Last year on Thanksgiving, I sat at home and watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on tv. I thought "wouldn't that be an incredible experience to be there in all the action. I'm going next year." So I continued to think about it and when airline tickets could be booked, I checked out the prices. Well I decided that it was going to cost too much to go. Tickets were over $400 and actually closer to $500. I just couldn't swing it at the time. Airfare wasn't the only setback. The other was of course hotel. I guess when I saw the expensive airline tickets and started adding hotel to it, it was going to cost somewhere around $1000. With my Italy trip that I had just booked, I just didn't know where I would get the extra money for travel. I didn't really want to use savings for that much. So I tried to forget about it and I actually did until recently.
I was looking online trying to figure out a cooler destination that I could visit before summer was over. I decided that it would be a rush to try to take one last vacation before school started back up so I would try to plan a little more ahead. That's when I looked on aa.com to see how far my air miles would get me. I checked to see what kind of flights they had to NYC for the week of Thanksgiving and surprisingly enough they had quite a few options. I didn't book anything at the time. I would check back each day. Then my mind started going. I had 65,000 air miles. If you aren't familiar with air miles, if you plan ahead and they have available seats on certain flights, you can get 1 round trip flight for 25,000 air miles. So I had enough air miles for 2 round trip flights. So I put a flight on hold and talked to a travel buddy friend of mine. I did the math and it looked like she would come out ahead if I used air miles to pay for both of our flights and she paid for my portion of the hotel. If she paid on her own for the flight it would have cost at least $500. My portion of the hotel was $370. So you do the math and we both got a great deal! We booked the hotel a few days ago. We found a hotel that I had stayed in before but the price went up before we had a chance to book it. So, we found another place with good reviews.
Now we are in the process of somewhat thinking about which Broadway show(s) we would like to see and where we would like to eat. I'm a foodie at heart so I plan to scope out the best places to find some great food.
I'm really excited and can't wait to check this adventure off my bucket list. Last year I spent New Year's in Vegas, this year Thanksgiving in NYC, and MAYBE next year Christmas in New Zealand :)
