Yesterday we booked the airfare for our trip to San Francisco in August!

I am so excited, because this will be my first real vacation ever, where I have taken more than 3 days PTO for nothing but fun. There have been 2 other times I have been gone from work more than 3 business days in my life:

1. Our honeymoon – we planned this so that it fell during the week the National Center (where I work) is closed between Christmas and New Year’s so that I wasn’t gone on any business days.

2. Mission trip to the Dominican Republic – this happened right after I went from Consultant to Full Time Employee here in 2005, so I actually didn’t get paid for the 5 days I missed. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a vacation since it was 100+ degrees, more than 100% humidity, no A/C, no hot water, and we were doing manual labor the entire time. I tried coming back the Monday after we returned and had to go home due to heat exhaustion and nausea.

Due to the nature of my job, if I’ve tried to take a day off in the past, there was no one to provide the service for my customers and they could not handle not having any projects completed for a week (we typically do 6 a day – this would be a loss of around 30+ jobs across the entire organization). So I would just take 1 or 2 days before or after a weekend and either work ahead before I left or work while I was on PTO. But now I have someone here helping me and I can actually leave for a week! This is so exciting!!!

So, if anyone has been to San Francisco and has any great tips for places to go and things to see, let me know! I am making a huge list of things we will do. I think that God has really provided for us because some friends of ours might be able to let us use their time share which would save a whole lot on lodging!