travel

It was definitely later than I’d like to start planning, and we’re paying a bit more in airfare because of that, but our family European vacation is all lined up now. (And really, it’s hard to tell if I’m paying more for airfare or not. Trying to guess what the prices are going to do is very difficult this summer, between oil prices and war in Ukraine and the ever-present COVID dilemma. In the end, I just bought the tickets and decided to just be okay with the fact that prices might come down a bit at some point between

Now that we know where and when Tomas is going on his mission, we can actually begin planning our life some again. First up? One last trip to Europe. Yes, Tomas will be living there for 2 years, but he won’t be with us, and we didn’t get to go last year, so . . . why not bring him along for a preview? Of course, to do that, I need to get a handle on the many different aspects of another trip to Europe, and I’m discovering I’m woefully out of practice. With that in mind, I thought I’d

As of about an hour ago, it’s been two weeks since Denisa and I got our second COVID vaccine shot. Which means (theoretically) we can start going back to some of our old routines. It’s surprising to me how many things that used to seem very normal and not that stressful are now giving me low level anxiety (or worse). For example, I used to plan trips all the time. I don’t love flying (a well-established fact with long-time blog readers), but I love traveling enough to overcome my dislike of flying. The lack of travel was a real blow

I’m not typically the world’s most spontaneous person. When I buy something significant, it’s usually after a long hard look at my finances, and there’s a fair bit of price comparison that goes into it as well. A vacation? I’ll stew on that for months. So if someone came up to me and said, “Do you want to go to Puerto Rico at Thanksgiving?” but said I had to make my mind up that instant, it would be a pretty easy pass. Except last week I bought plane tickets to Puerto Rico twenty minutes after I first had the idea

In my continuing credit card churning escapades, I managed to kind of accidentally end up qualifying Denisa for Southwest’s Companion Pass for a year. This means that for this entire year, anywhere Denisa flies on Southwest, I can fly with her for free. (If I’d been doing this the right way, I would have qualified her at the beginning of this year, which would have meant the free flights would have gone through this whole year and then all of next year, but . . . I goofed. C’est la vie.) That’s a pretty great perk, and after talking it