and Montreal mutliple times (Thanks road trip happy parents and close proximity to Eastern Canada while growing up!), I have actually been to Florida (1x), the US West of the Mississippi (2x to Colorado and 2x to SF) and NYC (? times but a loooong time ago) fewer times that some Canadian cities. I've never been to an islandy place and I've been to Europe twice. That's the extent of my travels, so I obviously have a lot of options. I still have to think about exactly how much I want to spend versus how much I ought to save (either way, I am going to earmark some money for the potential wedding monthly now, just to make sure that I don't get into a bad financial situation like I did last summer with all of my bridesmaid adventures). Gah! Who knew that travel and friends could be so complicated?

posted by Immunegirl @ 1:01 PM