Neil and I were scheduled to leave for Mexico this Saturday to celebrate our friends’ wedding. However, after the anti-climactic Swine Flu “pandemic”, many packages were canceled, including ours. That left the bride-to-be & groom-to-be scrambling to book alternate arrangements during a typically stressful time. Planning a wedding once is difficult enough, let alone having to do it twice and to have to accommodate 20 other guests. Unfortunately, the new plan included additional costs, so we had decided that the cost for the week was just too much and had canceled our vacation. With the four days of vacation taken from work, I was really disappointed to consider the possibility of having to return to work after the long weekend, without a suntan.

Neil and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a new plan. Do we postpone the vacation? Do we rebook a vacation? Do we try to cancel or accept a travel voucher? There were too many possibilities with such limited time to decide. Finally, we decided on a trip to Hawaii - The Big Island. We will be flying out of Seattle with a stop-over in San Francisco before basking in the glorious sunshine. We have booked our flights and a car rental, and will be bringing our camping gear, a guide book and a road map. From landing in Kona, we will see where the open road takes us. It’s not the sort of vacation that we’ve enjoyed before, but if we’ve learned anything from Costa Rica, staying on a resort in such a beautiful country only limits the possibilities. The ad-hoc planning is not my typical level of comfort for traveling afar, as I like to be a bit more organized and planned, but having talked to friends that have just come back from a similar vacation, I feel quite reassured. I am most excited to see the lava flows and steaming geysers, while swimming alongside sea turtles and tropical fish. That is what traveling is all about for me - the flora, the fauna, the geology and the culture. Having studied geology in my final year of university and having absolutely fallen in love with it, Hawaii is one geologically rich area that I have always wanted to visit; now I finally have that chance.