Then, when I've gone through the pictures about 139560938 times, I fall into a bit of a travel funk. Of course, the solution to this funk, is to start planning another vacation, which I have already done!
But, I don't want to jump too far ahead of myself yet. I thought I'd post one more post about the Atlantis trip, things we did to save money, things we are glad we did, things we wish we hadn't done, etc. Then we'll move on to our Turkey Day 2010 trip!
So when you book at the Atlantis, they try to give you a hard-sell on the meal plans they have there. I'm still fairly young I suppose, in my late 20's and I've learned already in life that if someone has to give you the hard sale, whatever they're selling probably isn't worth it.
So the Atlantis dining plans, they have a casual dining plan that is $75 and a gourmet plan that is over $100. We really aren't gourmet type people (especially not every night of the week) so if we had considered a plan, it would have been the casual plan.
The casual plan covers breakfast and dinner each day. The plan does not include alcohol, lunch, or gratuities. When you order a meal that is on the meal plan, your room is still charged 15% of that meal for the tip.
The meal plan would have cost us $1800. I have read that most people who buy the mealplan wind up ordering $2400 in food because the plan "includes" a huge buffet breakfast, and at dinner an appetizer, dinner, and dessert. If we had done the meal plan and ordered as many families do, we would have $1800 in the meal plan, and $360 in tips. So $2160 for 2 meals a day.
Instead though, since we are not big breakfast eaters, we took granola bars and pop tarts with us and we bought fresh fruit and coffee at the grocery store on the way to the resort, so the cost of breakfast was negligible. $1-2 a person tops.
For lunch, we ate by the pool each day, there were great little snack bars with burgers, chicken tenders, hot dogs, salads, wraps, conch fritters, nachos, etc. We always ordered whatever we wanted.
For dinner, we went mostly to casual dining establishments (places on the casual dining plan) but we did go to dinner at one gourmet choice, Mesa Grill.
At each restaurant we ordered whatever we wished. We found that portions were generally huge, and sometimes we would share an appetizer or a dessert, but not always. This choice was not based on price, it was purely because there was so much food!
So at the end of our trip, we were a little worried about seeing our room charges, to see how much damage we had done. Turns out, not much at all! The total for all of us was $1000!
So, I absolutely suggest skipping the meal plan. Unless you are really into eating a huge buffet breakfast, and have an enormous appetite, this plan just doesn't make good money sense!
This image to the left is a little craft that I made before our trip. I had heard about the seas of beach chairs at the Atlantis, and I thought perhaps my family could benefit from having something visible to mark our seats so they were easy to find when we got out of the water.Each morning we would go and find our seats, hang our neon pom poms from each of our chairs, and then enjoy the pool and current! Every day people would stop by and comment on what a good idea they were, as the people who commented wandered through row after row of chairs looking for their own!
The pom poms were great because they were very inexpensive, (just the cost of yarn if you don't already have some) and they mushed up really small to hardly take up any room in our suitcases. They were also a breeze to make. The one above is a little akimbo as it had just stormed and it was pretty wet. here is another picture of them when they were dry. They are about 4 inches across.
Here is the video I followed to make them. I made mine bigger (wound the yarn around my entire hand) and used a LOT more yarn than the girl in the video. I also spent more time shaping them at the end. Each one only took maybe 5-10 minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BRjpRfm1X8
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