Flyin', Cruisin' and Drivin'

As most of you know, Alison and I got back a while ago from a fantastic trip. Lucky for us, Rachelle works for JetBlue and gave us each a buddy pass about a year ago. They expired at the end of October, so we had to use them now or never. We looked at just going to any of the fantastic places that JetBlue flies, including Jamaica, Aruba, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. We found that a cruise (which essentially includes lodging, transportation and food) was going to be quite a bit cheaper than any other option. We booked a 5-night Western Carribbean cruise out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida with Royal Carribbean and couldn't have had a better time (more on this later). Half the excitement was in getting to and from Fort Lauderdale.

I was nervous using buddy passes to get to our cruise, because there is always a chance that you con't make it. We were willing to take this risk and we made sure to leave a few days before our cruise departed to give ourselves plenty of time. The day that we had planned on leaving, we found out that the flights to Long Beach were pretty well booked. We went with our backup option and flew to San Diego, rented a car and drove to Long Beach where we had planned on catching a direct flight from Long Beach to Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately, my brain was not working properly that day and I delivered us to the airport late for our flight and we missed it (I thought the flight left an hour later than it actually did (i.e. MTN time). We spent the night in Long Beach and caught an early morning flight to New York City where we were able to make our connecting flight to Fort Lauderdale. We had been planning on arriving in Fort Lauderdale at 5:30 AM on Saturday morning and instead we arrived after 9:30 PM.

The next day we took a one day cruise to the Bahamas that was simply fantastic (travelogues, coming soon!). We spent Monday morning in the Everglades before boarding our cruise ship. Our cruise took us to Key West, Florida then Cozumel, Mexico then Belize City, Belize before returning to Fort Lauderdale.

We went directly to the airport and were able to get on a flight to New York City less than 1 hour after arriving back in Fort Lauderdale. Unfortunately, there was just no way that we would be able to get from New York City to Salt Lake City in the next few days because all of the flights were booked solid. Our only other option was to fly into Las Vegas and find our own way home from there. Luckily for us, my parents were in Vegas for the Utah vs. UNLV football game. They picked us up from the airport about an hour before kickoff and we all went and watched the Utes beat Rebels. We returned to La Verkin, Utah late that night before finally making our way home Sunday morning.

In total we drove over 900 miles (blue line on map - click on it to make it larger), cruised over 1,920 miles (green line on map) and flew 7,466 miles (red line on map) for a total of more than 10, 294 miles!