I’ve hinted at it in a couple recent posts but, with one month exactly until our departure date, I’m happy to say that we’ve decided to go back to Mexico again this winter!
It was obviously a lot more touch & go with that whole “buying a new house” thing this year and up until very recently we were pretty sure we *weren’t* going to head south this year.
But there’s a few reasons we decided to pull the trigger and book a tropical vacation again this year:
1) the recent cold spell *sucked* and reminded us how much it breaks up winter to have a hot weather getaway in the middle of it.
2) ironically, by putting as many of our moving expenses on our Travel Points card as we could – everything from contractors to new furniture to pizza for the movers – we ended up with more than twice as many points to put towards a trip this year as we normally have.
3) although we’ve been trending to nicer and nicer resorts recently with last year being the most we’ve ever paid for a resort by a fair margin, we’re not so picky that we *have* to stay in super nice resorts and I feel like we’ll be just as happy anywhere, as long as there’s a beach and a buffet nearby. So we ended up booking Crown Paradise Club Cancun this year – a resort that was already on our radar as being very family friendly but which is maybe a bit older, a bit more rundown and maybe not offering all the services you might get at a higher end resort. But it’s also almost half the price of the resort we were at last year so I can handle a bit of wear in the furniture or a maybe having to fetch my own drink occasionally instead of having super-attentive service! (To put it in perspective, last year our resort was rated #6 on Trip Advisor out of all ~250 Cancun hotels. This year’s resort is rated a still-respectable #50.)
4) We had “made” a lot of money in the sense that our house had appreciated quite a bit in the fifteen years we’d owned it. So we thought we’d take a bit of those “profits” and put part of them towards our trip rather than putting the entire proceeds from the sale of our house towards our new mortgage (I know this isn’t really profits in the sense that any money we use towards our trip instead of putting towards our new mortgage is still “borrowed” – just taken from our new house instead of our old house so this reason is a bit harder to justify as a good one and my extremely fiscally responsible grandfather would not be impressed with me!)
5) On a related note, we were fully expecting to have to sit on our house for a month or more since we didn’t expect it to sell so quickly right before Christmas. So, in our mind, the few thousand dollars we’d budgeted towards keeping our house on the market for a month or two simply gets transferred to paying for this trip.
6) As you might expect, the older I get, the more people I know are passing way – most recently the father of a high school classmate who died suddenly of a massive heart attack. The point is, you don’t know how long you have left so I want to do everything I can to enjoy the time I have because who knows what the future will bring?
