So Saturday I got a comment on one of my recent blog posts. It seemed to be completely unconnected to the post itself. Since I’d had a comment spammer I had to clean up within the last few days, my immediate thought was, oh no, not again… It said:

http://dustsettler.wordpress.com

Not much on it yet, but it’s a start :) See page for explanation.

Thinking to myself, I don’t want any Viagra, I clicked on the link with fear. But I had no need of fear, it was a good thing:

Our First Trip
(brightviolet, Until the Dust Settles, 9 Jan 2009)

For some time, we had toyed with the idea of randomly choosing a trip destination by throwing a dart at a dartboard. However, our lack of a dartboard (or darts) had stopped us from doing so, until recently. As we sat in our friends’ house in Florida over the Christmas break, I decided to google “random vacation generator”. That search led me to a forum where people were discussing precisely that idea. One person added that he had created a “Spot Tool”, and had in fact taken a number of trips using this method already. (See the link to the left)

Sam Minter’s tool seems to allow for setting parameters, but as we could not figure out how to do this, we just gave it a shot. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you’re aware, the world consists of a loooot of water. A few failed hits later, we hit a location. A tiny island in the middle of nowhere, that was apparently U.S. territory, but uninhabited by anyone but birds. Okay, obviously not a possibility!

This made us realize that we needed to set some limits for each trip, and then we should keep trying until we found a location that met our parameters. Since we were looking at a spring break trip, with only 9 days off, and of course limited resources, we decided on the following:

…

Perfect: The first three locations that met our criteria were all within range of each other, and allowed us to plan out a perfect trip for 9 days. This trip will go as follows:

…

We will leave in March of 2009, so check back for updates!

I remain saddened that various factors have continued to push my own next random vacation to Chacchoben, Quintana Roo, Mexico into the far future. But it seems someone else is taking up the mantle! So thank you to BrightViolet… and I’ll be watching for your updates!