What Ana Does

Off We Go! This summer I was introduced to the concept of Travel Hacking! And it's fascinating!  What is Travel Hacking? So, you open a (for example) Chase United card and they'll give you a 65,000 points bonus after reaching the "minimum spend." Meaning, you have to put (eg) $4,000 on the card in the first 3 months. (They very.) To reach that minimum spend, travel/points hackers use these credit cards for all their usual household expenses and pay off the balance at the end of each month (carrying a balance would defeat the purpose!). And they open multiple cards a year to gather more points/miles.  In case you don't know, 65k points is two round trip economy flights in the US. And 1 round-trip to Europe. So, just that alone is a pretty sweet deal.   I'm so intrigued by this. Travel is my favorite thing. And making it cheaper for us to do more often, in any way, is exciting.  Just think, in five years we're going to be empty nesters. I'll have kids t

Alice is our huge Swiftie. And we tried but failed to get Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets when she rolled through the USA last summer. And the secondary market ticket prices were absolutely ridiculous. $5,000 a ticket? Even the $2,000 was out of the question. So when she released dates for her European tour, it made sense to try for tickets. We had planned to go to Europe this summer for Leah's graduation trip and we knew we would spend less than $2000/ticket, even with the flights and hotel.  It was a very stressful experience, but I got GREAT tickets in Milan for the three of us to last summer for less than $500/ticket. We just had to wait 12 months before the big night.  We watched the Eras Tour movie on Disney, watched all the videos on social media from other fans at the concert. I studied the lyrics all year and ran on the treadmill so I was in fit for the 3.5 hour show. We picked out outfits and made 60 friendship bracelets to exchange at the show. We needed those 12 months t

What a trip! As it was Leah's graduation trip (in leu of a big party), she choose to go to Ireland years ago, inspired by the show "Derry Girls" but also by recommendations from some close friends. Then, we got into the lottery to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in Milan a year ago. So we joined the two destinations and created the itinerary for our Family Summer 2024 Vacation! Here's the breakdown and some helpful links.  Milan, Italy Hotel: Hotel Tocq   (Our Rating: 9/10)!   We started our trip with three hot and humid days in Milan, thanks to Taylor Swift tickets we were lucky enough to buy last year. Putting aside the life-changing, extraordinary concert experience that is the Eras Tour (future post), our time in Milan was super. I booked and rebooked three hotels and finally settled on this hotel on the north side of the city. Let me tell you ... I can't talk enough about how awesome the location of this hotel was. First, it's next to the Metr