Hi everyone,

If you are a friend of mine on facebook, by now you know that I made a lifetime dream come true this past weekend. I have been very fortunate in my adult working life to be a travel consultant. It has taken me around the world and back again, and to think that a short one hour flight away there was an amazing dream that had not yet come true for me. Until now.

If you are a friend of mine off facebook, you may know this hidden (or not so) fact about me. I love New York. I love all shows filmed in New York. I love movies that are filmed in New York, all of it. If there is a RomCom movie on, even if I have seen it 100 times, I am in – Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve got mail, Serendipity, Annie, Maid in Manhattan, Uptown Girls, too many to even put here – you name it…you will find me watching. 

In fact, I also love chick lit books, and if I pick up the back of a book and it talks about the lead character living and/or working in Manhattan, I buy it. I haven’t always enjoyed the book, but the references to the city I love are worth the buy in.

Bucket list – made famous by the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman – saw two men fighting life threatening illness. One man took another on a journey of life experiences that everyone should see or do before they die. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I was a work conference last week and was told that the estimated cost of the experiences they had was $250,000. That is not something the average person can do.

But what can the average person do? Well, funny enough, in today’s world, put your question in the form of your status update – “Would really like to make bucket list dream come true – to see the Rockafeller Christmas tree – who’s in?” and thankfully, someone said they were in. I have thrown out a lot of travel suggestions before and people always “want” to be in, but for whatever the situation, they can’t be all in. But as luck would finally be on my side, my friend worked it out and we were on our way to the Big Apple in December!

And so it began. On September 26th we booked the tickets and hotel to make it happen.

If you followed me for the weeks to come you would have seen that I changed my facebook profile picture every day until the week I left. Challenging huh? For almost 70 days I changed my picture to reflect on the city that I love. One friend mentioned that it was like an Advent Calendar counting down the days to Christmas. One friend mentioned the photos were making her jealous because she loves New York as well.

I know that making dreams come true quite often comes with a price tag attached to it. I am lucky enough that this one dream had a price tag that I could manage and therefore make happen for myself and my friend.