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What a Great Weekend!

Daughter and I have been in Philadelphia this weekend visiting her dear friend who is in Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia for a month or so being treated for a rare and painful condition. God preserved this weekend with no homework and no other commitments as obstacles so we hopped on a plane on Saturday morning and spent yesterday and today taking in as much as we could. In this picture we are on the top of a double decker bus on a hop on hop off tour of this historic city.

As I blog to you I am perched along a wall near the first outlet I found near our gate in the Philadelphia airport. Our flight is delayed about an hour. I presume hurricane Kyle is gumming up the works here in the Northeast. All of the flights are delayed a similar amount.

We have truly had a blessed weekend. The weather forecast called for dismal conditions. In reality, we got just barely sprinkled on maybe a total of five minutes. The four of us (two moms and two daughters) really toured together well. It was just really a fantastic weekend.

Advantages of Destination Weddings

It's wedding season again. You can tell because the average bridal magazine currently weighs more than the average bride. - Dave Barry

Believe it or not, you're planning a wedding. Maybe you're the bride, the mother of the bride or maybe even on the groom's side. Whatever your role, you're facing one of the biggest projects of your life. You've heard alot lately about Destination Weddings. Should you consider a destination wedding?

Last week on our office, the mother of a bride expressed concern about guests needing to pay for a trip to a resort in order to attend her daughter's wedding. I brought to her attention that, since most of the family was out of town anyway, they were going to have expenses to come to the wedding even if it was in Dallas. There would be airline tickets, a hotel stay and meals regardless of where the wedding is held. We were able to list the expected expenses and show her that the guests would not be spending more money to go to the destination (in this case, the Riviera Maya). The difference is that they would be in a beautiful resort, and they would be able to visit as friends and family for the entire weekend and not worry about finding and driving to a church or a reception site because it would all be located at the resort. If your guests are spread across the country and they’re going to have to travel to your wedding anyway, why not have them travel somewhere beautiful and fun? Have you ever gone to a wedding of a friend, looking forward to spending time with them only do barely get in two words the whole time? At a destination wedding you will have the whole weekend to spend time with the people you cherish.

A destination wedding is much simpler to plan. Wedding consultants at the resorts are able to give you all of your options as well as arrange any custom items for your particular situation. Most of the communication is via email, but a phone call is easy as well. The wedding coordinators are bilingual and easily can understand and fulfill your requests.

Fewer people may attend your destination wedding than a local wedding. This is actually a great thing because you will be able to enjoy each and every one of them more. The people who attend your destination wedding are likely to be the people who are most important to you.

Destination weddings are generally more affordable than a local wedding. At a local wedding sometimes requires thousands of dollars of flowers and other decorations to make the site look wedding worthy. At a destination wedding, the scenery is at no extra charge.

Imagine the photographs!

Planning a Trip to Europe

Planning an Independent Europe Trip

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French.
Madeleine Albright

Despite the challenges of increasing airfare due to fuel prices and the weak dollar, our customers are still eager to travel across the pond for the trip of a lifetime. Many of our customers are not wanting to be confined to an escorted motorcoach tour, but prefer to determine their own itinerary and travel independently.

Planning for an independent trip is more involved than choosing an escorted itinerary. Rather than pointing to a particular itinerary in a brochure, traveling on an independent itinerary begins with a blank slate. How do you begin to fill in this blank slate? Consider the following:

First you must determine the scope of your trip. The first issue of scope is time. How much time can you afford to be gone? If you are not retired, this will be a different answer than if you are retired empty nesters. I am currently planning a trip to Rome where we will be gone only 6 days. Normally I prefer at least 10 days when possible.

Next, consider money. Along with time, money is probably the most significant issue when deciding what you can and can not do. When my niece turned 18 I took her to Europe and in 10 days we saw London, Paris, Rome, Munich and Frankfurt. One of my main purposes was to show her that it was possible to do really great things without spending a fortune. We stayed in very moderate places that served our purposes (they were safe, clean and well located), but we did not spend a fortune. You need to keep in mind, however, what it takes to make you comfortable. You don't want to make yourself and everyone around you miserable because you cannot relax where you are staying. If you are high maintenance, embrace it and choose your trip accordingly. One note about budgeting your money on a European trip. Please do not skimp on sightseeing. The reason you spend all of the other money..the airfare, the lodging, the transportation between cities, all of it is to enable the sightseeing. Wouldn't it be stupid to travel to the other side of the globe and then sit in your room because you didn't have any money left for that walking tour or the admission into that museum?

Finally, think about what you would like to see during this trip. On the first go-round, be bold. Get a big blank sheet of paper and write down everything you'd like to see or experience on this adventure. Perhaps you really want to cover Spain. Maybe you want to hit as many European capitals as possible. A weeklong cooking school might be the cornerstone of the trip. Whatever it is, get it all on paper and clear in your mind.

Next comes the challenging part. Now you have to figure out how the available time and money will best coincide with your dreams. This is where you pull out a map and a tablet of paper and a pencil with a big eraser and lots of lead. My technique is to write the start date at the top of the page and the return date on the bottom of the page. Then I take the map and put those 3M post it flags on the places that I would really like included on the trip. Usually a logical order will emerge when I look at the marked map. I write the cities in what appears to be the most logical order. Then I make my best guess as to how long I'd like to spend in each city.

After that I attempt to find the best way to get between each city. Train? Plane? Car? How much will it cost and how much time will it take? Sometimes at that part of the process something will surface that just isn't meshing well with the rest of the trip. A city that isn't easily traveled to from any of the others. At that point you have to decide how important is this "problem city". You have two choices, you can either drop it, or you can restructure the rest of the trip around it.

Once you've worked out all of these issues, and you think you have a workable itinerary, then all that is left to do is execute! Make the plane reservations, train reservations, hotel reservations and everything else to make this dream a reality.

I help people with this process every week. I find it to be satisfying and fun. I especially like it when people get home and tell me that traveling independently in Europe was not nearly as difficult as they had feared and that everything went smoothly!

Breakfast With The Boy

New Experience

Here in my little isolated Plano, Texas bubble I do not often encounter people asking for money (at least not out on the street...solicitors are forever stopping by the office, but that's a completely different post).

A couple of days ago I went to Radio Shack to get a new battery for my garage door opener. Right there in front of Radio Shack at Independence and Parker a lady was sitting on the sidewalk and asked me if I had any money to give her. Those of you in more urban settings are thinking, "Yeah, so what?" It just doesn't happen around here though.

Since that experience I've been thinking about what my response needs to be in those situations. I've never had to think about it, but maybe now I'll have to start. I don't want to be a jerk, but I don't want to be in danger and I don't want to be taken advantage of.

Thoughts?

Isn't She Lovely?

Isn't She Great? from Catherine Banks on Vimeo. Daughter asked me to record this so I could show it to people at LifeGroup on Saturday. (She was on her way to a Bar Mitzvah.)

Giving Instructions

One of the things I've been concentrating on is outsourcing. My pattern has been that it is easier to do things myself than to ask for or hire help. I'm a fairly competent person, and a fast worker. No matter how fast a worker, however, at a certain point you can only accomplish so much if you're doing it all yourself.

At that point you either have hit the ceiling of what you can accomplish across the board or you have to learn to leverage the labor of others.

This first started several years ago while I was at a Travel Technology conference. I have found that conferences allow me time to rise above the forest for a while rather than being surrounded by the trees. It became crystal clear to me that if we were going to grow, I was going to have to get better at allowing employees to book more of the business and I was going to have to focus on developing the staff. No matter how productive an agent you are..at a certain point you're going to hit the ceiling of what you can do. To grow further you must allow others to work for you.

For a control freak, this is not an easy thing.

Eventually, I am applying this to other areas of my life as well. I have recently started using an off shore personal assistant. I am gradually identifying and assigning tasks so that I am managing other doing the work rather than doing it all myself.

So far I have found giving directions to be a substantial challenge. Most of the problems that have come up have been as a direct result of me failing to give good instructions.

Last night Philip and I went to open house at our daughter's middle school. In science class they had just done an activity where one student wrote the directions for making smores and the other student had to exactly follow the directions. The results were often comical.

I wish I'd done that in 8th grade...maybe I'd know how to give better instructions today.

What a great looking staff...

When we met for our Platinum Dinner the other night, we took the opportunity to take pictures of us as a group.

The Best Looking Staff Ever

Enjoy!

Platinum Dinner

Tonight we celebrated being awarded Funjet Platinum. Here is our staff along with the whole Funjet Dallas Crew. A better group of people I've never known.

Heading Back to Mexico

Tomorrow morning I'll get on a plane, fly over Ike and land in sunny Cancun. I will be staying at the Iberostar Grand where I will be shooting 5 resort videos during a three day stay.

Menopause, The Musical

I'm having a hot flash
A tropical hot flash
My personal summer is really a bummer
I'm having a hot flash.
Comes on like a car crash
No warning just hot flash
Outside it is nippy, but I'm hot and drippy
I'm having a hot flash

Some friends and I went to see Menopause today. It was hysterical! If you are either staring down the barrel of "The Change" or love someone who is, go check it out!

Hypermiling

I drive a 2000 Honda Odyssey. In the past I have averaged 16-17 miles per gallon. With gasoline in the mid 3's right now, I've become obsessed with hypermiling. Basically, I drive in such a way so as to use as little fuel as possible. This includes driving more slowly as well as ceasing to accelerate well in advance of a red light.

It seems that people around me in traffic don't appreciate it very much.

I, however, got about 21 miles to the gallon on my last tank.

SCORE!

She didn't really just say that.....

This morning I found the laundry sorter in my bathroom completely broken down and clothes everywhere. Philip reported that daughter was the likely suspect.

When I confronted her, she retorted that if I did laundry more often she wouldn't have had to come looking for what she was looking for.

After a moment of an internal dialog of "did she really just say that? No, that's not possible...yes, yes, I think she did", I put my mean mommy hat on and informed her that I would be thinking about how I was going to respond to her disrespect.

I find that if I think about consequences instead of shooting off the hip I am able to come up with much more effective ones. In short order, the thought occurred to me that the child lives to text message. Guess who pays that bill? That's right....MOMMY!

So, I called Verizon and put a block on her phone. She will be unable to send or receive text messages until I turn it back on.

I'll be having a conversation with her about things that are her right and other things that are luxuries. Luxuries are things like being 13 and your mother still doing your laundry. Luxuries are things like text messaging (or having a phone in the first place). If she doesn't appreciate luxuries, they will go away.

I'm Such a Dork

Okay, so this weekend the need came up for me to deliver something to an elementary school in a different part of town. I was looking it up on the website and there was a place on this elementary school website that said "Information for Parents about Cheese".

Now, I thought "Isn't that nice that they give away free cheese to help these families!".

When I clicked on the link I learned that it was information about the form of Heroin known as Cheese.

I have no street cred whatsoever.