travel
-
The financials of this trip are a little different than previous trips, since I had a medical event during the trip and also the purpose was celebrating my friend’s birthday. I ended up deciding to exclude the medical and celebratory costs from the vacation spending, since they fall outside normal vacation behavior for me, but…
-
Continuing on our now three year tradition of traveling to the rust belt in fall, which is actually entirely coincidental up until this point, we took a long weekend trip to Detroit, Michigan to visit my friend for her 40th birthday. I’ve always been interested in seeing Detroit – its rise to being an economic…
-
This European summer vacation ended up being about $4,000 less than our prior year’s European summer vacation, in large part due to using miles/points to buy our plane tickets. This was partially offset by some unnecessary extra spending (including $200 thrown away on a non-refundable hotel when we switched our departure from Milan to Naples),…
-
Italy! If only this blog existed when we went to Italy the first time, in 2023. That trip was my first time going to Europe, and my first trip out of North America as an adult. It was also the most exciting two weeks of my life, and I have spent each day with some…
-
I’ll open this by saying: this ended up more expensive than I thought it would. I’m not really sure why I thought it would be cheaper, considering the impetus for going on this trip was spending $2000 on plane tickets, but here we are. Nonetheless, once you take out the big categories of airfare and…
-
Mexico City! Much like Québec City last year, Mexico City has been on my husband’s bucket list for many years. It is the largest city in North America, with approximately 22 million people in the metropolitan area, but somehow tends gets lost in the fog of misunderstandings about what Mexico has to offer. Similar to…
-
Miami is not a cheap city. Miami-Dade is not a cheap county. Florida is, increasingly, not a cheap state, if the many headlines about areas with the fastest-growing real estate prices are any indication. So we went on this vacation looking to cut costs where we could, while still being able to enjoy what we…
-
This was our second time going to Miami. The first time we went was in December of 2022. Depending on which member of the family you asked, it was either an incredible success or one of the worst trips we’ve ever had – the first part of the trip went off without a hitch, but…
-
This trip was kind of a fun trip from a costs perspective, because I am a person who is perhaps bizarrely tickled by being able to get things for a discount or free. With my Alaska Airlines Visa, I get a yearly companion fare, and this was my first time using that benefit since I…
-
Last spring, my husband approached me and asked, “Would you rather go to Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” One of his favorite bands, Opeth, was going on tour, but wasn’t going to be coming to the west coast at all for the tour. Since we visited Cincinnati last fall and I hadn’t yet been to Pennsylvania, I…
Violet Sky 