If you’re planning a trip and looking for flights, it’s natural to just search your home airport to your destination and back. You’ll likely compare airlines, see what’s cheapest or most direct, but I encourage you to think beyond points A and B and see if a positioning flight might make more sense instead. What’s…
4 Days in Kyoto and Osaka
Half of our trip to Japan was spent in/around Tokyo and the other half was divided between Kyoto and Osaka. Kyoto and Osaka both felt older and at times a bit more run down than Tokyo, but they each had their draws. Both cities are also quite close to each other – we chose to…
4 Days in Tokyo: Full Breakdown
Our trip to Japan was bookended by our time in Tokyo, where we flew in and out of. Though we didn’t intentionally visit in December, we ended up being blessed with blue skies every day. While it was cold (upper 40s/low 50s Fahrenheit), it was perfectly bearable and much warmer than Chicago! Our flight from…
10 Tips for Traveling to Japan For the First Time [2023]
Japan is a beautiful country with friendly people who want to help you, but even knowing that, it’s best to go into your trip having some basic ideas of what to expect and coming prepared. With that in mind, I’ve condensed everything I learned in the 8 days of our trip (+ the 8 days…
Credit Card Transfer Partners Explained
Earning points is important, but it’s really only half of the equation. Once you’ve racked up the points, how can you redeem them? That’s where transfer partners come in. You can redeem your points directly in the bank’s travel portal, but I BEG YOU not to – you get such a bad redemption rate, it’s…
ANA Business Class Review – How it was Cheaper than Economy!
On my flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo a couple weeks, I got the opportunity to fly business class for the very first time (but certainly not the last – I already have several business class tickets booked with points for this later this year). At 12 hours and over 5000 miles, this was the…
Pivoting When Travel Plans Go Awry
I like to plan trips pretty far in advance, largely because I can book all the tours I want at the times that are most convenient without anything being booked up. This has worked well for me on 99% of all the trips I’ve planned. Unfortunately, our final trip of 2022 was derailed only 10…
2022 Recap & Maximizing PTO in 2023
Merry Christmas (though I’m posting this from Japan where it’s already December 26th)! By the time the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, I will have spent 92/365 days in 2022 outside of my home in Chicago (that doesn’t count days where we took a late-night flight after work). That’s a quarter of the year…
How to Survive a Red Eye in Economy
Long haul flights can be tough, especially if you’re not seated in one of the premium cabins at the front of the plane. If the flight is overnight and you need to arrive well rested to your destination, it can be a challenge in cramped economy seats, but we don’t all have the deep pockets…
The Ultimate One Week Iceland Itinerary
I’ve already gone into detail about snorkeling between tectonic plates, ice climbing on a glacier, seeing the Northern Lights, and visiting Blue Lagoon, but our 8-day trip to Iceland was epic every step of the way. We quite literally had a once-in-a-lifetime experience every single day of the trip and I learned a lot about…