NOT FREE

earlier this year david and i went to a vacation ownership presentation. we have been curious about timeshare type investments and wanted to learn more about them. we love to travel, so they already had our attention. we fell in love with the program and the options and so we bought into it. we will be paying for it every month for the next ten years and then own it forever. our current plan is to try to pay it off sooner with our tax return money... but we'll see.

(check out worldmark and let us know if you are interested!)

so just by going to the presentation, we received a free vacation to san diego. we had to send in 3 different dates that would work for our 2 night vacation, along with a check for the taxes, and then wait for them to tell us when our trip was. they called to say what dates we had gotten and asked if i wanted to upgrade to a package with better travel times (morning vs. evening) and better quality hotels (holiday inn express vs. junky place with no free breakfast). well i did want an extra day and it seemed like a reasonable fee for a much better upgrade, so i did it. this was all set before we even knew when we were moving into our house, but all i had on paper was a date. we had no clue when the flights would be leaving, coming back, where the hotel was located, if the extra day was at the beginning or end of the trip, and so on thus making it difficult to arrange rental cars, take time off work... get the picture? so i call the company that arranges the free trips to ask for a more detailed itinerary and all they could tell me was that it would be sent 2 weeks before the travel date. we received said itinerary in the mail on saturday. the way they have us scheduled to fly out, david will have to take another day off of work. he doesn't have anymore time off (thanks alot gallbladder!) and with the new CRAPPY commission scale, we cannot at all afford for him to take more time off. and of course it is all non-refundable. it will easily cost us $500 to rent a car, go to sea world, and for food and gas for 3 days, and that is not including the lost wages at both of our jobs for the time off. we decided not to go. we were looking forward to being at the beach, and i REALLY wanted to blog about jenna at the beach, but i guess it will have to wait till next year. boo hoo. i am now trying to figure out some sort of day trip that we can turn into our summer vacation. let me know if you have any ideas.