Ask anyone who knows me personally and/or follows me on Facebook and you’ll quickly learn that I love to travel. We have two large bucket lists: visit all 50 states and visit each US national park. We thus budget for and plan our vacations accordingly. We’ve had some wonderful, breathtaking trips. We’ve also had others that didn’t go as planned or, as is the case in our most recent trip, didn’t go at all. Today, I wanted to explore the mindset shift we’ve had when it comes to these trips that didn’t go and how we’ve recently learned to shift the perspective of disappointment into opportunity for our large picture goals.
NYC, Baby!
For our anniversary this year, we decided to take a weekend trip up to New York City. Though I went to visit a friend after college, my husband has never been. To sweeten the deal, the man who hates musicals was excited to see Book of Mormon on Broadway, which was our big anniversary spending splurge. We aren’t big city living people, so we knew this would likely be our only trip to NYC together.
While I could take or leave going back to New York City, David has never done the touristy stuff and we both have been waiting years to see Book of Mormon. With his limited PTO situation at work, NYC felt like the perfect weekend getaway since most of our national park excursions take at least a week.
The morning of our flight, I woke up and checked my weather app to see how heavy of a jacket I needed. As someone living in the oppressive, swampy humidity of the South, I was very much looking forward to sweater weather to signal that in parts of the country, it was finally fall. When I pulled up the app, angry red warnings for area flooding and flash flood warnings littered the screen. Naturally, I Googled “New York City flooding.”
After Hurricane Matthew wrecked our Yosemite National Park trip and Hurricanes Irma and Ian made being homeowners panic-attack inducing, we decided to postpone our anniversary trip this year until the tail end of hurricane season. Which was a great idea, we just didn’t push it back far enough. The remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia were parked over New York City, dumping five inches of rain and threatening to flood many of the boroughs. As a native Floridian who is no stranger to sub-tropical rain, I naturally thought “NBD” and ran to Walmart to buy a trio of ponchos using our vacation sinking fund.
A small part of my brain was smart enough to check-in with David (post morning coffee) and tease the “what’s the game plan if things go sideways” discussion.
Remembering the Why
One of the big things we talk about here at The Budget Brigade is having a goal. After all, your budget is your GPS road map to get you where you want to go.
Our primary goal for this trip was to, after years of waiting, see Book of Mormon. So I asked David to pull up Ticketmaster and had him search to see if the show was playing anywhere off Broadway. It was, in fact, touring. In a serendipitous turn of events, it happened to becoming to a city in our state in only a few months with tickets going on sale to the public that very morning.
Right away, we had a back-up plan. If our NYC trip went sideways, we would use the opportunity to visit family we have in the town the show will be at. We’ve been meaning to make a trip up there anyway to visit, so we started to turn the potential disappointment of the trip cancelation into an opportunity for an alternative plan.
We weren’t willing to give up yet, though. With ponchos crammed into our backpacks, we trekked to the airport. We’re no strangers to spending hours upon hours at the terminal waiting on flights that get pushed back for weather. So went our first planned trip to Colorado. While only a few years ago, the stress and anxiety of the change in plans would have sent my heart rate into zone minutes, knowing we already had a backup helped relieve a lot of that stress.
Go or No Go
Our first Colorado attempt taught us that we didn’t particularly enjoy spending eight hours at the airport just to have to head home for a weeklong staycation. That trip stung because it would have been my first visit to the state I’d heard such wonderful things about and because we both now had an entire week to spend at home doing nothing but cleaning and organizing (confession: I don’t know how to relax on staycations).
That trip, when we got to actually go the following year, also taught me that, indeed, I wanted to move out West with my husband eventually. That dream is something we are currently in the early stages of planning for.
New York City isn’t going anywhere. All the sightseeing will still be there where we go, which we will eventually get to, since we still have almost all of the Northeast left on our states bucket list. After the gate attendant announced that LaGuardia was under a ground stop because Terminal A was flooding and the fuel trucks were stuck in a flooded fuel farm, we Googled some more. David watched videos of water pouring into city buses – which we knew we were going to have to take from LGA to the subway transfer. We also watched water gushing from the walls of the subway stations and saw news that several of the large lines were closed and diverting due to flooding.
When Delta announced they were delaying our flight for another hour, we pow wowed again.
Could we still go?
Absolutely.
New York City was under a state of emergency, but they had pumps already working to try to dry out the subway stations, and the buses were still running.
Did we want to get to New York City while the rain was still pouring down and the coastal areas of Manhattan, only a few blocks away from our hotel, were submerged under feet of water?
Not particularly.
If we hadn’t been able to find another option for Book of Mormon and we truly thought we’d never get the opportunity to see the show or visit the city again, I might have told my carry-on suitcase to buck up, it was going to be a soggy weekend. We would only have been able to do half the sightseeing we’d planned, but we would have made it a long Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning huffing it around Manhattan getting in as much as we could.
But we already had another opportunity lined up for Book of Mormon.
What’s more, I had a work-in-progress spreadsheet at home on what we needed to do financially in order to be able to move to Colorado. As of that week, we were an estimated $10K short of being able to afford the move by next summer.
Turning Disappointment into Opportunity
I knew how much I paid for the hotel in Manhattan (it wasn’t Key West expensive, but it was a lot). I’d forgotten how much the Broadway tickets were (also, a lot).
If we could get the hotel and Broadway late cancelation penalties waived, along with Delta’s offer of free cancelation and refund of our flights, we’d net over $1,300 versus the Book of Mormon traveling tour tickets and day trip. $1,300 towards our $10,000 long-term goal of getting to live where we wanted, escaping the oppressive heat, homeowners woes, and almost debilitating allergies. Plus, we’d get to have a nice, relaxing (and I did actually manage to relax – this was a hidden learning opportunity!) weekend at home instead of being stressed out and soaked for the next twenty-four hours in NYC.
I called the hotel and pleaded my case. They were more than happy to cancel and refund us our stay. We jumped on the Delta website to cancel our flights, and then rolled our way back to the car.
Were we disappointed we didn’t get to go?
Absolutely.
We had plans to meet a friend in the city Sunday for breakfast, along with a laundry list of places to explore, including some I didn’t get to on my solo trip. But instead of focusing on that disappointment, we shifted our mindset and looked at the opportunity the trip cancelation offered us. We got even better seats for the traveling show (and cheaper!), and we were more than 10% done with figuring out how to afford our Colorado move.
While NYC was a fun weekend goal, we have a huge dream we’re working on for the next 19 months. Since that is our focus number one for now, we let the chaos from our anniversary trip be a silver lining for our ten-year anniversary goal.
Have you ever had a situation that was disappointing in the moment but turned out to be an opportunity in disguise? Let us know in the comments!