This was written on April 3, but won't be published until later for security reasons.
Some time back, my wife and I were talking about places we'd been that we would particularly like to go back to some day. There are a lot, for her and for me, but one in particular we agreed on, enthusiastically: Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Tennessee and North Carolina. So it was with that in mind that, having been forced by a poorly-designed mobile website to call Wyndham Rewards on the phone from a Wendy's parking lot in Kansas, and having been subjected to a pointless (though they don't know it) pitch for their Wyndham Resorts program (a sort of time-sharing venture), I accepted an offer for a 3-night stay in their facility in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near that national park. They threw in a $200 gift card as a sweetener when I resisted the first offer. That won't begin to cover the expense of getting to eastern Tennessee, but it helps. Sure, we'll have to sit through another hour-and-a-half presentation on the joys of timeshare ownership, but we can do that.
So a few weeks later I selected a time for the trip, after consultation with my wife about her schedule. At that point, neither of us had any definite travel plans, so the choice came down to the timing of her local team's soccer matches, and Easter was the best time for her to be away.
Well. The trip is nearly upon us: we leave in the morning. My diligent-albeit-meaningless travel plans have already been pushed back a day because of an unforeseen family situation. so the trip over will be three days instead of four (though we might take an extra day coming back). And of course my excitement at the thought of driving around the southern Appalachian Mountains in my little convertible has been quashed by the realities of weather (highs in the 50s and strong chance of thunderstorms are really not "convertible weather"), so we'll be puttering across country in my aging, but still reliable Subaru Forester. (I say reliable: the stereo's Bluetooth has died for a second time, so we'll be limited to music and radio, no audio books. That's a real blow, but I'm damned if I'm going to get that fixed again.)
Really, the biggest things about this coming trip are (1) the dog and (2) other plans.
When both of us go somewhere, we like to take our dog with us. That means we go to places where she'll be welcome: primarily our family outposts in Colorado and Arizona, but also occasionally to other places. But more often, it means only one of us goes, and the other stays home with the dog. My wife goes to see her sister, and I stay home with the dog. I go on a wander, and she stays home with the dog. She goes to a tournament, and I stay home with the dog. It works for us. (At least, it works for me; I assume it works for her. Seems to, anyway.) But our sweet little dog is not welcome at Wyndham Resorts (another reason we won't be buying into it, as if we needed another reason), and so she's going to the boarding kennel for a while. I hate that.
And then there are the other plans. Like I said, when we picked these dates we had no other travel plans except a vague notion that at a certain point in mid-to-late April my wife would be out in Arizona for a couple of weeks with her sister. They do it every year. Nothing else was planned for the entirety of 2023, at least until a vague point in October when another regular trip comes 'round. It seemed like a safe bet to put this trip on the calendar for Easter.
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| beautiful scenery, tarted up |
(I did stay in a Wyndham Resort in New Orleans a couple of months ago, and it was very nice, but it's just a regular hotel with a good price and a good location; there was nothing "resort-ish" about it, that I could see.)
Also, I watched part of John Oliver's recent commentary on time-shares, which I recommend to anyone considering ever buying into one.
