why_nut
Joined: 20 Nov 2006
Posts: 19
Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 6:12 pm Post subject:
How long before the planned trip tickets were bought, I think is not specifically known. There are other facts that are certain. The Big Red Boat trip itself, from 1996 through to the end of 1997, only had three options. Either the Ramseys had taken the three-day package, which traveled on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or they took the four-day package, which traveled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There was a third option of a seven-day package, but obviously that would have been a simple combination of the three-day and four-day packages. Children under 17 years of age traveled free. If the Ramseys had traveled to Charlevoix on Thursday, December 26th, they would have been required to get to Florida by sometime on the morning of Friday, the 27th, in order to take the three-day cruise which would have let Patsy legitimately announce that her birthday (December 29th, falling on a Sunday that year) would be on the Big Red Boat. It hardly seemed worthwhile at that point, they would have spent mere hours in Charlevoix, and as crime scene photos have shown, Patsy was not done packing for the cruise, so she would have had to complete that task either Thursday night or in the very early morning hours of Friday morning.
If they had taken the four-day package, leaving on Monday, then there would have been a little more wiggle room for the Charlevoix trip, since they could have spent Thursday and Friday there, then come back to finish packing on Saturday, and flown out on Sunday to be there for a Monday departure. The problem with that scenario is that Patsy would then have been lying when she told her family-newsletter audience that she was celebrating her birthday on the cruise ship, since she would obviously not have been on board yet.