Travel, or lack thereof

This time tomorrow I'll be saying, "tomorrow I get to sleep in!" because Thursday is Veteran's Day so I don't have to work. YAY! I love random holidays that don't lead to my using my days off for holiday stuff. It's pretty nice.

I'll be getting a lot of holiday/free days this year though, because I can't go home for Christmas this year. During the summer I could have bought my ticket home for around $600 per person, but I wasn't sure about how asking for time off would work at my new job. So I waited. Then by the time I started my job and had some free money the tickets had shot up to $900 per person. This was simply not a possibility anymore. Leigh and I resigned ourselves to staying in Anchorage for Christmas, cooking a small dinner, doing presents and maybe spending time with friends. I was OK with this because I figured it would be relaxing and I could bank my PTO days for another trip (like Hawaii in April, in fact, this turn of events is WHY we decided to go to Hawaii).

Then this weekend Leigh's grandmother called and insisted that she go to Virginia for Christmas, even if it was just for 4 days. So Leigh's grandmother bought her a ticket to Virginia for about $750 so she can go home from Dec 25 to 29. She'll be back in time for our New Year's plans, which include a concert at the Bear's Tooth. I can't afford to go home at all at this point because we already committed our money to the Hawaii trip and Christmas travel is just too expensive at this point. Oh well, I'll be alone for part of the holiday but it's not the end of the world.
However, this entire situation has made me rethink my plans for next year. Initially I thought we'd just go to Virginia, but since I'm missing out this year I don't want to spend a bunch of my time off just hanging out at various parents' houses and eating a lot.

So instead I've decided we're going to do it up right next year: not only will I go back East for Christmas, but I will hit up Virginia and Florida. Leigh is basically mandated to be in Virginia for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and my parents live three hours from her family, but I really want to spend some time at my brother's house in Florida visiting with his family AND taking a side trip to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I've had my heart set on going there since I heard it was in the works and now I'm finally making it a priority to 1) see most of my family for the holidays and 2) take the time, travel, and money to go to this magical place I have only heard about in stories (literally)!

So exciting! Too bad it's still a year away....