Travel
All about our travels: from Travel Hacking, trip reviews, and general travel tips.
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Two Weddings and an Alaska Honeymoon
This is a story of how we decided to have two weddings and an Alaska honeymoon. Two weeks ago, we received some bad news. Ruby’s mom in the Philippines was denied a visa to attend Ruby’s wedding in the United States. The embassy officer didn’t even check her documents, which included confirmations from the priest and the church, just asked her 3 brief questions and denied her visa. We were all shocked and disappointed, because when Ruby’s aunt was denied a visa just a few days after that, it meant that Ruby wouldn’t have anybody from her family at her own wedding, boohoo. We discussed our options and thought about…
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An Allegiant Air Review
While most people in the travel hacking community blog about business and first class redemptions, we try to keep it real and fly ultra low cost carriers on short domestic or international trips. This stems from my original roots of flying budget carriers in Asia and Europe as a means to explore, and it’s a cheap and fun way to discover the world one city at a time. For this post, we look back at our experience using Allegiant Air from Jacksonville to Memphis and back. Like our Dallas trip, our Memphis trip was another impulse buy. Allegiant had a super cheap sale; we didn’t know anything much about…
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The Difference between Vacation and Travel
I recently read an excellent online article from The Atlantic about the dire financial straits that over 50% of all Americans find themselves in and something in the article struck me. The writer mentioned that because of the various financial choices he had made regarding his and his family’s finances, he and his family hadn’t been able to take a vacation in over 10 years. They instead sacrificed their retirement money to send their two daughters to excellent universities (Standford and Emery). I’m not at all criticizing that particular decision, because wanting your kids to attend the best schools is a noble thought, but I was instead curious with how…
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Dallas Texas on a budget
Our first successful random airline roulette was in Dallas, Texas! What started out as just something to do during a long holiday ended up being a really fun adventure ahead! Here’s how we managed to do this trip on a budget: Flights Spirit, an ultra low cost carrier flying from MCO, Orlando International, had a sale going on and we got a round-trip ticket with checked bags for $117 per person! Read more about our experience here. Tip: It’s an okay airline, but you do get what you pay for (Read: don’t expect too much!) Hotels We used AwardMapper to find hotels in the area where we can use points to…
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Is Graceland Worth visiting?
Elvis Presley was born in 1935 and died in 1977 at the age of 42. In between, he became the biggest selling artist of all-time with the biggest television broadcast in history (1.5 billion people; yes, billion), and basically the biggest pop culture icon there ever was. After his death, his private mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, the beautifully named Graceland, was shrewdly turned by his ex-wife Priscilla Presley into one of the biggest tourist attractions in the United States. It’s an impressive operation, and since we saw it first-hand today, my memories of it are pretty fresh. Is Graceland Worth Visiting? When you arrive, you have to pay a $10…
