Finally! It's booked!! We have made our honeymoon plans! We are going to Antigua!! After looking for places to go for 2 months now, we have finally made our decision. Now it's time to get excited. And excited is what we are!!
But it hasn't been like this for long. Honestly, yeah, Caleb and I should have started looking sooner than we did. We had ideas and had done a little looking on the internet, but not much until we met up with our first travel agent. We just both assumed travel agents were magical people that you tell what you want and boom they find it for you! Easy. Quick. Painless. Wrong...
Our first visit was to Travel Agent #1 in January. Well she proved to be one big dud! Who knew there were travel agents out there who do not know how to use email. Seriously?! I'm not sure how the lady even finds options for traveling without using the computer to do so! Very techy-illiterate. So once we figured out she was going to be extremely slow and want to talk over the phone with EVERYTHING, we sought out Travel Agent #2.
We both took a long lunch from work one day...by long, I am meaning 2 1/2 hours!!!..to go meet up with #2. Upon first judgment, she immediately seemed better than the first lady. Very friendly and foreign (which mistakenly I thought somehow had to mean she would prove to be a better travel agent). Wrong!! We sat down and talked to that lady for over an hour! Told her we wanted to book ASAP after receiving options. She informed us she would give us options by the following week. Uh, yeah, we still have yet to get one option from her. How rude.
So we had to come up with another plan. By this time, I had decided all travel agents were a bunch of duds and was beginning to understand why they are one of the proposed jobs within the decade which will be obsolete...Around this same time, my mother and I went to a small bridal fair. There I met Travel Agent #3.
She seemed the most promising of all. Afterall, she was "cool" enough to go to a bridal fair, so she had to be good, right?! I told #3 I would have my fiance call her ASAP, while I was then having to go to California with work and be gone 9 days. He calls; they talk; she actually sends options! But...they are all Sandals, Beaches, Couples, all the "big name" places, which is not what we wanted. What's worse, Caleb specifically had told her that is not what we wanted! Turns out I think #3 is strictly a Sandals representative. So no help there.
Then we get with Travel Agent #4. If you are getting tired of this story, so were we!! Travel Agent #4 came when Caleb contacted her while I was in Cali; she had been referred to Caleb from a friend. Not the best time to be trying to plan and book a honeymoon when your fiance is across the country. Suffice it to say, we didn't get much accomplished during this time. I was gone. Caleb was crazy stressed with school. However, Travel Agent #4 proved to the only one who seemed like she actually cared and really wanted to book us a honeymoon! She and Caleb emailed back and forth each day. #4 was persistent. She was also semi-pushy...telling us flights were going up daily and we needed to get something booked by 6:30pm this day, or by 10am the following day...and it went on and on. (Which proved to be a correct statement and one I try not to think about, but as gas goes up, so does flight fuel...Grrr..)
Once I got back from Cali this Tuesday, we had to make a decision. BUT it still took us a week to do so. I am an auditor. I ask questions. I do not take people's words for truth, or for the whole of the story. This is who my job has made me become unfortunately. So...I have to really investigate things. You better believe someone can't just email me a few options and I'm like "1, 2, 3, let's pick 2." In the midst of one of Caleb's toughest times of school...writing and planning for his dissertation...we had to make time to do the research ourselves.
Tuesday night, we googled. Wednesday night, we googled. When I say, we "googled" I don't mean, oh we looked up a few things for about 45 minutes or so. Uh, no! I'm talking we googled people! Hours! By late Wednesday night, I was done. I had done most of the "googling" Wednesday night, because Caleb had to work on his dissertation. I was tired. I hadn't got much sleep since getting back from Cali (due to staying up googling!). I was getting ill. How much longer would it take for us to find something?! I was stressing Caleb out. I started crying. Told him I was done. We just couldn't find something that we wanted that wasn't crazy expensive. Our problem was this....We didn't want a big name brand resort. We wanted something more intimate...less crowds...just a little different. But with that, prices are more. And then prices for airfares continued to go up each day no decision was made. It wasn't looking good. I said I wasn't going to look anymore. I went to bed. I was tired.
That night, Caleb needed to stay up and continue to work on his dissertation. But he didn't. He was determined. The poor thing, in a fit of fury, decide to "google" himself. He was going to find something for us.
What's funny is...He did. He found that night the place we (and me after one more night of long googling and two more nights of deliberation) decided to book today!
http://www.galleybayresort.com/
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