With only seven states left, there aren't many more trips to plan! My parents have invited us to Hawaii in the spring of 2016. SO, that's off the planning list for now leaving me with Rhode Island (GRRRR), New Hampshire (trip to Pepperell?), Texas, New Mexico, Colorado & Wyoming. Since we want to do Wyoming last, I have decided to spend my day working on Texas and New Mexico.

Our original plan for Texas and New Mexico was a Christmas vacation for two, but after doing some research on the airfares and weather patterns, traveling at the end of December seemed like an expensive crap shoot! I started looking into tickets for October / November.

The flights into the eastern part of Texas are so much cheaper than the flights to the western part of the state. We could get to Houston for $225.00 each on Delta, but landing in Houston puts us 781 miles away from the drop zone in New Mexico - roughly an 11 hour drive! That was not appealing. I needed to find some place closer to New Mexico. There were no USPA drop zones listed in West Texas, but I did find a DZ located near Midland, Texas and it was only four hours from the El Paso airport - Skydive West Texas.

There are only two active drop zones in New Mexico.  Skydive El Paso located in Santa Teresa, New Mexico was 27 miles from the El Paso airport. The second one, Skydive New Mexico was about 4 hours away in Albuquerque. As I continued my research, I discovered both New Mexico drop zones were high above sea level. No matter where we went, the landings would be fast!

Using Google, I looked to see how much it would cost to fly into El Paso - $448.00 each on Delta. At least we'd be saving money on gas and I really didn't want to spend an entire day driving back and forth across the state of Texas.  

I sent an email to Skydive West Texas and got a response from Pete Lutz. He said he'd be happy to put us on the plane with a tandem for $25.00 a slot or if he didn't have a tandem he'd charge us $30-35 each to put the three of us on the plane.  Bottom line:  Pete was willing to work with us to make it happen.  This would eliminate a long drive to the eastern part of the state.

After I got Pete's email, I got back online to look for a flight. I figured the sooner we got there the better, but I didn't really want to pay $448.00 for one ticket! I looked three weeks out and I found tickets for $327 each out of the Richmond airport! Awesome!

It's official!  We now have tickets to go to Texas in October!  Now, I just have to figure out Rhode Island!