Labor Day Weekend

I have a love/hate relationship with Labor Day. Who doesn't love a long weekend? But people always say it's the end of summer,which gives me cry-feeling just writing about it. I console myself that I technically have another 3 weeks of summer.

I have to preface this with a giant cheer for our honeymoon to Argentina but it was a tiring trip. Kelly warned me that I would be exhausted and needed to do nothing for the first few days which I passed on to Jeff, honeymoon-planner-extraordinare. But it just didn't work out that way. It was a fabulous trip but it was tiring. I got one - yes ONE - day of lying by a pool and having some spa action (recall: facial excellence). I'll do 49 posts on Argentina alone and you'll see in the photos that I look pretty pooped in every picture. For the first few days we got up in the DARK to go tooling around on glaciers. That's just not right.

So, I have been needling Jeff to go on a trip where I can lie by a pool or a beach and get lots of massages. A trip where my hardest decision is whether I stick with Swedish massage or should I try Shiatsu for the first time? Well, amen, it's happening. We are taking an extended long weekend to The Boulders Resort in Carefree, Arizona, near Scottsdale. Here is a link: http://www.theboulders.com/.

Jeff said we could ge where ever I wanted. He is so nice. (And possibly dumb. I could have chosen something crazy.) We pondered London but plane tickets are mental. I adore London being an uber anglophile myself and, yet, Jeff and I have never been together. I'm not sure he could stand it. We pondered Madrid, but again, plane tickets are mental. We pondered Miami but enh, we go there a lot. We pondered the Florida Keys and I even made a reservation at a hotel. Plane tickets were cheap but the hotel got hot and cold reviews and then there is that old possible-hurricane issue. We pondered Vegas but we have been there together before and decided that it was best saved for going with a group (helloooo, anyone up for that?). Basically, I tortured Jeff over the various possibilities...

It came down on The Boulders because of the spa, The Golden Door Spa. It's fabulous and it is at at a handful of hotels around the country. I first went to one in January with Cynthia and Jodi at the El Conquistador Resort & Casino outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico (home of future post). The moral of the story is that we knew there was a spa there but we knew nothing of this fabled Golden Door. It was f a b u l o u s. So, I have been obsessed with staying at hotels with this spa ever since. Ergo, The Boulders.

I've never been to the southwest and it's probably super cheesy of me to go to a place where I may not even leave the grounds (though they do have hundreds of acres!) but it's what's happening. It's a AAA 5-diamond hotel and I think we are paying about $150 a night. It's off-season (read: sweltering and Jeff's skin might literally just decide to give up and peel right of his body). In high season it's upwards of $475/night. I love a bargain!

Check out the spa menu. The Shirodhara is happening. It rocks on and on and on. But what else will I get???!!!!

Travel Excellence

We've been talking about having a travel blog for a while. Even though our vacations are Totally Awesome (TM) it's not really so we can tell everyone how super we are. (Though we are, indeed, super.)

We have a lot of friends who travel to really fabulous locations that the average bear wouldn't necessarily consider and we are hoping that we can use this as a forum for our peeps to post fun ideas and experiences and give each other feedback. Like a Trip Advisor but for Awesome People only. And if you want to go somewhere and you see someone has commented about it, please ask us if they have the same travel taste. Some people like to be uber active and others not so much, etc. We hope it'll prove to be a fun forum.

And the name. Now that I think of it, I think the story really wont be as funny to other people as it will be to us. When we were in Argentina for our honeymoon we stayed at The Most Amazing Hotel: Llao Llao (it will get it's own post someday). Oddly, at this super fancy hotel their English language spa brochure was alarmingly Asian-sounding (as in bizarrely translated for those who think I am simply offensive.) There was a facial whose title was just Facial Excellence and it was all about achieving facial excellence. So it became our running honeymoon joke - we have to achieve dining excellence, sleeping excellence, etc., etc. Yeah, you had to be there.

So, let's see if we can all achieve Travel Excellence! Woo!