Winner's Crime Blog Tour and Giveaway!

I'm so excited to participate in the What's Your Winner's Curse? Blog Tour and Giveaway.

First off, I really love the Winner's Curse series and highly recommend that you check the books out if you haven't already. If you missed my review of the Winner's Curse, you can read it here. My review of the Winner's Crime is here.

For this tour, Macmillan has asked bloggers to write about the following:

The ‘Winner’s Curse’ is an economics term that means you’ve gotten what you wanted – but at too high a price. 

My Curse was a vacation. I got what (I thought) I wanted and the price was (too) high, but I did learn something valuable about myself in the process.

Some of my most vivid memories of childhood are the times I was able to convince my babysitter to let me stay up past my bedtime and watch inappropriate television. I'm a child of the 80s, so for me one of the shows my parents did NOT approve of was the Love Boat. The show made cruising seem so glamorous -- celebrities I'd never heard of -- like Barbi Benton and Charo -- strolled onto the ship and met Julie McCoy, the perky cruise director. There were dinners at the Captain's Table and romantic nights under the stars...

So when I was planning a special, one-of-a-kind vacation, I thought of a cruise. Everyone I talked to raved about them. My sister did pull me aside and whisper an alternate cruise story, a horror of missed flights and lost luggage and having to outfit herself with dowdy, overpriced clothes from the gift shop, but I shrugged that off.

As I stood in the airport among all the other cruise passengers in our embarkment city, I wrenched my suitcase out of the hands of some guy who was trying to take it by mistake. This trip was going to be perfect. Nothing was going to spoil it. 

No, it wasn't THAT bad!

Except the weather. Which was tragically cold and overcast. For excitement, we donned our waterproof jackets and ventured out onto the cold, windy decks to access a ping-pong table that was partially protected under an awning. Because of the weather, we'd also brought all the wrong clothes, and I spent a huge part of the trip in a tiny, overheated cruise ship laundry room, washing our few sets of warm clothes. We were luckier than some -- a lot of our fellow passengers were seasick. Many of the excursions were cancelled. All there was to do was eat, and even that got boring after a while.
Except that it was our most expensive trip ever, and the worst trip ever.

Yes, the weather was most of the problem, but I also realized that I do not thrive on structure while on vacation. To me, being on a cruise ship felt a little bit like being a kid on a school field trip: endless schedules, rules, procedures and lines.

Like Madeline, I wanted to run away and have an adventure.

For shore excursions, we had to line up obediently to be taken to a port city that was, we soon discovered, filled with shops that were owned or paid to be promoted by the cruise ship company. As I wandered listlessly from generic store to generic store, all I could think of was how much this vacation had cost and how little I was enjoying it.

Maybe my cruise experience was just random bad luck. Or maybe, given my sister's bad experience, my I am living under a Cruise Curse. But I also think that a large part of being happy in life is knowing yourself.  I'm not sure cruises are for me. For our next vacation, I rented a tiny apartment and we spent our time wandering, trying to navigate the grocery store in an unfamiliar city in a language we didn't speak. To some people, that vacation might seem like a nightmare, but to me it was like reading an amazing book, having the opportunity to imagine living someone else's life, if only for a week.

I wish I'd had a copy of the amazing Winner's Crime on board -- that might have saved my trip. To enter to win a copy, thanks to the generosity of Macmillan, just fill out the Rafflecopter below!

And please be sure to  check out all the other tour posts -- it's nearly the end of the tour, but each posts has a different blogger's Curse story and some of them may still have giveaways running!


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