Vacation Lodging

Planning vacations is my passion.  I love it! It doesn't matter to me if I am the one going on the trip.  I just enjoy making the arrangements.  I have planned a few trips during the past few years where I discovered that hotels aren't always the best lodging choice. It is often times very affordable to rent a house or a condo instead of a hotel room.  The nice thing about this is that you have access to a full kitchen and living room.  Some of them also have their own patios, pools and decks.

  I recently rented a huge home for a 3 night stay. This home had 6 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, and slept 14 people.  It was beautifully decorated and furnished.  It was a beautiful home with vaulted ceilings, a master bedroom to die for, a pool table, a beautiful kitchen with granite counter tops, flat screen tv, tv's in some of the bedrooms and had it's own private pool, hot tub, and deck.  It only cost us a total of $1080.00.  This averaged out to be less than $75.00 a person for the whole three nights which made it very affordable.

Having our own home to stay in also made our trip more affordable because we were able to cook our food in the home. This saved us a lot of money because we didn't have to go to restaurants for every meal.  It was also great to have access to a full size fridge. We also enjoyed having the pool to use when ever we wanted without having to share it with anyone else.

It is very simple to find homes and condos for rent when you are planning a vacation.  Just get into your web browser and do a search.  I used google.  Type in "Homes and condos for rent in........"  enter whatever city you are going to.  It will pull up many options to search through.  Spend a little time searching through these sites until you have found what you are looking for.  Many times they will require you to e-mail someone for more information.  They are usually good about responding quickly and it is worth the wait. When you rent a home or condo, they will charge you the price that they quote on their site, applicable taxes and usually a cleaning fee. I have found that the prices are usually pretty comparable to hotel prices, even with the cleaning fee, but the accommodations are sometimes much better.

I am in the process of planning a few more trips.  Once again I found condos that work out perfectly for the groups that we are taking.  For one of the trips, we are only paying an extra $30.00 over the cost of the hotel rooms I originally had reserved.  On the other trip, we are saving $250.00 over what we would have been paying at the hotel that I had reserved rooms at.  The cool thing is that our accommodations will be much better.  Not only do we have full kitchen's, living rooms etc., but we also have access to multiple pools, tennis courts, volley ball and even a health spa.

Check out home and condo rentals next time you plan a trip and see how easy and affordable it can be.  It will help to make your trip amazing!

Photoshop Fun

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend.
I thought I'd start this week off by sharing some of what I've been doing in my little world. My sister recently got married and she asked me to be a backup photographer for her wedding. I have absolutely no photography skills, but I do have a really nice camera (which I bought used) so I agreed to do it. Here's the amazing thing about the whole situation. The pictures I took look exactly like... snapshots! Yae! No professionalism there. But, I have photoshop elements on my computer. Tell you what, it is an AMAZING program. My crappy little snapshots have been so easily transformed into something much, much better. Why am I sharing this, you ask? Well, because part of being a Wonder Woman is being good at everything (haha, just kidding), recording our children's lives, decorating our homes, saving money, and a million other things. I do all these things with my pictures... well, apart from saving money, which I'm working on. I'm a picture freak. Within the last year I've taken at least 2500 photos, possibly more. And I love, love, love the look of a good professional photograph. Of course, I'm not going to go pay a photographer every couple of months to take my kids' pictures, and I'm sorry, but I won't go to the department stores to get them done anyore unless I'm desperate. One to many quality issues there for me. So I'm trying to learn to take my own. I don't take the best pictures, but photoshop elements can do the rest! So, for all you Wonder Women who love pictures as much as I do, here's a sample of what you can do with your own photos.

Crappy Snapshot becomes...

Little studs!

Photo over-exposed and definitely needs to be cropped is turned into...

Absolutely darling!
Then, of course, after having so much fun photoshopping wedding pics I had to take a few of my superheroes-in-training... here's my favorite so far, since I haven't edited most of them yet...

Before... slightly over exposed, color seems a bit dull to me.... but he has a cute face!

After... brighter color, more clarity, and look at those eyes pop!
You know what the best part about this is? I really don't know what I'm doing. I'm a photoshop rookie in the truest sense of the word. But it's fun and I'm going to have the pictures I want without putting out the hundreds of dollars necessary to get them.