My family gave me a tall order. My husband started it all with: "As long as you're planning all these trips anyway, see if you can schedule in a volcano. I've always wanted to see a volcano."

"Um, honey, you already saw one when we were in Italy. You know... Mt. Vesuvius... that teeny, tiny, insignificant volcano that buried that little town called Pompeii? Yeah. That one."

"That doesn't count... I didn't see anything shooting out of the top."

It didn't matter one bit to him that it's still an active volcano, with a infamous history that's amazingly preserved in the ruins of Pompeii (where we spent an amazing day, by the way).

Sigh... I added a smoke-or-lava-coming-out-of-the-top volcano to my list.

My daughter read about rain forests in an Ask magazine and said, "Mom, as long as you're planning all these trips anyway, can you add one to a rain forest? I really want to see one before they all disappear."

"We're already going to see a rainforest, sweetie. In Alaska. Isn't it cool that there's a rainforest right here in the United States?"

She wasn't impressed. "No, Mom! I mean a rainforest rainforest! Like where there are monkeys and pretty poisonous frogs and cloud forests and everything!"

"Oh. That kind of rain forest," I muttered, adding it to my list.

My youngest son, who would spend all his time doing nothing if I'd let him, said, "You know, Mom, as long as you're planning all these trips anyway, can you plan one at a beach where I can just sit and watch the waves roll in while I sip a drink?"

So I gave up and planned a trip to Costa Rica, where we can see a very active, hopefully-something-coming-out-of-it volcano; get close and personal with rainforests, monkeys, and cloud forests galore; and, of course, spend a day sipping drinks at the beach. How can anything be more important than that?

As long as I'm planning all these trips anyway...