How I Surprised My Husband With a Trip to San Francisco.
Ok I'm pretty sure Ian and I don't have any secrets... Which made keeping these plans a secret a nightmare for me! Literally, I lost sleep over this because I was just so stressed out lol. I'll start from the very beginning where we had no money in the vacation portion of our budget BUT on cyber Monday I got an email from Alaska Airlines (we are cardholders with them so we receive exclusive offers and stuff like that) including a bunch of insane flight deals to certain airports. I scrolled through the list of about fifteen different destinations and the one that stuck out to me was the $59 (one way) fare to San Francisco. I had never been before and Ian had way back when but had just mentioned how he'd like to go there again soon. So I thought about it for a week (the deal lasted 7 days) and on the seventh day I decided to try and pull this off as a birthday surprise.
I contacted his assistant and his bosses and within an hour I had his vacation days approved and the flights booked. I actually booked the flights with my mom's credit card so that he wouldn't see any money come out of our account. The flights totaled just $275 and within a week I had paid my mom in full with cash I made from selling junk on craigslist (we had soooo much stuff in our garage from our last house that we weren't using in our current house). I am the Craigslist queen, so it was no problem to make this kind of money on such short notice. Also, Ian was just completely oblivious to the CL sales and the fact that big furniture items were disappearing from our garage lol. So that helped.
Exactly 4 weeks prior to our trip I found a great hotel deal on Hotwire.com. And $253 later we had ourselves a hotel room booked (on my mom's cc again). I used more CL money and also some of my own birthday money to pay her back from that but I figured if spending my birthday money on my husband got me a trip to San Francisco, that's one heck of a birthday present to myself! lol.
Along the way (like early January) I bought Ian a really cool carryon suitcase because the ones we have are hand-me-downs that are falling apart and I thought wrapping up that suitcase would be a clever way of revealing the trip to him! My sister stored the suitcase until early Feb when I filled it with a bunch of his favorite snacks, a magazine, some sunglasses, and a photo book of San Francisco (that was wrapped separately so he wouldn't figure it out right away upon opening the suitcase). I had him read his birthday card (which was more of a letter) out loud so that he could actually process what was written down... all the details of the trip and how I pulled it off. I figured writing it all out would be the best way to break the news to him because he would've just been plain confused with the bottom line and then I'd have to backpedal and it would be a weird confusing mess lol.
Needless to say, he was completely shocked! I was actually worried he was mad at me or something because he wasn't really expressing anything... but he said he was just so surprised he didn't even believe it and kept forgetting (he opened it five days before his birthday becauseI just couldn't keep the secret any longer).
Anyway, surprising him was so much fun because he values spontaneity and although I had been planning this for months, it was spontaneous for him : )
Here are some pictures from our trip.
