I'm Such a Grasshopper

Oh great.....it's snowing.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it is the middle of November after all. Yet even though I know it's coming every year, my heart still sinks a little every time the first flakes descend to the ground. It's like that final bell to let the ant know that it's time to take it easy, and that now's the time for the grasshopper to panic. Since I live my life in a manner far more similar to the grasshopper than the ant, I guess I should be worried.

Fortunately I don't have to scrounge around for food. What the first snowfall usually sends me in search of are cheap airfares to somewhere warm. Or lukewarm. Really just anywhere that I won't have to get up at 7am and shovel a hundred pounds of white stuff off my driveway. You'd figure having a teenage son would help to alleviate some of the manual labor, but it's less work to clear the entire street by hand than it would be to try and get him up that early on a weekend.

The problem that I usually find myself in though, is that like the grasshopper, I always leave things to the last second. Sometimes this pays off for me. Last year Expedia ran their "free trips to Las Vegas" promotion (I think they might take offense at calling it a promotion, but they've insisted it wasn't a mistake.), and we got a fantastic winter holiday. Alas there doesn't seem to be anything similar coming our way this year. This year it looks like we're going to have to pay for our own vacation, and well...that's just no where near as much fun.

Still, I've got to start sometime, so today I did a quick search for airfares over Christmas break. From the airports that I frequent, the top deals for a winter vacation are to Nashville, Albuquerque, Long Beach, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Houston. Most of these don't particularly scream "target destination" to me, but to be fair, I suppose I'll have to give them some consideration. I can tell you right now though, that as our major goal is to end up somewhere warm, Detroit and Philadelphia are out of the running already.

It's always a little disappointing (although not surprising) when Hawaii or Florida don't show up on the cheap list, but I've always said that the key to us being able to travel so much is that we don't pick our destination. We simply find the most economical place to travel to, and then we figure out what there is to do at that destination. I'm sure we could make a good winter vacation out of Texas or New Mexico, but before I go and start booking things, I'm going to play grasshopper for a couple more weeks. I've got a feeling that something great is going to come along soon, and if I'm wrong, I guess we can always go find a well prepared ant in a tropical location and beg him to let us stay there.