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This summer, my friend Rosio and I traveled around the world in two weeks, stopping in eight destinations, and in each place we tried to see and do as much as possible. There’s no way I could share everything we did in those two weeks, but here are a lot of the highlights! Even the highlights turned out to be crazy long, so I’ve split the post and this is part one of the activities recap, covering Minneapolis, Iceland, London, and Mainz.Read More →

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Choosing hotels was probably one of the harder tasks on our trip around the world. We wanted the bulk of the cost to be covered by hotel points, but we obviously weren’t working with unlimited amounts of points – especially with the one realistic Maldives option being 20,000 Starwood points per night – so we had to be as strategic as possible. Except for a bed & breakfast booked through Airbnb in Colombo, all the lodging was in fancy-ish hotels via loyalty program points or certificates. Read More →

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ONLY FOUR MORE DAYS (!!!) until my round-the-world summer vacation with my friend Rosio! We’re heading to 8 countries in two weeks (gotta maximize that annual leave), and booked our flights and accommodations using a mix of loyalty points and money. We ended up with a nearly $37,000 trip for 2 that was booked with about 600,000 points and roughly $2,000. I’m so excited, and I want to share bit about the plan and how we booked it.Read More →

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Welcome to the fourth and last installment of my recap for my April trip to New Zealand! If you haven’t already, check out my previous post for part 3.  Auckland  → Bay of Islands → Auckland →Wellington→ Queenstown →Milford Sound → Aoraki Mount Cook → Christchurch →Auckland →Hobbiton → Auckland Aoraki/Mount Cook The bus ride to Aoraki Mount Cook was just under 5 hours, booked as part of my Intercity pass and turned out to be part of a GreatSights New Zealand tour. As far as I could tell, this meant a cushier bus and frequent stops to take photos of the (as always) beautiful scenery. In particular, Lake Pukaki nearRead More →

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The Perfect Accommodations There are many things in life to which I sometimes arrive very late (dinners, nearly all TV shows, most entries on Urban Dictionary…), but a hotel reservation is not one of those things – a late hotel reservation can mean spending hundreds of dollars that I could otherwise be using to eat delicious foods, or it could mean compromising on what I want out of my hotel stay. Neither is an acceptable outcome when both can be prevented. The two biggest expenses of most trips are flights and lodging. If you can control these costs, then the overall cost of your tripRead More →

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 The evil, dangerous, credit card myth tl;dr – Don’t be scared of credit cards. Learn to make them work for you. I want to address this notion I frequently hear – some variation on “credit cards are for irresponsible people,” or this sense of pride in being debt free because you haven’t fallen victim to the dreaded credit card. The former is just ridiculous – having a credit card does not inherently mean irresponsibility – and what would be irresponsible is miscalculating the difference between what you charge to a card and what you have money to pay for, or can reasonably afford to pay overRead More →