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Several decades ago my wife and I ended up with a brochure for an exotic luxury vacation.
While it sounded very nice, it was more than my take home pay for the year to go. Each.
(Of course it should be noted that my first job as an engineer I could have made more money per hour at McDonald’s. So…)

We both said that it would be something we’d put on the list of if we ever won the lottery or something similar.

At the end of last year, when we normally go on at least some sort of trip, we caught Covid. It was the sickest I ever think I was, including that time with food poisoning in Shanghai. (Which only lasted at day, while Covid lasted weeks for me…)

I was raised to think that spending money to enjoy myself was bad. I do fairly well at fighting that. But, when pondering this trip, it is still enough to give me quite a bit of pause.

I make a lot more money that when Reagan was president. Our expenses were much lower than normal last year.
I paid off my wife’s car more than a year early this week.

I’m already 8 years older than my grandfather was when he died.
And, we lived through the plague this year. Despite having pretty much every high risk box checked.
My aunt, in her 80’s and not doing that well, keeps saying "do things while you can. Waiting doesn’t pay off."

Just the deposit to go on this trip is half the price of my first car that I bought the year we got that brochure and is only a fairly small fraction of the total price.

I’m reluctant to even talk about it as far too many times I’ve had things I wanted drop away from me before I could grab them. And, when I was young telling people what I wanted only let them target those things better.

I put the deposit on my credit card.
Now I’ve got to ask my boss for the time off.
Then, and only then, will I start to think we may pull this off…