A Weekend Away

This weekend Jim Bob and I were able to take a little getaway. That in and of itself constitutes a fabulous weekend. But what made this one even better was that it was basically FREE! Wahoo. I love anything that is free. The weekend came about like this. . . .

Jim Bob and I had been looking to go on a weekend away for some time but it never quite worked out with his work schedule. We'd had a pretty long and stressful week previously and so on Sunday we decided to take the weekend and go on a short vacation since Jim Bob conveniently had Friday off. We started making rough plans but hadn't got very far when I got a phone call. It was one of those telemarketers which I HATE however, Jim Bob had signed up for these guys to call us at the zoo. Anyway... to make a long story short they ended up offering us a free nights stay at a hotel in Phoenix (normally $250 a night) AND 2 free nights in San Fransisco if we would listen to a 90 minute presentation on timeshares. Well I'm not one to turn down free so we signed up.

We spent Friday hiking through Peter's canyon. It was BEAUTIFUL! The desert wildflowers were in bloom as well as several cactus flowers. We saw a lot of frogs which were super cute. My favorite was when you'd get to close to them on a rock and they'd do a kamikaze back flip into the water below. Very awesome to watch. We went swimming in a couple of pools along the hike which was cold, but very refreshing. There wasn't really a trail so we were doing a lot of rock climbing and bushwhacking. Thus, both of us came out of it with scrapped up legs and I have some lovely purple bruises on my knee and foot (Jim Bob is totally jealous that I got the battle wounds). But fun was had by all.

Then we went to check in at our hotel. Unfortunately, our reservations hadn't been received yet, so we went to grab some dinner while the timeshare company faxed our stuff over. We went to In N Out and let me tell you NOTHING tastes better after a long hike than a milkshake. We relaxed and ate back every single calorie we had burned on the hike and then headed back to the hotel. When we checked into our little "suite" I was absolutely amazed. The first thing I saw was a huge jetted tub (horray!). The place was huge. It was probably bigger than our first apartment. It had a living room, dinette, full kitchen, washer/dryer, huge bedroom and huge bathroom. And all this for .....free. Life was good.

We checked out the amenities, pigged out on cookies and watched the Bourne Identity and then headed to bed. I was so grateful that during the presentation in the morning Jim Bob had nerves of steel. I would've totally bought a timeshare. They just make them sound so good! But thankfully, we were able to enjoy our weekend away and keep it free by not committing ourselves to a timeshare. It was wonderful and now we're looking forward to our other "free" vacation in San Fransisco.