Suckas

I spent my last free Saturday before tax season going to a presentation by "Worldmark by Wyndham" - which is sort of a twist on the timeshare concept. But I'm not going to get into the details or my experience there, because that's not the point of this post. The point is that my wife signed us up to go to this because they offered a free three-day, two-night trip to either Las Vegas or Orlando. And they insisted there was no catch. Riiiiggght. . .

We selected the Orlando trip with the idea that we could use it as an opportunity to get to Florida and drive down to Boca Raton, where my wife grew up. We've been married almost 10 years, and I've never seen where she went to school or the house or any of her old stomping grounds. After we beat off all the sales pitches we left with our free voucher and read the fine print to discover the catch. It was essentially a one-day, two-night trip! They fly you out in the evening of day 1 and then fly you back the morning of day 3.

We were undaunted, and went ahead with Orlando plans. We sent in our three preferred dates, and wound up with the week of our 10th anniversary. So then we had to send in a $95 deposit for the taxes on the flight and the room. Okay, whatever. I can understand that they are trying to minimize their cost of our "free vacation."

Then we get a call from the travel agency the other night offering an upgrade. She emphasized the fact that we were going to get crappy flight times and that our hotel in Orlando would be maybe 45 minutes from Disney and possibly wouldn't even have a pool. But for an additional $378, we could convert it to an actual three-day trip and get a hotel right at the gate of Disney. She also offered to switch us to the Vegas trip for an additional $98 - we would get the better flight times, a nicer hotel on the Strip, tickets to a show, free shuttle from the airport, a day of free car rental, and $100 for gambling at some casino.

We debated this for a moment - the Orlando upgrade was pretty much out of the question. My wife is pregnant and wouldn't that just be the luck that something would happen and she wouldn't be able to go and we'd be out almost $500. So the question was if we really wanted to keep our crappy Orlando package: Spend a minimum of 10 hours on flights and spend the one vacation day driving 6-7 hours.

In the end, we decided to do the upgrade to Las Vegas. If we're going to go to the trouble of taking a vacation for our anniversary, we might as well spend some of the time doing stuff besides flying and driving. I don't exactly love Vegas - I've visited a couple of times and wasn't that impressed. In fact, I don't think it would crack my top 10 U.S. vacation destinations. But it should be fun to spend some time together without any kids for the first time in about 8 years. (Unless you're counting the one in utero - I guess we can't leave him.)

So our "free" vacation so far has cost $193. We're disappointed the Florida thing didn't work out, but hopefully we can do a better plan some other time.