Honeymoon Initial Plan Complete

One of the tasks that Jamie and I have on our checklist is for me to being planning the Honeymoon. From the onset, we decided that we would basically take the entire month of August off. This would include time before the wedding and also time spent on our Honeymoon. We were looking to leave the Monday following our wedding and coming back about three weeks later. Our budget has been set and I was now off to research.

Since this will be a once in a lifetime vacation, we wanted to make it count. So, we will be visiting three different locations while we are away. We will start by going to Fiji from Seattle. Using Luxury Link we are able to find some pretty good deals on places on Fiji. We have it rounded down to one spot in particular and we’ll be watching it closely, but it looks like a lock. The neat thing about Luxury Link is that it is auction based and the starting price is usually at a pretty substantial discount when compared to purchasing directly from the resort.

From Fiji we wanted to visit an urban location. Being in the South Pacific, we figured that going to Sydney would be pretty sweet and relatively close to Fiji (as compared to Seattle). We will be spending almost a week in Sydney doing who knows what, but knowing us, I’m sure we’ll have a great time. To wrap up the trip, we will visit the island of our engagement, Maui. We plan to spend our last week there before coming back to reality in Seattle.

After working out the initial estimates, I will have used all of my stored up vacation, nearly all of my accumulated Starwood Starpoints on the hotel in Hawaii, and we’ll still be 20% under our original budget. So, I’m pretty stoked. It’s nice to have it locked in on what we are going to be doing. The next steps are to book the trip and count down the days (which we were already doing anyways).

Upgraded to 2.7 and removed from Google

I’ve finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.7 today after I got an e-mail from Google. Apparently, somebody or something got onto my site and placed some links to a third party site in my footer. The links were not visible on my site, but were hard coded into my footer and were visible to Google and other search engines. My site will be removed from Google for 30 days. I have since removed the content from my site and have added to be resubmitted to Google. It’s just a pain that this happened in the first place as I have no idea when or how this happened. Guess it pays to keep your passwords updated.