A change in plans

I like frequent flier miles. I use them to take international vacations with my family. By international I do NOT mean Canada. (Love my neighbor to the north, by the way.) I save my miles for as long as it take to get tickets to Europe and Japan.

I cashed in 180,000 miles nearly one year ago for three tickets to Tokyo. A friend woke me up Friday, March 11th (my birthday, by the way) to tell me there was an earthquake in Japan. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Japan has earthquakes - no big deal.

I woke up 30 minutes later and turned on the tv to watch the news. It was a huge deal! Narita airport was closed and tsunami warnings were issued for Hawaii.

I was sad. Sad first and foremost for those affected by this tragedy. And sad for me and my family. What was going to happen to our vacation? A trip we planned for nearly one year.

I've never tried to plan an international trip on short notice. It isn't as stressful as I anticipated. I checked major cities in Europe to see where we could go with the minimum number of Delta miles. I came up with London, Paris, Nice, Venice and Athens. I then checked the weather forecasts for all cities. I really wanted to go to Venice, until I learned it was supposed to rain every day. Every day.

We are going to Nice! The French Riviera isn't going to be warm enough for beach and swimming time, but we will still have fun.

Andy is very sad we aren't going to Japan. We made him watch the news to help him understand why we made the right decision to go somewhere else.