I am trying to schedule three vacations all at the same time and it is just a bad idea. Way too many moving parts.
I started the day with vague plans for a Monday to Friday in Kansas City. Our hilarious niece is there, so that’s a non-negotiable, but everything else is in play. Well, I do want to see the Mucha exhibit at the shuttlecock museum. (I am too lazy to look up the real name, but it’s the only art museum with a giant shuttlecock on the grounds. At least, I hope they still have it.) Then I started adding on extras like the buried steamboat exhibit (I’ve already seen the WWI museum, thank you), and then evaluating what the best non-barbecue restaurant is without the aid of the Micheline organization, and then do nice restaurants take a reservation for one person, and do I need to hire a male escort, and all those considerations. So I have booked nothing … and that starts in 10 days.
In addition, I had planned to go to Houston to see NASA in September and then Chicago in December for the Choir! Choir! Choir! concert. Again, I had a plan: plant myself at the Chicago hotel next door to the venue, move to a nicer hotel after, see the Obama museum, eat at a three-star restaurant, see all the parts of Chicago that Gary is not interested in.
But that all went up in the air when I saw Choir! Choir! Choir! had the same concert in Houston in November, and November in Houston beats Chicago in December by a nautical mile, so those two dates had to be switched, which means I can see Operation Mincemeat in Chicago … and I am starting to appreciate what travel agents do.
This all began when the first domino fell and I discovered BNL is only a third of the bill at Choice A) their concert in St. Louis in 11 days or Choice B) Kansas City in 12 so that drops my interest by 66.66666%.
However, they are going to be in England in December …
3 responses to “Dizzy with options”
That is a spiraling fractal set of options, no wonder you’re dizzy! I hope you can shake a good plan for each of the vacations out of the decision tree somehow. (on the plus side: if one of the vacations turns out to be a disastrous series of things-gone-wrong, it’ll at least still be blog-fodder?)
KC – I am now at the point in which I strike things off the list. Zoo? It will never top the St. Louis Zoo. Team museum? Why? It will never top the British tea museum. Now my essential list has six days six activities.
Good call! Good work, brain, to swap to the mode of assessing and thinning things down rather than endless splitting of decision trees! The “nothing is going to be better than my local [thing]” and “… realistically, I will not want to look at paintings for four days in a row” and “you know, sure, that may be the biggest thing of its kind in the US but I don’t care beans about that thing…” phase…
(it is also okay to go “well, the zoo is probably not *better* than the one in my home town but I would enjoy Cute Fuzzy Animal Time anyway, especially at that point in the trip” but options do not sound *lacking* here)