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! 

I won!

I am proud to say that I took top honors with the second-highest rating in the Canon Tell Your Story Photo contest. I was so excited that I had to tell everyone! I had the choice of winning a PowerShot SD770IS camera, or a PIXMA MP 610 all-in-one printer. I chose the camera of course. When you love taking pictures as much as I do, you can't have too many cameras floating around. Thanks to everyone who voted for my submission, Giants and Giant Illusions and you still have time to enter your own photo story and win some great prizes! Just go to http://www.canontellyourstory.ca/ to enter.