The Trip! Yay, we leave in two days for vacation. I am soooo excited. I would probably be excited to be going anywhere, as long as it means getting away and no work, but I am super excited about going on a cruise. We've been on one 4 day cruise before and loved it. We did have our vacation narrowed down to either a Hawaiian cruise or Washington DC. Well, that was when we thought we were going in August and would have more time. Because of Chad's tentative job offer, it doesn't look like he will be here for the summer and we'd like to have a family vacation before he leaves us for several months. Yes, that's right. A FAMILY vacation. We are pulling the kids out of school for a week. We had to do this when Chad was able to get the days off and my girls' team had a bye week. We decided to narrow things down and settle on a cruise this time, but decided against the Hawaiian one. When we do that one we would really like to take more time to stay both before and after the cruise and not feel rushed. We'd settled on a Western Caribbean cruise leaving out of Tampa, but the flights were difficult. We would have had to fly to S.F.. then to Denver and then to Tampa, leaving at 6 AM and getting there at 11 PM their time. Not only this, but we would have had to fly standby. I decided to do some checking on the Mexican Riviera since the port is so much closer to us and we were able to find a cruise for the same exact dates, same type of ship with better reviews and it saved us a $1,000 in airfare and cruise charges, leaving us more to spend on excursions and other things. Also, and the biggest hoorah for us is that it only takes 2 hours to get to LAX. Probably would be faster, but we're leaving on a twin prop engine plane. We'll be taking off around 5pm Saturday the 28th and arriving around 7pm. I got an awesome deal on our hotel through priceline, we'll be staying at the Westin Lax. Sunday we have a ride van reserved to pick us up at the hotel and take us to Long Beach to the cruise terminal. We are doing Carnival. We had a good time with them last time, and their kids programs are rated really high, especially on this particular ship (The Pride). This ship also has really good ratings from all the different message boards and travel sites I've visited.

We will have 2 days at sea and then arrive in Puerto Vallarta. I have paid for a canopy excursion, definitely NOT through the cruise ship. I did research and chose a company with rave reviews. The one the ship uses has good reviews too, and of course it is cheaper to book directly with them than with the cruise, but the one I went with still has better reviews and it was a decent price. This is one of those zip-line things through the tree tops. The kids are sooo excited about it and actually so am I. We don't have to be back to our ship until 10pm, so we have part of the afternoon and all evening to do other things as well. We'll decide after we're there what else we'd like to do, whether it's something beachy or city or both.

Mazatlan is the next port and I have booked a private all day city tour. There's this one guy who posts a lot on ?Cruise Critic and he's not allowed to advertise or ask for business or anything luke that, they watch him closely, but he offers lots of advice to anyone who asks, which of course people like and is good for his business anyway. People rave about his tours, I guess he's really interesting and friendly, and so are his associates. Most posts I've seen regarding his (and employees) tours, people say are the best tours they've taken. He caters to cruise ships and to resorts and has separate tours depending on which you're coming from due to the time constraints and such. Just a few days ago I decided to check and see if there was any availability (maybe someone canceled). There wasn't, but he made me an offer that he would have his associate do the tour for us if we would pay as 4 adults instead of 3 (D is considered an adult price anyway), as his tours list that he must have at least 6 paying adults to do a tour, but he would go ahead and let us do this and we get a private tour out of it! It's only a $15 price difference for Micki, so I think well worth the private tour. The little short tours that the ship offers are way more for half the time and with a lot of people. He doesn't think at this short notice he'll get anyone else asking for a tour from our ship, but he said we could invite a couple more if we met someone and he would reduce Micki's price to a child. Also, if someone we don't know asks, we could wind up with a few more, not likely but could happen. We don't care, it would still be like a private tour with so few people anyway.

Our last port will be Cabo San Lucas. We don't have any plans at all for this port. We're going to play it by ear and see what we feel like once we get there. I have a feeling it will be more beachy/ocean type stuff here.

So, those are our big plans for the coming week. Derek has had really positive support from most of his teachers, he has some school work to work on while we're gone, poor thing. NOT Micki's teacher hadn't planned out next week's work, but will have it to her by tomorrow, so Micki won't get behind there either. I'm not really worried about her though. They don't grade the same way the Middle School does, plus she only has one teacher, not 7.

Ta-Da!