Free with no Restrictions

My gripe of the day... Airlines.

This is the famous line the lady at the ticket counter gave me when I said I was interested in volunteering to give my seat up on an overbooked flight. The airline would compensate me with free ticket to anywhere within the United States except Alaska and Hawaii. I asked if there were any black out date and she quickly replied no. Perfect I thought! We had been contemplating a trip to Florida during Thanksgiving break and this free ticket would allow us to go ahead and book the trip since we had enough frequent flier miles for two tickets.

Tuesday afternoon I booked the frequent flier miles online and then called United to use the voucher. Only then did the restrictions become apparent. You see the ticket is only good for certain classes of tickets so what this means is if those classes of seats are sold you can't use the ticket. As luck would have it, there were no seats available in the needed class for the voucher. Frustrating would be an understatement. Luckily by making some small changes to our plans and staying an extra day we were able to use the voucher and book our trip. The only compromise was Wendy has to fly through Denver on the way to Florida while Zach and I fly through Chicago. We do land within 20 minutes of each other so I guess that's pretty minor for free tickets.

I know it has been forever since I posted. The last week seems like a complete blur. Zachary went with his dad for a week of vacation, so we took advantage of some adult time to go to the movies (Forgetting Sarah Marshall SUPER funny but pretty graphic!) and to go to the horse races at Remington Park. No, we didn't win big money but we had a good time. We also used the time to rearrange Zachary's room. We moved his old bed out and got him a cool new loft bed with a desk underneath it. This helps us maximize his space and gives him a full size bed instead of a twin. I included a picture for everyone to check out.

On a related note, Leslie, it was so nice to see you last weekend. I wish that we would have had more time to spend together. We really do want to come down and see you soon. We need to look at travel schedules and find a time to do that.

Ok, I'm outta here for now. Take care everyone.