Beach Trips: Calling an Audible

Remember how we seriously considered canceling our Phoenix trip less than a week before going? Well, we're at it again. 😣 This time it's our 10-day trip to New Orleans and Pensacola Beach on Florida's Gulf Coast, with a little bit of Mississippi thrown in the the middle. The trip starts Friday— maybe. 😰

This is a trip we've been planning since December so making changes now, even feeling like we have to consider making changes now, hurts. OTOH, calling an audible when conditions change is important to how I enjoy travel.

As with considering whether to cancel Phoenix, weather is a concern here. The forecast for late next week when we'd be at the beach in Florida shows high temperatures in the low 70s (around 22° C). That just doesn't seem warm enough for enjoying time on the beach. We looked at weather averages months ago and expected it to be 10 degrees warmer there in late April.

Weather's not the only concern here. There's also President's Club. It's the free trip I won as a form of employee recognition for outstanding performance. I won the award in February. It was only this week that the company finalized the destination: Grand Cayman in May. It'll be several days on the beach on a tropical island. With that on the books, Pensacola seemed like a pale cousin. It's less luxe and the weather's off. And even if it were comparable, two trips of lazing at a beach hotel, a few weeks apart, is repetitive.

Hawk and I discussed it yesterday and agreed to cancel the Pensacola part of next week's trip. The next challenge is, does the rest of the trip hold together? 😰 More to come.

Keep reading: Whole Vacation Now in Question!

Whole Vacation Now in Question

Earlier today I wrote about canceling one beach trip in favor of another. It seems an easy call, right? Two trips now on the books, they seem redundant, so let's keep the better one and take back the time and money from the other. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that.

The difficulty is that I'm struggling to justify the whole rest of the trip beginning Friday now that Florida has been canceled. New Orleans, Mississippi, and Florida were like three legs of a tripod. Take one away, and the others don't stand well.

What do I care about in New Orleans? I'm not sure anymore. Carousing on Bourbon Street was amazing when I was in my 20s. Now, it's like, why do I need to pay exorbitant prices to drink overly sugared cheap booze on the street while party-goers throwing up in the gutters? I've got far better booze at home, far cheaper, and the only person I have to worry about throwing up on my own shoes is me. 🤣

What do I care about Mississippi? On an absolute scale, not much. It's a culturally backwards, politically authoritarian shit-hole. But it's also on my bucket list to visit all the states in the US. Mississippi is one of the last two.

We seriously considered pulling the plug on the whole trip. N.O. I wouldn't miss. Mississippi I'd be miffed about missing because of the bucket list thing. And frankly I'd be miffed about not traveling because then I wouldn't be taking time off. Remember, I'm on an "unlimited" time off policy at work now. There's no saving vacation days for later. They're effectively use-it-or-lose-it every few months.

We've considered going somewhere else instead on this trip. It's a great idea, but the problem is it's hard to book at reasonable prices only a week out. We explored a few ideas last night and decided it's not worth it. We've got one more idea we'll look at today. But most likely we'll just do 60% of our trip starting next week and I'll feel frustrated about the parts that are broken.

Hiking Little Cascade Falls

Sunday a week ago we had an epic hiking day, achieving a rare three-fer: three hiking treks. The epic-ness wasn't just three hikes... moreover it was a stunning twelve waterfalls, or something ridiculous like that. The Cataract Falls trail had more waterfalls than I could count. I'm going to call it 6 for tax purposes. Carson Falls was another 5 falls. And finally, Little Cascade Falls was just 1. That's half the reason why I've dubbed it "little".

Hikers in Marin County talk about the "Three Cs": three waterfalls treks on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais. They're Cataract Falls, Carson Falls, and Cascade Falls. Except there are two totally different places in the area named Cascade Falls. The one we hiked Sunday is not the one with the reputation. (Thus "Little" Cascade Falls.) But it's plenty beautiful. And the trail is short. There's nothing wrong with the more famous Cascade Falls. It's just a longer trek. When you're already punch-drunk on the beauty in which you walk from seeing a dozen or more waterfalls and it's getting late in the day, things like an easy 1/2 mile hike seem better than piling on another 2-3 miles.



Little Cascade Falls is nestled in a canyon surrounded by wealthypeople homes in an affluent residential area of Mill Valley. You can tell it's a wealthypeople neighborhood because (a) the houses are huge, (b) they're actually well isolated from the hiking area, and (c) the roads here absolutely suck. Seriously, it's one-lane drives of broken blacktop with no sidewalks. It's like driving in a poor part of a developing country up in here. Wealthypeople apparently (d) hate paying taxes to do things like fix their damn roads, and (e) keep the roads shitty because improving them just encourages poorpeople to visit.

Well, they'll have to try harder to keep us out. We drove our 4x4 SUV rather than our German sports-convertible on this trip. The only parking spot left was in a ditch next to a cave? Pfft. I took it. Seriously, I parked in a ditch... next to a cave... in front of a probably $8 million house.



All the craziness of the is-this-squalor-or-wealth setting faded as we hiked up the trail into the canyon. Both the multi-million dollar houses and the crumbling roads disappeared from view, and Cascade Falls emerged. It's a tiered falls with a main drop of about 20 feet.



I'm glad I've gotten this blog out this evening. It's a week behind at this point— and I still have other stuff that's at least a week behind— but at least I've caught up on hiking. ...Well, we did a small hike yesterday I'll have to blog about sometime in the coming week. Catching up on this tonight has been fun because the touching up the beautiful pictures has reminded me how in beauty I walk.