Unique digital nomad travel adventures from around the U.S.
This post finds me killing time in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I am here with my folks. My dad is seeing a specialist about his Lyme disease and to say my parents are terrible travelers is kind of an understatement. So I offered to come along …
Iceland is h-o-t, people. A Jane reader asked us the other day about whether we had written anything on it as her friend was planning a trip there soon. (If you are like us, it seems like every other day you hear about someone you …
You know how your mom always told you that if something seems too good to be true it probably is? Well, for the most I part subscribe to my momma’s sound adage. However, every now and then the improbable happens. Enter the Delta vacation package deal. But let me back up a little…
Last year B and I decided we wanted to try spending the Christmas holidays somewhere new. Since B just sent us to Australia, it was more or less my turn to pick our destination. I really want to go to Romania. Like really really. Now, there is a twist in the story line: both B and I have been racking up the Delta SkyMiles and we wanted to use them for this trip. Delta allows you to book flights about 11 months in advance. So around November of last year, I was patiently waiting for my window to book tickets to Bucharest, Romania.
When I first started tracking, a round-trip ticket cost about 60,000 miles. This is a very reasonable amount of miles for an international flight from lil ol’ Boise. However, as the time got closer and closer to the end of January (the earliest window for booking a Christmas-time trip) the prices skyrocketed. They just about doubled, which is way more than we wanted to use for this trip. I was pretty heartbroken, I’ll be honest.
I decided to open up the search and see where I could go for around the original amount of SkyMiles. Sadly, I didn’t have much luck getting anywhere in Europe for under 100,000. But then I noticed that flights to Amsterdam, Netherlands, were surprisingly inexpensive and close to our target range. I had to wait for B to get home from Australia, but the night she did, I launched a plan on her: we could fly to Amsterdam and ride the Eurail around the Netherlands and Belgium for Christmas! My good friend, G, spent some time in Bruges, Belgium, and spoke so highly of it that I have wanted to check it out for a while.
From Boise, the round-trip ticket was 80,000 miles or 60,000 miles plus $350. Since jet lag got to B before I could convince her to buy another international trip, we put off buying tickets for a day until her cognitive processes returned to normal. Imagine my disappointment when the prices had gone up the very next day. We’ve been burned by this in the past (more than once actually) and usually strike while the iron is hot. But since we did not strike, we had some non-buyer’s remorse for not booking the tickets and went back to the drawing board.
About a week later I was doing some research on how to maximize SkyMiles and travel around the holidays. I found an interesting blurb that said sometimes purchasing a car rental and/or hotel with a flight from Delta could save a lot of money. I’ve done this on Expedia and Orbitz before and it usually gives you some savings, but I’ve never saved that dramatically. However, I figured I’d might as well give it a try. And something incredible happened when I did…
To begin, I went to Delta’s website and put in our dates from Boise to Amsterdam and found tickets for $1,400 each, or around 120,000 SkyMiles. Not great. But then I went back to the homepage and clicked on the ‘Vacation Packages’ tab and selected a flight plus a rental car. When the price for the trip popped up at $1,450, I thought, well that’s about the same. But when I looked closer, I realized the price was $1,450 total, not per person. I then clicked through to the car rental screen and it looked similar to what I’ve seen on other sites; it showed the type of car and listed how much it would be to select that car.
However, I noticed something I’ve never seen before: some of the amounts listed next to the cars were negatives. Confused, I clicked on a mini car and saw our total price for the package go down by $100. By adding a car, we essentially cut our ticket prices in half! Plus, we got a car rental. (Enter mom’s voice.) We suspiciously decided to follow through with the booking process to see when the other shoe was going to drop…but it never did. So, after months of angst and stress, we got our Christmas holiday booked for about $675 each. This is, hand’s down, one of the cheapest deals to Europe I’ve seen out of Boise in at least a decade. We didn’t use our SkyMiles, but at that price, we would have been crazy to.
The article I read said that by booking a hotel and car with the flight, the fares get bumped into a “tour package” category and that’s why they can be sold at a discounted price. I was curious if our Amsterdam package was just a fluke and tried some other hypothetical vacations. I found a flight + car from Boise to Paris in October for just about the same price as our screaming deal to Amsterdam. I then tried Boise to Berlin in September and the price came in around $1,700. However, when I tried Seattle to Oslo, the price jumped significantly–comparable to a plane ticket without the car. I should also mention that before we booked the Amsterdam package, I checked to see if there was a package for Bucharest. There wasn’t.
It appears that there isn’t a real rhyme or reason for the car + flight deals, but it is DEFINITELY something you should look into if you and a +1 are going to a destination where you will fly in and out of the same airport. B and I talked about getting the flight + hotel in Amsterdam, which we would just leave on days we wanted to spend in other cities. Since we were planning on moving around, though, we opted for the car. One caveat the article I read did mention was that you can’t just not get the car or not check into the hotel. I don’t know what happens if you try to pull a fast one, but I don’t plan on trying it out.
I am still a little dubious about the deal we got. It has since showed up on both of our Delta Apps and my credit card was charged the amount we were quoted. So I suppose this is one of those times when it is good and it is true. Regardless, we will be spending Christmas in Bruges, Belgium, eating waffles and sipping hot chocolate. I can’t wait! If you are searching for tickets and are open to various destinations, take a look at the Delta Vacation Packages options. You could score something amazing, just like we did.
After a Jane Sees the World reader saw this post, she booked the same package as B and I for $60 less than what we paid. Score! There are deals to be had booking travel this way and if you are planning an adventure soon, this could be an economical option. Let us know if you landed a great deal!
We’re baaack! And going through the usual post-trip activities—fighting jet lag, getting back into a routine, planning the next adventure, etc. It is never easy coming home. But unless you are going sell everything you own and become a nomad, it is a necessary part …
Travel is full of memorable and unique experiences. Many of them you could never recreate even if you tried (and there are some you never want to). That said, I rarely have an experience I would describe as once-in-a-lifetime. It just feels like that should …
B and I have seen a lot of really good stuff in the last few weeks: koalas, kangaroos, sunsets, sweeping landscapes and cultural icons. We expected all these things. What we didn’t expect was to see so many funny Australian signs! The funny ways Australians narrate all of these things and other information is downright entertaining. Aussies, whether they mean to be or not, are funny suckers. Here are some of the gems we’ve seen along they way.
Australia has reminded us that there’s no need to be boring when you are presenting useful information. The funny Australian signs shown above (and many more we did not show) are both informative and entertaining. They made us laugh. They also reminded us to watch out for venomous snakes, precipitous cliffs, poisonous jellyfish, etc. An adventure this down under is! Be sure to check out our tips for traveling in a not-so-foreign country.
Hello from the land down under. We have been here a week and already it has been a wild ride. Just check out our Australia van life photos below! Australia Adventures First up, we visited Sydney. Then we turned our attention to Melbourne. But between …
I am very excited to share this road trip itinerary for three days on the Oregon coast. I take no credit for its amazingness. It was given to me by a former local and all-around Oregon expert. She really came through and provided the greatest …
Last spring B, C and I were thinking about where we could go in the fall for a quick, affordable vacation. After looking through Google Flights and seeing where we could get from Boise on the cheap, we narrowed it down to two options: Aruba or Puerto Rico. None of us really cared about where we went because really, how can you go wrong with either? We decided to go with Puerto Rico because it was a little cheaper and the flight time was shorter. Here are the activities and costs associated with five night trip to Puerto Rico.
From Boise we would fly to Dallas and then onto San Juan. The legs of the flight were pretty long but because we only had one layover total, trip time was ten hours.
Tip: it’s a good idea to know what cities are a direct flight from your hometown. This knowledge will help with plotting the shortest flight time so you don’t have to backtrack. On short trips, the length of time it takes to get somewhere is just as important as the cost. Direct flights at airports don’t stay static; just this year Boise added the Dallas direct flight.
Our flights from Boise cost $452.
We knew that we wanted to see more of the island than just San Juan so we opted to rent a car. Puerto Rico is a foreign country but is also protected by the U.S. So after checking with my insurance company, I rented a car through Enterprise. My go-to for car rentals is usually Hotwire, but I wanted to make sure I rented through a company I recognized since we were out of the States.
We did some checking on wikitravel and learned that Puerto Ricans have a bad rep for being crazy drivers and so foreigners should opt for the insurance on their rental, just in case. However, my car insurance carrier covered me in U.S. protectorates so we were able to skip that expense. We knew that we wanted to explore San Juan for a few days and that driving around downtown would be a disaster so our game plan was to return the car a few days before we headed home and just walk around the capital city.
Our car rental for four days was $196.
I did some searching on the interwebs and found an article from a gal who visited Puerto Rico and went on an excursion to a deserted island, Caja des Muertos (Deadman’s Coffin), on the southern part of the island that mainly locals visit. This sounded most promising and we booked right after we bought our plane tickets. Unfortunately, a few days before we left Boise, I got a call from the company saying the excursion was canceled due to weather. (Did I mention our trip was during hurricane season? Hurricane Matthew passed by the island a few days before we arrived. Because we knew we would be traveling during hurricane season, we went ahead and purchased travel insurance for $32.)
The only other activity we knew we wanted to do was visit a bioluminescent bay. For some reason, we didn’t book this in advance and almost missed out on our chance since all but one outfit were sold out. A little context: Puerto Rico is one of the few places in the world that has bays with organisms that glow, or bioluminesce, when agitated. It looks a bit like fireflies in the water and is very cool.
C, B, and I joined up with a group of teachers from the States and a little after dark, we climbed into two-man kayaks. The kayaks had little lights (like glow sticks) at the end of them and the idea was that even if you couldn’t see anything else, you could follow in the general direction of the kayak in front of you. This worked better in theory than practice as most of the group hadn’t kayaked before. People were fine crossing the broad bay but when we began going down a canal with mangroves, all hell broke loose. C and B were in a kayak at the front of the group so they didn’t experience what I was seeing. At one point two people tipped their kayak. I have no clue how this is even possible as there wasn’t a current or rapids or anything. But somehow they managed it. The guide had to come back and help them climb back in. Luckily, the water was only about three feet deep.
I think the only thing that made me not lose my cool was how awesome it was to see the water glow every time my partner put her oar in the water. Eventually we made it to the lagoon with the highest concentration of bioluminescent critters. We got to swirl our hands around in the water and see the tiny fireworks. It was a very unique experience and the highlight of the trip. The route back to the bay was better because the current did all the work and took the kayaks back. Somehow people in our group managed to turn themselves in circles (seriously……how?) but eventually we made it back.
Tip: this is the coolest thing to do in Puerto Rico. Even though there are lots of companies that offer these trips each night, they fill up with the cruise ship people. Book early to ensure a spot. We went on a good night for seeing the critters; some nights with a brighter moon or different meteorological events I don’t understand change how well the bio lights show up. It is worth the chance to do this activity no matter how well things are lit up. At the worst, you’ll kayak in the dark in a mangrove canal. That’s pretty cool on its own.
Our kayak through a bioluminescent bay was $55 each.
Our other planned adventure was a hike through the El Yunque Rain Forest. We stopped at the visitors center to the national forest and got some recommendations from the friendly guide. The main hike we did took us down to a lovely waterfall that was chock full of other hikers swimming, or sitting rather, in the water. We opted not to join them and hiked out through the lush jungle back to the road. On our way out of the rainforest, C purchased a delicious Piña Colada from a roadside stand.
Tip: the national forests and parks in Puerto Rico are part of the U.S.’ National Park system and as such I could use my annual parks pass to get us into places for free.
Our hike through the forest was free with the Annual Parks pass.
Since our Caja des Muertos excursion was cancelled, we had some free time and no real need to be anywhere. Instead of booking something new, we opted instead to take a better look at this island. Since we had our own car we had the freedom to explore and decided to follow the coastline and stop wherever our hearts desired–which were usually beautiful beaches. The highlight of our wandering was the Los Marillos lighthouse in the southwest corner of the island. The lighthouse was built in the 1800s and is quite pretty and well maintained. But the real star of the show was the dramatic cliff line and drop to the turquoise ocean. Quite stunning, really.
Tip: if you have the time, get off the main highway and take the back roads whilst driving around. You’ll find hidden gems and probably get stuck in a traffic jam or two but you’ll get a better taste of how the locals live.
The lighthouse and beaches were all free, with the biggest cost at the lighthouse being the delicious maracuya (passion fruit) ice cream I ate.
Our final adventure was exploring downtown San Juan. Again, we used the annual parks pass and got into the cool San Juan National Historic Site, the fortresses that protected people here for hundreds of years. We did a walking tour using our Lonely Planet guidebook and then spent the rest of the time wandering and shopping and trying in vain not to be mistaken with the tourists filing off the huge cruise ships.
Our costs for this part of the trip were pretty expensive (mainly for me) because mama likes to shop. Eek!
We ran into some issues with lodging this trip as two of our previously booked Airbnbs canceled on us at the last minute. One due to the poor guy getting dengue fever and the other due to the guy being incompetent. B had her heart set on staying on a sail boat moored at the marina, so it was sad the guy turned out to be a flake. Our places ended up just fine though and who knows–could have been better than what we originally planned.
Our lodging cost for two nights in the beach town of Luquillo, one night at a resort that reminded me of the place Baby finds her man in Dirty Dancing, and two nights in Old Town in San Juan cost us $570.
Puerto Rico was a nice little excursion to help us ‘blow off the stink’ as C’s farmer father says. Since it was Columbus’ day weekend, we only had to take three days off work. There were some unexpected challenges–two canceled hotels and two canceled adventures–but overall we were able to just go with the the Caribbean flow and chill.
For lodging, flights, travel insurance, excursions and a car rental we each paid $815. I will say the extra costs (food, shopping, etc.) cost more than what I was expecting. I was thinking this would be like other Latin American countries I’ve been to, but it really was more like mainland U.S. prices. Oh well, it was totally worth it.
After finishing grad school in 2008, I still wasn’t ready to face the real world and get a grown-up job. Instead, I decided to cash in some skymiles and head down south to Peru with a pilot friend, L, with whom I had worked over …