By: Revanche

A taste of Hawaii

July 29, 2019

This vacation was desperately needed but the timing was awful for me, for several reasons. I won’t get into all of them, just that the worst was that I was going through a terrible horrible no good very bad fibro flare up the entire time we were gone.

It sucked.

By the second day I decided to look at it this way: If I had to be in excruciating pain, at least it was in absolute luxury, where most of us had not much else to do but eat, drink, swim and be merry. I still had to work but it was minimal and that meant that I could take naps almost every day. That didn’t help my recovery, something was driving that flare up and I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it did mean that I was able to survive and actually enjoy parts of it with my family. If I’d been home, I would have had to work long days, cook meals (or we’d do take out), get JB to bed, all the usual parenting things we share, as normal. PiC did all the parenting on this trip so that I could rest and survive and he didn’t mind one iota.

This trip was for PiC – it was a reunion for his side. When I agreed to go, I accepted that due to the tastes of our travel companions, we’d be treating this as a once in a LONG time luxury vacation. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were ok about keeping down a variety of costs while over indulging in others. It balanced well enough that we didn’t go over the $3000 mental (!!) marker I had in mind for how high this could go. I did my absolute best to bring the flight costs down and we economized as much as we could without forcing everyone else to be cheap. It was definitely still both expensive and the priciest trip I’ve been on in a very long time but he was really happy that we took it and we had some amazing views. It was almost surreal – they were so gorgeous.

It was the level of activity I would have wanted for a vacation even if I wasn’t in pain – lots of poolside hanging out and lots of food, a little adventuring to paddle around beaches and to see a really weird tree, great weather. It is possible that the heat and humidity made the pain worse but it felt great otherwise.

Travel Cost Overview

This trip was weird. It wasn’t just us traveling to see friends, we traveled to meet up with people and that meant we had a lot of communal costs and meant that other people’s priorities affected our spending.

Shared expenses (rental car, food, lodgings), $1000.
We normally don’t pay for lodgings in Hawaii, we usually stay with friends, but this time we rented a really nice place so that was much more expensive than the usual “we will pay for groceries and at least a few meals”.

Flights, $982.
This was a combination of a BOGO+tax promotion taking JB’s flight down to $50 in tax, plus a ($120) flight credit. Flight credits are weird for my mental accounting. They are still money so I feel like I SHOULD count it, but it was money already spent on another flight and basically an unexpected refund and it expires so it’s not strictly money. Count it or no? Here I have not counted it because it would have expired by June.

Transit, $48
Do I count this or not? It’s covered by my Chase Sapphire travel credit but technically that credit defrays an annual fee that I’m paying. I’m counting this one.

Dogsitter, $402
We saved $30 thanks to a $10 off Rover from a T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion. I used mine, PiC’s, and @jessfauve was awesome enough to give us hers. (Damn, our sitter’s prices went up $13 a day since we booked this trip.)

Misc spending (non-shared food, meals we hosted, travel spending, gifts), $206
I’m a little embarrassed at how impossible I’m finding it to pack food for the airport for myself. I can’t do those easy to pack carby snacks anymore. We do bring dried meat and cheese but that’s not really satisfying and I don’t do well going a day and a half without sufficient sustenance. We didn’t blow a ton, I spent about $25 on airport meals because we didn’t have time to stop for lunch elsewhere but the rest of this category was well worth it.

Total: $2638

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