Recently in Vacations and Traveling Category

Earlier when I was talking about going on vacation in the spring I forgot to mention that we are also considering going to Bermuda. Now that we both have a valid passport we can actually travel outside of the country. The only place I have ever been outside of the U.S. is Nassau and I would really like to see some more places.

It does mean leaving the girls with a babysitter though which also means that we will only be able to go for the weekend rather than an entire week. That's not really a bad thing because I am trying to start setting more money aside for an emergency account. I don't have nearly enough set aside should we have some sort of emergency.

Every once in awhile I will get on here and talk about vacations. Mostly where we have been but sometimes I will discuss where we want to go, real estate in the area and available rentals. I like doing vacation rentals simply because you get more bang for the buck.

We have been thinking about going to see my brother at some point in the spring and am hoping that if we stay somewhere on te Carolina coast that he and his family can come out for a few days and stay with us. I have been looking at prices for Outer Banks rentals and there are some really affordable places up there that look just beautiful. If we don't go that far north we may stay on the bay in Beaufort, SC. We spent a couple of days there when my son graduated from boot camp and I really liked the area.

I really enjoy my vacations when they finally roll around each year. I get three weeks a year and one of those is a ten day vacation. This year my ten day was spent in Disney World with my wife and kids. The one prior to that the wife and I flew to Nassau and spent a weekend there. It was a blast. My last one for the year will be spent in Helen, Georgia during Oktoberfest at a blogmeet. I'm really looking forward to that one...

One of the biggest expenses seems to be the lodging and the problem is that even if you get a really nice hotel (or what seems nice online) it's not always that great. I prefer cabins and rentals but finding and booking them is harder than going through a big hotels web site.

Luckily there is a place to find vacation rentals and vacation homes for rent at VacationsByOwner.com.

Vacations By Owner has thousands of vacation rental listings around the country to choose from including California vacation rentals and Lake Tahoe vacation rentals to name a couple.

What I was REALLY interested in was looking at rentals in the Keys. I found a really nice two-bedroom house on the beach in Key West that only goes for $2500 a week during the summer and fall. That's the off-season down there. During the tourist seasons of winter and spring it goes for about $600 more per week. That would be a great place for us to go on spring break next year. I may have to go ahead and make my vacation plans and head south for the spring...

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Even though we spent quite a bit of our money on vacation in Disney earlier this year we are still going to go ahead with the remodeling later this month but I think we are going to curtail some of our discretionary spending for awhile. I just recently bumped up the amount that I am having taken out of my check for retirement as getting it done sooner than later would please me to no end.

Originally we were looking at cruises for our next vacation but now I am thinking more along the lines of driving across the country to see the Marine out at Twentynine Palms in March. We could camp or heck, maybe even rent an RV for less than the four of us could go on a cruise.

I do still want to take the wife on a Caribbean cruise though it just may have to wait an extra year or two...

I am actually going to be out of town from this afternoon until Sunday night although I will attempt to get online and post a bit. If you need to get in touch with me leave a comment or send an email, I will be checking throughout.

My son is going to graduating Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island on Friday morning.

It's very likely that one of the areas I might end up getting promoted to is Florida. One of my old bosses is the senior vice president down there so that would be a good thing. What's nice about the area is that there is so much new real estate construction going on down there and such a large glut of vacation rentals that I could probably find a great deal no matter where in the state they would want to put me.

If I should get promoted to the area I would end up looking for an apartment or perhaps even vacation rentals in order to see what some of the houses are like, prior to the wife and children coming down. Depending on when and where I got promoted it might be eight or nine months before they could move down.

One of the best ideas I ever heard about timeshares can also be applied to this type of situation. The deal was to go rent from someone that owns a timeshare, stay there for a week, talk to the other owners and visitors and see if it's someplace that they love. The same think can be applied in this case because there are so many Florida vacation homes that I could stay in one temporarily and get an idea on whether I like the place or not.

One of the blogs that I try to get to every once in a while (and really should get to more) is in Hawaii. I run my mouth a lot and write about travel. Places I've been. Places I want to go. Places I am not sure about but would be interested in learning about. One of the places I have written about in both paid and unpaid blog posts is Hawaii. I post pictures quite a bit and like to learn about the culture. It is the ultimate in beautiful places to me, but one thing that never occurred to me when writing about visiting Hawaii on vacation is that if I really like it so much, I COULD LIVE THERE. How's that for a revelation. Duh.

Yeah, it might be a stretch because I would obviously have to find a new job but after 21 years in the restaurant business with the same company someone is bound to hire me and there are plenty of Hawaii homes for sale, you just have to look and be willing to ask questions to get the best deal. Honolulu real estate may be a bit more expensive than the rest of the Oahu real estate but that is because it's in what is basically a metropolitan area. Personally I think I would prefer to live a bit out of the way anyhow.

I have considered moving out of the southeastern United States before and since I am sort of bucking for a promotion I will end up having to move sooner or later. Perhaps we will start opening restaurants in Hawaii. Now THAT would be nice as I have quite a bit of experience opening store in new markets.

Although I am most likely taking tomorrow off as well as today, my boss comes back from vacation in the morning. He and a friend decided to go stay at the Golden Nugget Las Vegas and do a bit of gambling. He's single so doesn't have to worry too much about losing his shirt if he spends too much money. I'm sure that they had a blast. I've been to Vegas once about 23 years ago and even though I didn't spend an inordinate amount of time there it was a lot of fun.

The wife wants me to start looking at different cruises for our vacation in January. I am somewhat interested in going to Key West at that time but she wants to go hang out on a boat instead. That would be cool, but I don't think she can get enough time off work right after the Christmas holidays to do that. We might end up waiting until Spring Break to schedule this one.

I love going down to the Carolina and Georgia coast. Although we have been to several different places over the last few years for our vacations we always seem to return to the East Coast. While it's not quite as warm as the gulf and the seas are a bit rougher, I really love the weather as well as all of the surroundings and people in the area. Next year I think that maybe I would like to go a bit farther north and go to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.