I got our plane tickets for Florida next month. What a hassle.

Next time, either I'm not taking the reins on this one, or we're not going during made-up holidays like Presidents' Day when EVERY FREAKIN' HIGH SCHOOL IN THE NORTHEAST is closed and all the RICH YUPPIE PARENTS ARE TAKING THEIR KIDS TO DISNEY WORLD. It's not Casey's fault that her grandparents live in Orlando, but maybe it's her dad's fault for deciding to go that week. What was he thinking? We chose that week because he'd be there and we'd have to pay for less. With her grandparents already picking up her flight and my parents offering one of their four free flights to me, it will be a pretty affordable vacation.

Until we land and go to theme parks and shopping malls. We should try to bring a lot of books and spend as much time as we can getting tan. That will be cheap.

But I'm excited. I'm excited for a vacation in the sunshine, for a chance to see Brian, for a possible dinner with Bryan's parents, who will be down from Massachusetts. There are two options right there for when we need to escape the family.

"Are you excited," I asked her yesterday when I told her the arrangements were made.

"No," she replied, almost sadly. "A week with my family. Great. I just want my grandparents to meet you so they don't think I'm living in sin."

I wonder how much room they have in the house, because with Jim and Carol there (I think Carol's going, but I'm not sure) and Casey, I'll probably be on the couch, which will probably be in a front room where everyone will walk through at 6 a.m. to get to the kitchen. That's if they let me stay in the house. HA! Kidding. I'm sure they will. Probably.

When we both got the OK for taking the week off (the company gives us Presidents Day � but not Martin Luther King Day, which was yesterday for you Arizonans � so it's costing us each four vacation days and not five) just before Christmas, we went online to look at airfares. They were outrageous. What the airlines should do is team up with Hallmark to invent more holidays so that they can raise airfares over more weekends. Then people would either pay the rates, or not travel as much and boost their local economy. Well, that wouldn't help the airlines, but it's a better economic boost than giving rich people more money in the form of eliminating the dividend tax on stock payments. That won't help the economy � people rich enough to gain significant sums from the elimination of dividend taxes are rich enough to spend money even in a recession.

I see I've digressed. Anyway, our first searches showed us nothing below $400. So we decided to wait. Periodically, I'd scan sites like Expedia and Travelocity (no linkage today because they sucked), which might occassionally show me a fare under $350, but that would somehow end up a farce. Sometimes, I'd select the departure date, and it would slap me on the cheek and say, "Fat chance, prick, we're getting real rates for those dates," only without as much rhyming.

With the search providing no reasonable results and the magic 21-day limit approaching (it's Saturday), I reluctantly took Mom's offer to use their credit card travel points.

This avenue required me to call the company's travel center, for which I was on hold for 20 minutes one evening at work. Then they said I needed to have one of my parents on the phone with me to tell them it was OK for me to use their points. So when Dad drove up yesterday (he had the day off) to deliver a bed frame for Casey and me, he spoke with the people at the travel center (after I'd waited on hold for 10 minutes).

In speaking with Linda, we found a decent flight out of LaGuardia for $330 on USAir, but we arrived at like 9 p.m. on the 15th and left at 7 a.m. on the 23rd. While she went and checked another airline or another date (we tried the 16th and 22nd in various combinations), the $330 fare was snapped up. Her next offer was on AirTran for $390. I said I'd have to check with Casey about AirTran, so after 26 minutes on the phone and no real results, I hung up.

Casey was fine with it, so I called back. Another woman helped me this time and the best we were able to get was a combination USAir/Delta flight with a three-hour layover each way in Greensboro, N.C. I didn't want to do it, but I also wanted to get these reservations made, so I was about to give her the OK when I asked her to check Philadelphia.

Glory, hallelujah. Well, it doesn't really deserve a "hallelujah" because it's still $390, but we're on USAir with a one-hour layover in Charlotte on the way down and a direct flight coming back. We get to Orlando at 5 p.m. on the 15th and leave at noon on the 23rd � not really enough time to do much of anything on those days, but not so bad that we have to go straight to bed when we land or wake up and high-tail it to the airport when we leave.

Too bad we'll have to deal with conservative rich families from Long Island when we go to Disney World, though. At least Epcot won't be so crowded.