Planning planning planning!

We are going to Califonia!

We have a wedding coming up. For a friend I have known all my life. (No really, Our parents were friends before we were born, and we have been friends ever since) She's having a destination wedding in California! Since I am a bridesmaid in the wedding obviously we were going.

The way Dave's work schedule works, he is flown to and from work, but only on his scheduled days. If he needs extra time off, he can take the entire 2 weeks off or pay for his own flight back up to work. So, he has his scheduled week off, his 2 weeks of work off, then another scheduled week off. So, 4 weeks off.

The wedding fell in the middle of his work weeks, so we just figured, hey, if we have 4 weeks off we may as well do Disneyland while we are right there. (the wedding is just outside San Diego) So...... We are making the trip a big huge shebang. Our current plan is to be gone for 19 days. 19 days on the road. Yes, we might be insane.

There is a lot of planning involved in pretty much taking 3 vacations and putting them into 1. I mean, if we have to drive right through Las Vegas, Why not spend a few days there, right? So we have our Vegas vacation, our Wedding Vacation, and our Disney vacation. I mean, where do you even start?

Well, you have to start with somewhere to stay. The bride rented a vacation house near the wedding. Asked us if we wanted to stay there as well. One thing down. Then, I looked into Vegas hotels. Holy smokes. So many options and places! I found a cheap price on one hotel. I booked it, and yay!!! But then I heard from many many people that the hotel has gone downhill and it wouldn't be a very good idea. So, we cancelled it. back to the drawing board. Found another one, stalled on booking, prices went up, I kicked myself. lol. But, it's been booked. Finally we have Disney. In Walt Disney World there are all sorts of hotel choices on the resort. I grew up with Disneyworld being the place to go. I knew nothing about Disneyland. They have 3 hotel options. And yeah, they're pretty expensive. But they have good neighbour hotels there. So we booked into a good neighbour hotel with a pretty cool water park attached.

So yay for somewhere to stay. Then we also had to look at airfare. Yeah, it's expensive. Plus, we're being super awesome and bringing our babysitter to watch the kids during the wedding, the bachelor/bachelorette parties, any other wedding activities, etc. So by the time we bought 4 full priced air fares... it gets expensive. So we're driving. If we drive straight through, it only takes 29 hours. So we needed a few more places to stay. We had to figure out how much we were going to drive each day, where we were going to stay.

It has been a long planning process but we are now in the home stretch. We are driving for 2 days, doing 2 days in vegas, 6 days in the vacation house, a random night we still have no idea where we are staying, then 6 days at Disneyland and drive back home. Stay tuned for a trip recap, because I'm sure there will be quite a few of them and they are going to be awesome.