Cancun; the preparation.....

Okay, so for our anniversary trip this year I knew I wanted to go somewhere warm and tropical. Earlier in the year I was looking into doing a Hawaii trip. Ultimately though we ended up choosing to do an all-inclusive CanCun trip. We're booked at one of the Palace Resorts at the CanCun Palace in November right before the Thanksgiving week.

Here we go...

Step #1) Reserve airline tickets. We decided to take our kids along so we needed 4 round trip tickets. I needed to donate my left lung and some other body parts in order to afford the outrageuos prices the airlines are charging right now. It's ridiculous and I'm out of breath because I'm functioning on only one lung now.

Step#2) Reserve Hotel accomodations. We're currently booked at Cancan Palace Resort on a VIP all-inclusive week with an Ocean side Supreme room but I'm planning on trying to upgrade to a Presidential Suite when we get there. Not sure how much more it'll be or if they're even available but hopefully I'll have body parts left to donate for the additional charge. How important are spleens to the human body?? hmm.

A view from a Presidential suite...

Sunrise from the balcony of a Presidential Suite...

Step #3) Make sure all our citizenship papers are in place...easier said than done right.

My biggest mistake so far was assuming the girls only needed a birth certificate to travel outside of the U.S....BOY WAS I EVER WRONG! The new law this year requires that EVERYONE, including small children and anything living and breathing need official Passports to re-enter the U.S., post 911. So begins the first snag in the trip prep phase.

Well, what a whirlwind day today was to say the least.... in order for us to get our kids passports issued in time we were told we needed to go to the nearest passport processing office which was in Downtown Chicago. So we drove to Chicago early this morning because we had an appointment at 8:30am in the morning. This meant we needed to be in the car driving on the road by 3:30-4:00am in the morning...Yikes!

Well we finally made it to the federal building in downtown Chicago and got everything squared away. After they process and accept the application we had to wait another 4 hours to pick the passport up. Finally at about 12:30-1:00pm we were allowed to pick them up and now my 2 girls have there passports...whew.

We were sweatin' there for about 2 days not knowing whether or not we needed to cancel the trip. All in all it cost us hundreds of dollars in passport fees, toll road fees, parking fees, overpriced food and gas gouging prices at the pump...oh yeah and a 600 mile roundtrip car ride there and back.

Well that's it for now....I'm out of breath because of my one remaining functioning lung, so I need to go lay down now...