Vacation news

In 9 days, I will once again be on vacation. This time, it is a girls-only trip to celebrate our 40th birthdays...although that is kind of a misnomer, since I will be the only actual 40 year old there. Vanessa turns 40 later that month, then Stacey does, and my sister Mandy is only 37, damn her, but we are letting her come anyway. We started out with a guest list of about 16 people, but some of these chics are caught up in kids sports, one is pulling off a semi-secret wedding, are broke, or maybe just do not like us anymore. (I am pretty sure that is not it, but in case they see me teasing them on here, I felt I should point out that possibility too) We are going to the Dominican Republic next Saturday. We are doing 5 days at an all inclusive resort, so there will be almost no action except laying there by the pool and downing our full money's worth of girlie cocktails. I am not even taking my dive stuff---well probably not---not sure I can stand not to, although the diving in that area is not so great anyway. It is going to be awesome. It was hard to come up with somewhere that would suit us all--Vanessa and Stacey had to get their passports, and I wanted to go somewhere I had not been. Mandy's travel is legendary (she makes me look like I never leave the house--for example, her last girls weekend was in Sri Lanka where they rode elephants and had their own butler at their house, for God's sake, but this sounds like a fair compromise for everyone. It really does not matter where we go--all of us have things going on in our worlds that cause great stress and to just chuck it all and run off like this is going to be good for us. I am thinking maybe we need to do every year! I do hear some rumblings of a trip to Spain in the spring with Mandy's girls and I am totally up for that if I can pull it off. I also have other vacation news, but I cannot let the cat out of the bag until we tell the kids next week. Something this big, I want the satisfaction of seeing their faces when they find out, and I am never sure who reads this blog and might rat me out. I will let you know their reactions as soon as I have them!