(no subject)

My France trip is nearly a week away and my excitement level is finally climbing pretty high.

I've had quite a few last minute headaches, and the whole process has been a bit more stressful than it needed to be due to really long turnaround times on most things from my travel agent, but everything finally seems to be falling into place.

My latest issue was the realization that our (prepaid) hotel in Provence was going to be totally unacceptable.  I'd kinda taken the travel agent's word that the city she'd booked us in was a good base for the area, but when I started doing driving directions to the sites I really wanted to hit, everything was an hour or more away.  Considering that there are plenty of towns within 10 or 15 minutes of those sites, this seemed like such an unnecessary waste.

I was really bummed about it for a couple days, thinking the prepayment was going to screw me, but I did manage to get them to cancel and credit me for the original hotel in that area, *and* I was able to manually book a place that A) Is more centrally located, B) Has *very* positive reviews on TripAdvisor, and C) costs $200 less than the original place.  Yatta!  :)

Now if I could just finagle some way to get an upgrade to first-class on the flight over, everything would be perfect. ^_^