My Mommy (and best friend) is having a Big Birthday, September 17th. The only hint I’ll give you is that she’s still holding firm in the double-digits, and she did not want to stay at home where her other not-so-young friends would throw her a not-so-surprising birthday party. Ugh. So my East coast sis and I decided to cough up the big bucks and whisk her away on a surprise Ultimate Birthday Girlfriend-Getaway Trip.

And that’s when the going got really tough… You see, Mom is quite well-traveled, and we wanted to take her someplace new and exciting. And then there is the matter of going someplace that my sister hasn’t been and wouldn’t want to go to with either her husband or daughter, and then the weather shouldn’t be too hot or humid, or the flight too long, the food must be good, had to be over a certain time frame in September, not too much driving once we arrived, blah blah blah… you get the drill.

After literally months of kicking this around with no success, (Disneyland was starting to sound really good), my sister found an unbelievably great price for new tour to Dubai!

If you don’t count the long flight or hot weather, it was perfect! We figured one out of three wasn’t bad and it certainly was exotic, newsworthy, exciting, and none of us had been… so we immediately signed up for the September trip. The very next day my sister calls me and says, “Are you Nuts?????” (As if it had been all My Bad!)

“Do you know Dubai gets to over 110 degrees in September and we’re NOT talking dry heat!”

Oops… for my cool rain-loving, Seattle-born Mommy, this would qualify as a trip to hell. I immediately got on the phone to the folks at Friendly Planet and they sure lived up to their name. They informed me that the best weather (around 75 degrees) would be in February, and although it wasn’t their usual policy, they would change all our reservations for that date. Phew.

All good. Except we still needed to get her away from that dreadfully dreary sounding “surprise” party in Seattle. And that’s when I opened an email about the upcoming Lake Tahoe Autumn Food and Wine Festival… and it was right over her birthday, September 13 to 16.