Sure I'll Take a two-day Stay at a Resort in Italy...Now I just have to get Myself there!

I enter a lot of contests. Some of them are simple and only require a form to be filled out with my contact information; others are more challenging and require me to actually do something for my entry. I prefer these more challenging contests. Sometimes the challenge is to submit a photo and other times, the challenge is to submit something in writing. Recently I entered a travel blogging contest that offered a two-night stay at a resort in Italy as the prize. I composed my entry and hit submit and forgot all about until a few weeks later when I opened my inbox to see the headline “you won” on one my incoming emails.

“You won” is something I often see in my email and 99% percent of the time, it is one of those scam emails. But I always open them up just to be sure and scan them to make sure they are in fact scams. As always, I opened this one, scanned it and went back to the top to reread again slowly because something caught my eye. I recognized some things in the email and it all came back to me; this was about that contest I had entered a few weeks ago. I was being informed that I had won two free nights at a resort called La Francesca in Bonassola, Italy.

I’ve been thinking about doing a multi-country trip in Europe for some time now but never got around to it. After confirming my information and getting in contact with the resort owners, I really started putting a plan in motion. I even went as far as choosing the dates that I would be in Italy and corresponded with the owners of La Francesa to inform them of my plans. It wasn’t until I received an email back with a pile of information about the resort including the fact that many of their facilities were now closed because it was the off-season. Those two words “off-season” caused my plans to crumble. I had forgotten that it was almost winter in Europe. I emailed them back and informed them that I would not be going in December but rather next spring or summer when the weather was warmer and there was more to do….and proceeded to book a week-long vacation in Barbados instead! 