John Grisham has a book called Skipping Christmas, about an accountant who sits down right before the holiday season, adds up all the money that he and his wife spend on Christmas each year, and realizes that if they just skipped all the Christmas hullabaloo, they could go on a really nice relaxing vacation instead. It was later made into a pretty crappy movie starring Tim Allen called Christmas With The Kranks. The book wasn't bad but the movie was definitely worth a miss.
Anyway, this year, my wife decided that we would be the Kranks. She offered the kids the opportunity to go on a pretty great vacation if they were willing to drastically scale back Christmas. They agreed, although some of them had some misgivings as Christmas came closer. In the end, I don't know how successful we were scaling Christmas back. We definitely did buy less...but probably not enough less, and definitely not enough less to cover the price of the vacation.
But, unlike in the book (and the terrible movie), things didn't go catastrophically wrong and we were still able to go on the trip. We had decided that San Diego was to be our destination. My wife had done a lot of prep work, and we had a really awesome trip planned out.
Back in 2010, we'd done a similar trip to Disneyland in December, and we used some of the lessons we learned from that trip for this one. To begin with, we were leaving early on Saturday morning, and staying the night in Las Vegas on our way south. She had reserved a room for us at the kids' favorite Vegas destination, the Circus Circus hotel.
Our first problem happened as we were trying to pack up the car. December, up until now has been unbelievably mild. The weather has been so warm that we were afraid we were going to just have to start calling it Decem, because there was no brrr at all. But as we were trying to get everything into the car, the first snowfall of the winter hit. This was a bummer in two ways. One, it made packing the car a wet mess, because the snow was really coming down, and it was getting into and soaking the car with each thing we put in it. Second, we were leaving, and we weren't going to get to play in this snow we'd waited so long for. Every year, we always make a big deal of the first snowfall of the winter, and enjoy going out to play in it, but for this year, all we have of the first snowfall of the winter is this picture of the packed up van driving out of town.
From there it was the long, long road south. The kids were pretty much fed up with the whole thing before we were even halfway there. Little potty trained this year, therefore we were stopping again and again to get him to a bathroom. We put him in a diaper so that any accidents wouldn't be too bad, but he refused to pee in it. Instead he would squeal and shriek until we stopped. A few times, after doing something like that, he wouldn't even be able to make himself pee once he was in front of a toilet...or on the side of the road. That got a little frustrating.
Eventually, we grew close to Vegas. My daughter started asking if every group of lights at every podunk weigh station was Las Vegas. I told her that Vegas was a big city, and that when we made it there she wouldn't have to ask, she'd know. She continued to ask all the same, but then, at last, we crested the hill that put Las Vegas in sight. She gasped when the horizon was filled with lights from one end to the other. She thought it was the biggest city she'd ever seen in her life, never suspecting that the city we live by is at least as big if not twice the size. It was just the fact that Las Vegas was surrounded by absolutely nothing, whereas most big cities have a much more significant amount of sprawl around their core. It made me laugh anyway. It was as though we were bumpkins coming from a tiny burg to the big city, instead of suburb dwellers coming from one hive of urban sprawl to another smaller sized hive.
When we finally made it to that bastion of Vegas decadence, Circus Circus, we ran into some issues. When my wife tried to check in to the room that she'd reserved, she found that it had been given away. They tried to get a different room for us, but it was still in the process of being cleaned, so we needed to come back in twenty minutes or so. It was already getting late, so we figured we should take this time to play the midway games, because we probably wouldn't be coming back for it later. Most of us got in on one of our favorite Circus Circus game. It's the one where you have a squirt gun, and you squirt it in the mouth of a clown. Depending on how accurate you are at hitting the clown's mouth, a balloon fills with air, and whoever has the balloon that pops first wins. My son came out victorious in that particular game. What did he win? This extremely ugly golden shark:
Only most of us did the squirt gun balloon race. One of us didn't want to do that. Instead, my younger wanted to win a particular prize. She found a booth that was giving away horse stuffed animals. That was the prize that she wanted. She thought it unlikely that she would win the game herself, so she asked her dad to play for her. The game was a basketball themed one. If you could get two balls in the hoop, then you got the horse. Two balls in out of two. Yes, that's all you got. You had to be perfect. my daughter looked at me with her big, hopeful eyes as I bricked the first shot. Now it didn't matter. I had to get them both, and I'd already missed the first. I chucked the other ball up, and missed the second shot. Then I did my best to console my crestfallen daughter. She should have known better than to put her hopes in me when it comes to basketball.
Now it was time to get back to the front desk and see about our room. The room they had mentioned to us was also gone by the time we got back, but there was another open one, and they gave us a key. Since it had turned out to be a lot of trouble, they gave us the room for free as well. That was nice...or so we thought. We hadn't seen the room quite yet. We ran out to the car and grabbed our bags, and headed up to the room. My wife slid the card key through the slot, and we strolled into our home away from home.
"Hey," somebody said from inside the room. My wife looked up, surprised to see a naked man sitting on the bed, just as surprised to see us barging into his room.
"Oh!" my wife said, "I'm sorry," and we all backed as quickly as we could out of the room.
"What's going on?" I asked. My wife was the only one who had made it far enough into the room to get the full picture of the room's situation...thankfully.
"Someone's in there," she said, "they must have given us the wrong room or something."
We went back down to the front desk. On the way, my wife, red-faced, explained to me what she'd found in the room. We all got a good laugh. They apologized for the mix-up. They had already given us our room for free, so they tried to come up with a different conciliatory perk. They said we could check out later than the usual time, a perk that was useless to us, since we planned on hitting the road as early as possible the next day. It didn't really make up for them causing us to barge in on a naked guy, but at this point, we didn't care at all. It was getting really late, and if we didn't get a room...well, thirty minutes ago really...then we weren't going to get a chance to go out and see the Vegas sites.
This next room had no land mines awaiting us, but once we got our bags in place, all anyone wanted to do was go to bed. Nobody wanted to see the Bellagio fountain or the replica of the Eiffel Tower. The Vegas strip just plain wasn't a draw. They had been interested when we first got to the hotel, but all the shenanigans and delays, dragging our bags around and going up and down the elevators, had totally harshed their buzz. So, we went to bed. We did nothing at all.
The next morning, it was too late. Vegas was like it always is during daylight, ugly and hungover. Nothing is pretty or spectacular in Vegas during the daylight. You can see all the strings, and the makeup is smudged and cracked. It just isn't a daylight city.
My wife thought we would be well served to eat the breakfast buffet at Circus Circus. When they rang up our family, though, it was much more expensive than she'd thought it would be. The price she'd seen quoted on the online recommendation was much lower. She paid the money anyway, and we ate there, but she regretted the amount for the rest of the day. Eventually it left the front of her mind, but for the rest of the week if reminded about it, she would groan and start to complain all over again. It was a good thing we got our room for free. Next time we'll have to be sure to ask for free buffet tickets instead of agreeing to the useless late checkout.
We did our best to enjoy the dinner despite my wife's sticker shock generated perma-scowl.
My daughter was excited, and vowed to try a little of everything...including the soft-serve ice cream bar. That made for a breakfast of champions. She was also so determined to get her money's worth that she started throwing food on the floor.
Okay, she claimed that was an accident, that she just let her plate get too close to the edge of the table, but what a weird thing it was. One moment she's trying to cut her bacon with a fork, the next moment it's flying all over the place. I guess we got our money's worth out of the deal, because the bussers had to spend double the man-hours cleaning up after us when we left.
We'd already loaded the car before we went to breakfast, so all there was to do was get in and get out of town. We had enough time that we could have seen something, but I believe I've already talked about Vegas in daylight. We drove down the strip all the same, but we didn't even slow down enough to see anything, because it wasn't worth seeing. We just wanted to be on our way.
There were still hours upon hours to drive though. Vegas is only halfway. There's still the long, hot journey through the Mojave followed by the longer and hotter journey through the crawling traffic of the SoCal megalopolis. It took forever. And then one more day past that. But at last roboticized female voice of Siri told us that we had arrived at our destination. We looked for a moment at the house that would be our home for the next week, then rolled on by. At the end of the street was the beach, the thing we had really come for, and the sun was about to set. If we hurried on down to the end of the road, we could spend a few minutes on the beach, and really enjoy our first hours in San Diego.
We got there just in time. There was an open parking spot, and we slid in and piled out.
We ran down the cliffside stairs to the sand, pulled off our shoes and luxuriated in the feel of it between our toes. The kids went immediately to the water, rolling up their pantlegs and letting the waves lap over their feet.
The sunset was beautiful and vivid, and it was just the prelude to what we could expect this trip. We were on the beach for sunset almost every day.
At last, when the sun had gone away completely, and it was just too dark to do more, we went back up to the car and headed back to our beach house.
My wife had spent hours online searching for the perfect place to be our home base while in San Diego. Up until this year, we'd always stayed in hotels or tents when on vacation. But, for reasons unknown to me, my wife decided to change things up. Surprisingly, it hasn't been substantially more expensive, but unsurprisingly, it has made for much more relaxing and enjoyable trips. We first tried it for our anniversary in June, and that went so well that my wife found us this gem to stay at while in San Diego.
It was really great. A whole house just for us. It was roomy enough that the boys could sleep in their own room, the girls in their own, and my wife and I had a master suite. There was a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room as well. There was a large yard with outdoor furniture as well as a jacuzzi.
Anyway, after getting all our stuff settled, unpacking our clothes and putting them in the dresser drawers (!), we all got our swimsuits on, and finished the night off with a soak in the hot tub. It really was unbelievably pleasant. Now we're thinking that maybe we need to get a jacuzzi for home some day. Time to start saving.
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