I Am A Pretty Pretty Princess

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

Or so I feel when, in the course of a hellaciously busy couple of weeks for devoted partner, he finds time, at 6:30am on a Sunday, before going into work for 5 hours before Easter brunch, which is merely a 3 hour respite from more office time, to hide Easter eggs around the house for me.

But let's backtrack a little. In January, we discussed vacation plans for the year. Devoted partner is going to be participating in a year-long project and said he was pretty sure we wouldn't be able to do anything until Q3.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

We had, in the past, discussed going to Turkey so I set about pre-planning a 2.5 week trip to Turkey and Northern Syria for September. In my way I started spreadsheets, downloaded itinerary information, tracked plane fares, investigated hotels, dive operators, visa requirements, etc. I also took out books from the library so we could look at pictures. Meanwhile, it turns out that this is not going to be a good year for a 2+ week vacation because the timetable for devoted partner's project changed. This was mid-February.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

No problem, I am a roll with the punches kind of girl (sometimes). And I love to travel plan. Yes, I love it more when it results in actual travel, but even when it doesn't I have a good time. So we were looking for a plan B. Devoted partner has a conference in Miami in May. Originally, I was going to go down with him, spend the conference days lounging by the pool, and then we would take the weekend and go to the Keys or something. Now that we were looking at Plan Bs, I thought this conference might provide the perfect launchpad for a shorter vacation. And since we were already at the bottom of our continent, I started looking for locations in Central and South America.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

My first thought was Buenos Aires until I realized it wouldn't be exactly warm. My next thought was Colombia. And I'll explain. The trip to Turkey would have been a nice combination of sightseeing and attractive nature/beach time; having been on a number of mostly beach vacations recently, I was looking for something a little more adventurous. Colombia might just fit the bill. So I took a look at flights to Cartagena and then, for giggles, googled Colombia and scuba diving to see what came up. The result that caught my eye was for a teeny tiny island far closer to Nicaragua than Colombia that had only 6000 residents, was inaccessible from every airport save the one on the next island over, shared the barrier reef system of Honduras and Belize, and had exactly no large hotels and pretty white sandy beaches. We are big big fans of deserted beach.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

And now we were rolling again. Plane fares were being tracked, hotels being contacted, dive specifics determined. That is, until last week. Last week one of the vendors alerted devoted partner to the reality that it might not make the deadline by which we planned this trip. Devoted partner was not amused. On the bright side, we hadn't bought our plane tickers yet; on the dark side, we had been looking forward to getting away. So devoted partner did what he does: started working to fix the problem. His already long hours got longer as he tried to shore up all potential leak points so that a delay by the vendor wouldn't push the deadline any more than was absolutely necessary and, possibly, allowing us to still take the vacation time.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

Of course, this schedule left little time for Planning Wednesdays and Date Night Thursdays and any of the weekday moments we spend in between. While the rest of his company had Good Friday off, devoted partner worked from 8am until 1am. We had company coming on Saturday evening, so devoted partner worked from 9am until 5pm and then came home and was a wonderful and gracious host. And of course Easter Sunday he was back at the office. But not before setting up the Easter surprise I have cataloged here. Despite all his stress and sleeplessness and irritability, he made a little egg hunt for me in our house. When I saw the first egg, I assumed it was the only one and called him at the office to tell him how cute it was; then he told me there was one in every room of our upstairs. I spent the next five minutes on the phone with him finding the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th eggs, and the next 30 minutes on my own finally finding eggs 5 and 6.

It really was the sweetest thing. Made all the sweeter because it came in the midst of adversity. We still don't know if we'll make it on vacation in May, but I've already started brainstorming alternatives. In the meantime, though, I've left the eggs where they were found as a reminder to myself of how lucky I am.