Guess What?

Lunch in warm sunny Calgary

I am back on the road again. As you likely know, I have this wonderful travel adviser who does an awesome job of organizing trips. We had a chance to attend a family wedding in Calgary, and I had a friend from China who lived in Calgary, so I was quite happy to attend the wedding and catch up with my friend. We booked a five day trip to Calgary.

My travel adviser (You do know this is Regis, right?) discovered that she could get a very inexpensive trip to Vancouver where we have some other friends. She said that there was no sense coming all this way to Calgary without continuing to the west coast. I agreed that extending the trip for another five days sounded like a good idea. I have been to Vancouver a number of times and it is a city I enjoy.

You will never guess what she found next? I have always wanted to do a full transit of the Panama Canal. We did the locks into the lake on the Caribbean end, on an earlier cruise, but had not done the full trip. After I had agreed to the trip to Vancouver she discovered that five days after we arrived there, an 18 day cruise left Vancouver for Ft. Lauderdale including a full transit of the canal. By this time I was beginning to think I may have been set up, but it has been a couple of years since we did a cruise, and this was a cruise I did really want to do.

You know where this is going right?

A few days after I agreed to the cruise, she discovered that there was a NASCAR race in Kansas City that I had said I wanted to go to 'some time'. We could fly to Kansas City the day the boat arrived in Ft. Lauderdale and we would arrive there just in time for the race.

And . . . . all those flights added together cost less than the return fare to Calgary.

That is how a five day trip to Calgary turned into a month long vacation.