5 Reasons I'm Glad That We Used a Travel Agent

To finish this week off, I decided to share my experience with using a Travel Agent for our vacation.  We've never used one before, and I'm really glad that we did.  Our agent was Sharon Law with Pack Your Bags and Go Travel (catchy name, right?).  Here are the reasons that this was a great decision:

By the way, the following photos don't necessarily have anything to do with the listed reasons, I just didn't want the post not to include images :)

Better Deals
A travel agent has access to multiple vendors that offer deeply discounted pricing to the agents that they work with.  There are even deals that you cannot find online, but the agent has access to them.  We got a great deal on our hotel especially being peak season and having an ocean front room.

Stress Relief
I don't know about you, but when it's time to start looking for hotels I expire in about 20 minutes.  This is mainly because I start to feel overwhelmed and frustrated because I'm very particular about where I stay.  With an agent, they are doing the brunt of the work and will send you results based on your requests (kind of like a real estate agent!).  This took so much stress away from me.

Travel Perks
As I mentioned in the last post, our hotel stay came with two free tickets to a dolphin cruise.  That bonus may not have been available if we'd booked our travel ourselves.

A Knowledgeable Representative That's "Team You"
If anything goes awry at any point of your vacation, you always have your agent to back you up and to handle any of those issues for you.  An agent is well versed in travel and knows what to do in many situations that we may not know.  Who really wants to deal with drama on vacation anyway?

Payment Plans
You may not want to use a credit card to pay for vacation and you may not have all of the cash on hand.  A lot of agents offer payment plans so that your trip will be paid in full by the time your vacation starts.  One less thing to worry about in my opinion.

So those are my top 5 reasons that I'm glad that we went with a Travel Agent this year.  If you are looking to travel sooner or later, check out Pack Your Bags and Go Travel!

Photo Credits 1 2 3 4 5

**I was not compensated for this post, I just wanted to share my experience with you all because it was a great one!**

Vacation Recap Pt II

Our vacation was relaxing.  So relaxing that we had free tickets to a dolphin cruise but passed it up to stay on the beach and soak up more rays.  We did take a break from the sun one day and ventured to St. Petersburg to visit the Sunken Gardens and the Dali Museum.

The Sunken Gardens was a tropical paradise.  As soon as you walk in your shoulders drop.  There were so many rare botanicals and everything was so beautiful.  The trees were so tall that they created a roof for most of this outdoor attraction.  We actually decided to go here on a whim and I'm so glad we did.

This tree looks painted but it actually grows like this!  It's called a  Rainbow Eucalyptus and I'm in love with it.

We planned to visit the Dali Museum and I found out that Thursday's the admission is only $10 after 5pm and the parking is free!  I didn't take my camera with me because I was sure that I couldn't take photos inside (though I did sneak one photo of a cool illusion piece), and I was right although photos were fine outside of the galleries.  There was a labyrinth outside which also had some cool pieces at the entrance.  Lastly, if you don't know about Salvador Dali, he was a surrealist artist with some amazing paintings that will make your mind go nuts.  He also had a really cool mustache which there is a sculpture of outside.

 

           Dali image via

As far as the rest of our vacation, we ate well, drank well and enjoyed being off of work.  We even saw a pirate ship sail by one day.  The weather was surprisingly mild at night, so sitting on the balcony listening to music was my favorite thing to do.

So that's our vacation.  As I mentioned before, I'm ready to go on another one.  I'm thinking a long weekend around our anniversary maybe to a Bed and Breakfast.  Have you guys gone on any fun trips this summer?

Vacation Recap Pt I

Hello!

We are back home from vacation and I'm already planning out the next one!  I told Simon that I want to start taking quarterly vacations, so we'll see how that pans out.  In the meantime I wanted to share with you all some of the sights that were seen on our vacation to North Redington Beach, Florida.  We've never been to this beach, but our travel agent (more on that later!) was able to find a great hotel at a great price.  We were situated between Clearwater Beach and St. Petersburg, 30 minutes in both directions.  This area of Florida was pretty quiet which is perfect for us.  There were a lot of homes being built on the beach and they were GORGEOUS.  No photos of them, however, so just image huge homes with 3 and 4 car garages.

To start, we left on a Monday morning.  Atlanta traffic isn't too friendly, so although check-in was 4pm and it was an estimated 7.5 hour drive, we left at 6:30am in order to beat rush hour(s) and decided to make the road trip a mini trip in itself.  We stopped for breakfast once we were well outside of the city (in Macon, GA to be exact) and relaxed for about an hour.  We got back on the road, crossed the Florida line a few hours later...

...stopped for lunch at a gorgeous rest stop (that's an oxymoron right?) and ate at one of the pavilions.  The rest stop was so gorgeous I had to snap photos.  One thing that wasn't so cool though was the "Warning Beware of Poisonous Snakes" sign.  Huh??

Maybe they were being funny (or not), but there was an attraction there called the Snake Wall which basically is a bridge that you walk up and the end is an overlook of one of the state parks as well as the interstate.

We even saw caterpillars!  I've never seen this type in person and boy do those suckers move fast.

After about an hour here we finished our trip (even got a little turned around towards the last 15 minutes of the drive thanks to road construction/changes and Google maps not having current info) and arrived at our hotel, the Doubletree.  Here are a few photos of the beach in no particular order.

There were hula dancers on Friday night at the cookout that the hotel had, and on Saturday morning I was surprised to see a beach wedding!

I will be back with part two of our vacation soon!