Monday, September 4, 2017

Long weekends are wonderful & 2018 travel plans

Although I'm not able to do everything on my to do list (the heat!), having an extra day has been fabulous.

To beat the heat, I did more planning chores than normal this weekend. One of my plans was to budget & prioritize our planned 2018 travel. The boys have voted on skiing in Tahoe this year over our planned 2018 Thanksgiving trip to Hawaii. While not exactly the same cost, skiing in Tahoe is extremely expensive. Here's what we're thinking of so far for travel in 2018:


  • January - no planned trips
  • February - skiing in Tahoe over "ski week". We are planning to stay for 3 nights in a condo with a small kitchen. Expenses will be: the condo, lift tickets, food for meals we don't make, etc.
  • March - no planned trips
  • April - girls trip at the beach, with my sister & bestie. I'll need to buy my flight, but the rest of the expenses are negligible, as we'll be staying at our beach house
  • May - I've promised my mom a girls trip, as a gift for her birthday & Mother's Day. Not sure exactly when we'll go, so earmarked for May. Would prefer no back to back trips, but we'll see. Again, cost should be pretty minimal, and my flight will technically fall under the gift category.
  • June - We'd like to take the kids to Yosemite. Not sure if we will, and/or if it will be in June, but putting it here for now. 
  • July - we'll be doing our annual family trip to the beach house. So, airfare for four, car rental, plus more food than normal
  • August - I'll be doing my relay, so airfare for one. 
  • September - no planned trips 
  • October - M & I may do a long weekend together, if my parents are up for coming to our house. Potentially Sonoma.
  • November - no planned trips
  • December - we'll all go to Portland for the holidays, and will need to rent a car for our visit. Round trip airfare for 4 is pricey, so I will try to use miles again.

After listing it all out, I was able to see that airfare will be by far the biggest expense in 2018. I took a look at all of my travel rewards (mostly accrued from work trips) & matched up the hotels to see if anything would work for our trips. We actually don't have many hotel trips planned in 2018, and some of my miles are expiring. So, I opted to transfer points for 100,000 miles to our preferred local airline. I'll use these miles to reduce much of our travel spending. We also have a credit card with our preferred local airline, and I'm hoping to use miles for our Christmas 2018 trip as well. By listing it all out, I'm able to determine whether the number of trips & total planned expenses are reasonable, and adjust as needed. I'm also able to best utilize our travel rewards, which is a nice benefit.

Sam had a friend over to swim yesterday, and Nick remains at his camping/fishing trip. The pictures have been super cute.  

Otherwise, we've continued to make the most of our leftovers.
  • For lunch yesterday, I had the final piece of quiche (crust removed, as it was soggy) inside of 1/2 a pita pocket (freezer), with a tomato from the garden. I also had 1/2 a pear & the last of my delish cold brew latte popsicles from Trader Joes.
  • M had a sandwich made with a variety of cold cuts in the fridge, and the remainder of a leftover salad from dinner out on Saturday.
  • For today's lunch, I'm having the remainder of pizza that we made on Friday, and M will have another sandwich with a few other "spare parts" in the fridge. 

How do you plan your yearly travel? Do you handle it more spontaneously, or do you have your travel ideas planned out in advance as well? 

5 comments:

  1. Other than the latte popsicle, your lunches sound an awful like things my husband used to take for work lunches - he would comb the refrigerator every morning to see what leftovers he could use up. Sometimes the things he put together seemed a bit weird to me, but he was a master at using everything up. He would have so eaten a piece of leftover quiche in a pita pocket!

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    1. It was actually a great lunch - totally recommend. ;-) I had a piece of leftover pizza today, a homemade granola bar/protein ball (too squishy to survive as a granola bar, but the taste was fine), a few leftover chicken nuggets from the pool party we had, and fruit. I'm easy to please, and like to keep the fridge cleaned out. ;-)

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  2. I am waiting on a seat sale to Italy for our March/May trip with 2 of the kids, have 2/3 of that trip already saved for. Also need to get our late November/early December trip(on points) to Alberta sorted out but we were waiting on a client so had delayed making any decisions there. Started saving money ($25 so far) on our new sealed pot for a weekend away sometime in 2018. I need to figure out where that might be though.

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    1. Sounds great! Whereabouts are you thinking for Italy? It's definitely on our bucket list, but we'd like to wait until things slow down a bit with the kids, so it's easier for my parents. We'd ideally like to do two weeks, and that's still a lot at this age with the boys. Of course, the longer we wait, the older my parents are getting, so it's a hard tradeoff!

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  3. Ha...we used to travel all the time, as DH was a pilot. When flying on a pass, you have to be very spur of the moment, and flexible. Forget planning. You might get to the airport intent on going to, say, California, but wind up in Albuquerque instead due to availability. I used to truly enjoy it. But, we very rarely travel now, other than going to our second home. It's very hard to travel with lots of kids. It requires tons of planning, and compromise, and isn't much fun, frankly.

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