On the other side of Wednesday's Rant

by Andrea McCall | guest blogger

I am so unbelievably excited about the trip to Las Vegas that Valerie and I are taking!  It seems that almost everything has fallen into place to make this happen.

A while ago, I read the book called The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho and one of the most important themes in the book was, when you follow you personal legend, the fates will conspire to make it all happen. Also, you need to listen to your heart, not all of the noise around it. Well, I guess this trip is part of my personal legend and I listened to my heart on who I wanted to go with because it has just seemed easy.

Now as a prelude to this, I do love to travel and explore, but I tend to get a little stressed about the preparation. Between figuring out what is happening with the kids (whether they are coming with me, or not, and all that goes with both), what is happening with the dog, and gathering all of the required travel documents, I usually am feeling that the trip really isn't worth all of the hassle. 

I haven't felt that once! It turned out that my son's first hockey tournament is in Minneapolis for the exact same days that we are leaving. My first thought was that my brother-in-law would love to take the boys and I was right! He is excited because the team is going to a NHL game on the Thursday and they have all day Friday off to go to the Mall of America and have fun before their first game on Saturday. A guy from work is staying at my house with the dog.

I purchased all the travel insurance, got the passports together (they were in a spot that was easy to find) and wrote the required letters of permission (for my kids to cross the US-Canadian border with my brother-in-law, without incident).

The clothes that I packed are mostly ones that I am not wearing because of the different season, so the pressure to get laundry done wasn't as overwhelming and I got it all done anyway. So far, the trip has been stress-free!

I did take out the camera last night though, and found that the batteries were completely dead (darn kids) and we were totally out of that size of batteries. So far, dead batteries have been the extent of my stress, but there's always tomorrow ... figuring out where to eat, how much to gamble, and determining how much fun we are having may be somewhat stressfull...

Vegas, here we come!