Two tickets to paradise.

Internets, I hurt. Badly.

I got the remaining staples from my hips removed this morning, and holy crap on a pancake, I'm sore. I'm more sore than I was right after the surgery. I can barely walk.

Also? The place where the drain was on my right hip hasn't closed, so I have a gaping hole in my hip. No one seems to be concerned about it but me, so I'm trying not to worry.

Also, also? My new belly button hurts today for no good reason other than I think it deliberately wants to annoy me.

Anyway, to keep my mind off the pain, I'm trying to think of a good vacation for Will and I to take sans kids this fall. We should (hopefully) be making a few thousand dollars by moving ourselves rather than having the military do it. We could be responsible and pay off some of my student loan or something boring like that, but I'm thinking a vacation is more necessary.

A vacation without kids.

And Will doesn't seem to disagree.

At first I looked at going to Argentina. Will went there on his church mission and has talked about going back. But really, we could only afford Buenos Aires and Will wants to travel down to where his mission was and that takes it out of our price range.

So, last night when I couldn't sleep (and was out of Tylenol PM and didn't want to wake up with a Percocet hangover) I researched some other places.

I can think of a million places in Europe we'd love to go to, but I don't want to risk having my vacation screwed up by volcanic ash grounding my flight. So, Europe is out until someone sticks a cork in Iceland.

Renting an over-the-water bungalow at an all-inclusive resort in Bora Bora or Tahiti looked nice, but the airfare alone is more than we can spend (though, surprisingly, the resorts themselves were quite reasonable).

So, I started looking closer--in the Caribbean. Everything looks spectacular. And within our price range. Puerto Rico. Antigua. Turks-Caicos. Jamaica. Grand Cayman. St. Kitt. Dominican Republic. St. Lucia. I could go on... Oh, or we could go to the Riviera de Maya and see the Mayan ruins (which I would LOVE to do, but would feel guilty doing that without the kids, who--especially Ben-- would also love it).

Hawaii is also an option, but with Sawyer and Harmony gone, it seems kind of pointless.

And then there are cruises. I've wanted to go on a cruise, oh...for forever. But that's another vacation I kind of want to save for a family vacation (because we can pawn the kids off in the kid's club when we get tired of family time, which you can't do at an amusement park).

There are just too many fabulous choices. So, internets, I'm turning to you. Where should we go? Have you been anyplace you'd recommend? Help plan my escape.

(Oh, and on a sort of related note, I tried on a two piece swimsuit today and it didn't make me cry or want to vomit up my lunch, so that's progress from Sunday, I guess.)