Happy (Belated) New Year!

I know this is a little late, but I hope you all had a great holiday. Kevin and I went on an 8-day Caribbean cruise for the holiday so I was a little stressed before leaving because I over-committed myself a bit. The vacation was great, but coming back to work was hard. I spent a good 30 minutes lying in bed yesterday morning debating whether to take another day or to just bite the bullet and come in. It was also weird not having Christmas dinner with my family. For the last 27 years I've been with them on Christmas, so it didn't feel too Christmas-y to me while on this huge boat - even though there were Christmas decorations everywhere.

via

I have a bunch of things to blog and have just about caught up on all of the blog posts I missed over the past week and a half. Janice over at Life Begins at Thirty is preggers (congrats!), John and Sherry at Young House Love painted their kitchen cabinets and they look awesome, and I won a Designer Series Programmable Crock-Pot® Slow Cooker. from Britt at My Daily Randomness!! Seriously, that Crock Pot is pimped out.  

via

For our vacation, we drove down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with one of Kevin's cousins. People thought we were crazy for driving, but we saved a ton of money!! The total cost for the gas and tolls for the drive from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale to Fort Myers and back to Toronto was $320 US. The cheapest direct flight from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale was $800 Cdn each. The conversion between Canadian and American money is pretty much 1 to 1 at the moment. We saved just over $2000 between the three of us (just under $700 per person). Sounds like a win to me!

People asked if I'm glad I drove. Yes, I am. The money I saved more than covered Christmas presents, Kevin's birthday present and drinks/excursions on the cruise. 

The only part that was tough was driving at night. That was brutal. I took the first driving shift out of Toronto and after about 5 hours of driving at night through fat snowflakes, I started to feel like I was on the Starship Enterprise going warp speed. Side note: I may or may not have seen pretty much every episode of The Next Generation - I loved that show as a kid!

via

I had to call it quits and let Kevin drive. When I woke up, the sun was just about coming up (I think we were in Virginia) and the view was gorgeous. It looked a little something like this:

via

On the way home after the cruise, I drove the last 8 hours or so, which ended up being through a gross snow storm in West Virginia (I think) and Pennsylvania.  I wasn't very lucky for my driving portions...

via

I guess the bright side was at least this part of the drive was during the day... Yay to no more warp speed! When I drive at night I open my eyes really wide like it's gonna help me see better lol But all it does is give me dry eyes! Why do I do that? Does anyone else do that? 

How were your holidays? Do anything interesting? Did you go away?