Good Food

What’s your favorite fast casual restaurant? I’m not talking about fast food like Mcdonalds. I mean a place where you can be seated without a reservation and a meal for two people will cost about twenty bucks.

I like O’Charleys better than Chilis and Applebys, but the O’Charley’s restaurants are a regional chain and are not in all the same cities that Chilis and Appleby’s will be.

I also like Cracker Barrel a lot, and love the way they will serve you a full country breakfast any time of day or night.

Christmas at Home

Looks like I’m the only one who won’t be gathering with the family at the homeplace this year. Everyone in my family lives within an hour or two of my mom’s house except for me. It is a 14 hour drive to get to mom’s house, door to door, which is a long hard day of driving, and to be honest, I’m not up for that long of a drive in one day. I would need to stay overnight at a roadside motel to get some rest and not take the chance of an accident due to driver fatigue.

The cost of gas has risen so that just paying for gas up and back is cost prohibitive. It costs $70 to fill the tank and I estimate it would take 3 tanks to get there, one tank to visit locally and then 3 tanks back. That is a lot of money for gas that could be better spent benefiting my family instead of some Arab sheik.

So we are staying home this year and I guess we will get everyone on the video cam sometime around noon to exchange Christmas wishes among the family.

Merry Christmas to all!

Last Minute Savings

Yesterday started off like a normal Sunday, woke up and made coffee, walked the dogs, turned on the computer to check emails. That’s when everything went downhill really fast. I had an email from my sister that her husband had died the previous night, they had tried to call but my cell phone went right to voicemail, so they resorted to email to get the word to me.

Of course, I dropped everything and made arrangements to go to Maryland to be with the family. Thankfully, I was able to find some coupons online to take care a lot of the details for this unexpected trip and I saved some money. First of all I wanted to arrange for flowers and the coupon site had a link to Proflowers, so that helped right at the start. All I had to do was select the sympathy arrangement and place my order, then enter ProFlowers promotion code coupons from the coupon site to get the bargain rate.

The coupons site also has bargain rates for hotels, like Ramada Inn and Holiday Inn.I probably would have stayed at the Holiday Inn, but this way I got a $50 gas card in addition to the best room rate because I made the effort to check the coupons available before making my reservations.

Since I have to fly to Baltimore and the family is already occupied with funeral things, I decided to rent my own car instead of asking someone to pick me up at the airport. I found a discount coupon for Dollar Car Rental and saved an extra 15% off the weekly rate.

It saved me a lot of time by not having to check a variety of other sites. I just go to one place with the confidence that I am getting the best deals. And I can find a better use for all the money I saved by helping my family in this important time of need.

Family Ski Holiday

The kids have a great holiday from school in November at Thanksgiving and we are thinking about taking the whole family away since we had to cut back on travel this summer. Now that the kids are older we have been wanting to take them on ski holidays. They love to travel as much as we do, and there are so many wonderful ski resorts that the hard part is picking just one.

I want to give them a chance to learn downhill skiing as well as snowboarding and have fun with some other winter activities, like sleigh rides and ice skating. We don’t get enough snow here in the South to even go sledding. So going someplace that is completely family friendly with a variety of winter activities for all ages is vital to our skiing holidays.

If we want to stay in the United States, I think that Killington is the most family friendly area and I’ve been reading the internet for more information on skiing in Vermont. But I have several friends who swear that we are better off going further north, into Canada and the Directline-skiing.co.uk/Whistler website seems to back them up. If we decide to go on up into Canada, we’ll definitely go to Whistler. From reading the website, Whistler is not only one of the top ski destinations in the world, it is especially great for families and beginners. There are adventure ski camps for all the different age groups, and the beginner trails take them through enchanted forests, past magic castles and there are even lifts dedicated to just kids. This is exactly what I have in mind and there are packages for every budget. This website is great for putting it all together and giving you all the details so you can plan the entire trip with just a few clicks of the mouse.

If we all have as much fun on their first learning to ski holiday, we can plan on a nice winter getaway next year, too. I’ve been wanting to ski France and Italy, and I’d love to bring the kids to Europe while they are young and appreciate being with their family. I’m afraid that once they turn into teenagers, the idea of a family vacation will not be met with as much enthusiasm. I intend to pamper and enjoy the kids as much I can while they are young and fun to be around. I hope that being a teenager doesn’t change that, but I’m preparing myself mentally for that, just in case.

Making it Harder to Get to California

Can’t believe that Southwest Airlines is starting to knuckle under. They announced today that they are cutting back on flights. Of course, one of the routes getting the axe is the one I take – the only nonstop from Nashville to Oakland. All the other flights add 2 hours to that trip and it’s long enough as it is. And changing planes always puts you at risk of missing that connection. To be honest, the most I am comfortable on a plane is the 4 hour flight to Las Vegas from here. Anything farther than that and I start feeling cooped up and get really restless sitting on a plane – especially when there are crying babies on board.

On a good note, Southwest is the only airline this year that is still operating in the black. All the others are in the red. That says a lot for Southwest’s excellent management practices and their customer service. They’ve always been good to me and I can’t say that for the other airlines, especially with some of the horrendous experiences I’ve had with American and Northwest. So I’m glad to see the good guys are still winning.

When I fly, I always check Southwest for an available flight first and it has to be an extreme situation for me to fly on a different airline. There are only a few cities that Southwest does not service from here, and most of the time I don’t have to go there, thank goodness. I love their website – its so easy to make reservations and check in online – I can’t believe we used have to make long phones calls and stand in line for everything that now just takes a few clicks.