Having had a few bear encounters in my day, that whole, "They're more afraid of you than you are of them" doesn't come to mind when you're staring in the face of a 300+ pound animal. You're never sure if your particular bear got the memo. The vacation sounds like a blast to me, but I'm Ms. Outdoorsey. But I know and understand that there are folks that just don't "do" rustic and there is no sense trying to make them into something they are not, I think respecting differences is very important. Way too bad about grandma. I have to say, BF's family sounds like a pretty close bunch, which I kinda like but could also be crazy! I grew up with sparse family, so I've always wanted to be part of a big boisterous clan, but if I had one I would probably wish the opposite! P.S. I think you should make BF a teddy bear cake!

Corgimum, the service was fantastic! Unfortunately husband ended up in the ER there shortly after we arrived due to his ticker. However, for the first time ever they brought him back in rhythm with some sort of Mexican ckt drug. We had such good care! Never ever has drugs worked in the states to bring him back around he always needs a cardio version (sp?). We carefully enjoyed the rest of our vacation and husband was so happy not to make any decisions. He has since had an operation to fix his problem and so far so good. We did take out the extra insurance before that trip and was reimbursed. That worked so well I will never travel to another country again without it. Joanie, just do it! Life is short! When my kids were young we could only afford one big trip the whole time to France and England and some mid trips to the Carolinas and mid west. The trips they enjoyed the most though were trips to the Florida Keys on the Gulf side. Those trips were just a few hours south for us though. And I have to say that they were not as much fun for husband who worked so much and had to do the long drive and then go to a NON all inclusive where decisions on where to eat and how to amuse the children were nonstop. Once the kids were grownâ¦we have been doing some traveling as itâÂÂs a piece of cake with two.

We went to Europe in 2000 and I planned the trip myself. At the time we were a family of 4 and my kids were 9 and 14. We went to France, Ireland and England and we were gone 22 days. I planned the trip on the internet and by reading Rick Steves books. We went in June, I understand August is when my Europeans travel, so I avoided it. Ahead of time I found our first three nights in Paris. I also arranged to rent a car after that. We spent 4 days drivng around France. We had no trouble finding places to stay until our last night. We were flying to Ireland on Ryan Air(also arranged ahead of time)and when we got to the town all the hotels were full. It was graduation week and it was a college town. You can't just go to a Wallmart there and get camping stuff like here. Our flight was leaving the next morning. Luckly we were able to fly out that night(of course we had to buy more tickets)and took a chance our hotel in Dublin would have a room and it did. We had also arranged our hotel in Dublin and a rental car in Ireland after we left Dublin. We also rented a car with an automatic cause we figured driving on the left would be enough to think about. After we left Dublin we just stopped at the tourist shops in the towns and stayed in B&B's the rest of our trip. We didn't arrange those ahead of time. We also flew Ryan Air to England. In Enland we mostly stayed with my husband's sister. A couple of things, over there rooms for 4 people are not the norm like here. Several times the kids had to sleep in a different room. You just have one child so I guess they could bring a roll away in most of the time. I am glad I planned it myself, but it was a lot of work. Some of it wasn't planned, like we went to Switerland for a day. I found the people in France to be very nice. I did learn a few phrases before I went and that helped, but mostly we winged it. Sometimes we just pointed. Restaurants outside of Paris don't have English menus, so we did the best we could with a language book. It was fun. My husband and I also went to Rome a couple of years later and planned it ourselves. Again, we got our hotel ahead of time, but everything else we didn't plan. I really love Rick Steve's books and highly recommend them, but I looked at others too.

It took me a while to find this, and I had to do some odd searches to finally find it! Anyway, I did want to respond... IdaClaire - yes, I am somewhat of a compulsive story-teller, and when I was in First Grade, I won first place in the UL story-telling contest. I had to look up David Sedaris, but he does sound inspirational. I've always wanted to write in the style of James Thurber, which I think is somewhat similar. Anyway, I have to thank for this comment because it has gotten me back on the short story collection I was working on. I had started to write my autobiography, not because I think my life is special, but several friends have asked me to do this, including Dolores Deluxe, who is an actress and also an author. I met her in San Francisco in 1974 when I was living in a theatrical commune where she was rehearsing a play that some of my roommates at the time were in. Our commune was in a storefront on Valencia street that had been a dance studio before, and so it had one cavernous room with 8' high mirrors and ballet bars. I recently saw Dolores again at one of her book signings, and then we had lunch near her bungalow in Venice on the beach. I have her autobiography and thought that I should try to write something similar, but that really didn't work for me, but when I read your post, I got the idea that all I need to do is get a collection of short anecdotes - something that would be much easier for me to do. I've decided that they do not need to be sequential, and I can try to make sense or order out of them after I've finished writing them. BTW, when I was at Rice, I took Larry McMurtry's creative writing class and got an A in it. I was told that some of my writings were Kafkaesque, which I did agree with, but those were especially the ones I wrote in high school and college. They tended to be a bit surreal. 3katz4me, you would have to fly your cats to Palm Springs, which is Cathedral City adjacent. I just had my pool resurfaced, and it has new equipment as well, and the heater works well, although I certainly don't need that in the summer. In September the water temperature was 85° without using the heater. I'm going there this week-end to do some more work on the house.