When we first started talking about heading to Louisiana and Mississippi, we weren't sure where we would be going. I started googling drop zones and discovered only one USPA drop zone in Mississippi, Gold Coast Skydivers which was located in the south western part of the state. I started looking for a drop zone in Louisiana and found Skydive Nawlins. It was just over the border about 45 minutes from Gold Coast and almost the same distance from New Orleans. I sent an email to Skydive Nawlins to ask if they were open year round. I received a prompt reply from Brenda (I later discovered she is the DZO) advising me that they are open year round. However, they do not come out to the drop zone unless the weather is good. Unlike some drop zonese, they do not hang out and wait for weather to clear. I didn't have to email the other drop zone because Gold Coast Skydivers was where The Pink Mafia started and I had chatting with some of my GCS friends and knew they would be open. In the end, I decided that the airport in New Orleans would be the best one for this trip.
In an effort to keep our momentum, I wanted to do this trip in January and luckily Matt had off work on MLK day. The prices from our local airport in Richmond were expensive. I was happy to discover the tickets from the DC area were less expensive (still not cheap). If we left from Dulles, we could leave our car at Jennifer's house and eliminate the cost of keeping our car in the airport parking garage. Our expenses would include: airfare, two nights in a hotel, and car rental. Of course, as I dug a little deeper, it turns out the best airfare prices were for a Thursday departure and returning on Tuesday. The savings from the lower price tickets would be offset by extra nights at the hotel and additional days of car rental. The more I thought about it, the idea of purchasing tickets in advance seemed like a bad idea. Weather is such an important factor in our sport. It's hard to spend $600 on airline tickets for a "maybe". When I added up the cost for everything, I realized that these two states would cost over $1,000. It was so expensive, but it's part of the cost of achieving our goal.
Out of curiousity, I pulled up a map to see how far away Gold Coast was from our home - 941 miles. With the current gas prices, if we drove down and back the gas would be less $200. We could eliminate the cost of the airline tickets, extra hotel rooms, and car rental. When we came up with the idea of flying, Matt took of the Friday before his long weekend. This gave us four days for the trip. If we left our house on Thursday night, we could drive four hours or so and then we'd only need to do 10 on Friday. Our last major trip was over the course of 4 days and 4 hours and we drove over 2,400 miles. This was only 2,000 miles! It was time to talk to Matt.
It didn't take much convincing because Matt is frugal. We were looking at roughly $500 for this trip - three nights in a hotel and round trip prices for gas. That's 1/2 of what it would cost to fly. It just made sense to drive!
One last piece of the puzzle - Emma! Emma would be at our house for the weekend. Even though she is 16, we were worried about leaving her alone for three consecutive nights. I made arrangements for a friend to come and stay with her on Friday night. Having a friend come over in the middle made sense to us. I gave Emma $60 to spend while we were gone. Dinner, a movie, whatever they wanted to do.
A few days before setting out on our trip, I did a deep cleaning of our bedroom. I even took apart our bed and vacuumed underneath, cleaned the walls and every inch of the base boards. With three cats in the house, its a constant battle in the war on cat fur. I absolutely love coming home to a clean house. After a long drive, it's especially nice to crawl into your own bed with fresh sheets! Each day, I had something else to accomplish. I cleaned our office from top to bottom - a long overdue chore I'd been avoiding. I managed to get all the laundry washed and put away.
Next on my list: maintenance on the van. With over 220,000 miles on it, I am diligent about oil changes. It wasn't quite time yet for an oil change, but I wanted to be certain the car was road worthy so I took it in to the shop. I asked the technician to scour the car to see if there was anything that I needed to replace before our trip. There were two items he came up with - new front tires and a timing belt. He said the timing belt could wait, but he highly recommended new tires (they were about 3,000 miles away from bald). I took the van to Merchant's Tires. Any guesses on how much two new tires cost for a mini-van? Too much! I went back and forth on rather or not to buy the best tires. As much as I drive, it makes sense to spend the extra money. We planned to take the van on our future road trips because it's much more comfortable than the car. It allows us to take whatever we want - including a place to sleep! I left with the top of the line - 90,000 mile warranty tires. Hopefully, these will be the last two front tires I buy for my van. They should last until I'm over 300,000 miles!
Getting new tires put a monkey wrench in my schedule - I was running out of time to get everything done. On the way home from the tire installation, I stopped at a Car Pool to have the car cleaned out and washed. This is the first time in my life that I've paid someone to clean out my car. They did an okay job - not perfect, but it saved me a couple of hours of doing it myself. I got back to the house and put together something for dinner. It was hard to imagine getting the car after dinner and driving for three or four hours. When Matt arrived, I had almost everything packed. We just had to load the car after dinner and then we could be on our way. That's when I started waffling about leaving.
I suggested that we pack everything in the car and leave at 7:00 AM on Friday. This would eliminate one night of hotel expense, we'd get a good nights sleep in our own bed, and Emma would only be home alone one night. Matt agreed with this suggestion and started loading the car. When he was done, we watched some TV and went to bed early - alarm clock set for 6:15 AM!
