This year I celebrated my birthday a month later. I decided to take my birthday trip over the long Labor Day weekend versus crunching it in to a measly 3 day time frame. Still in the limited PTO struggle, I had to find a destination less than 6 hours away. Initially I booked a hotel on my actual birthday weekend to Panama but the flights were ridiculous (a 10 hour layover on my return was out of the question). My 3 options were Costa Rica, Belize and Panama. Costa Rica was not feasible for this trip because I’d need at least 10 days to see the country so this narrowed my choices a bit.