You made me a Power Point Presentation?

At the beginning of the movie Couple's Retreat Jason Bateman's character attempts to woo his friends on a tropical vacation with a power point proposal detailing the eponymous location - "it would play like gangbusters in the conference room..." 

For about 2 weeks I have puttered along building a spreadsheet of logistics, options, and arguments to present Adam with a proposal for a river cruise on the Rhine to experience the European Christmas Markets.  While I was already taken with the romance of it all, I anticipated Adam would be a bit tougher to sell:  

A) It would be a cruise (but not an ocean cruise, eliminating concerns of sharks, ship wrecks, seasickness, and not being able to swim to shore if something catastrophic happened).

B) It would be colder weather (but we have our Iceland trip as a successful precedent for a wintry travel destination AND this would be sandwiched between our February 2024 trip to the Maldives and a winter 2025 trip to somewhere warm)

C) it would involve traveling with the same 200 people for a week (this was the trickiest point of potential resistance, but had a potentially valuable offset if we booked a Veranda Stateroom or Suite with inherently more private relaxation space)

Once I got the big pieces figured out, and some serious spreadsheet formulas going to show my work on the math, I built Adam a 12 page document proposal for the trip that included photos, high -low price options, time of year price variations, excursions, etc...  My plan was to either get a couple of beers into him at camp and ease into it or just get up in the night and leave my packet on his laptop to discover when he crawled out of bed before me in the morning. 

Well, then I got a phone call from my physician's office saying the routine blood work I got jabbed for that morning was an inadequate sample and I needed to go back.  That soured my mood in a hurry and resulted in an impromptu vacation idea bomb drop after dinner. 

"What did you do?"

"Nothing yet, but I have an idea"

"Did you make a power point presentation?"

"It would play like gangbusters in the conference room... but no, I have a monster spreadsheet and a condensed easy to read version printed for you."

"Is this what you've been doing with your downtime at work this week?"

"Maybe..."

"You're cute.  Alright, why have you got." 

Long story short, we're booked for a Christmastime River Cruise with stops in Switzerland, France, Germany and Netherlands.  I can almost smell the Christmas Market baked goods now... In an interesting twist, we actually ended up with a better cabin category than I had planned because Adam was not willing to short himself on deer hunting season and a Veranda Room was all that was available in the weeks that were still remotely "affordable." 

Ah, serendipity.