How We Made Our Europe Trip Affordable -- Flights

And now, for the first time on this blog, Dr. Reed himself! Let's give him a nice warm welcome, folks! This is the first post in his series on how we traveled to Europe in lush style for two weeks at an incredibly affordable price. Enjoy, comment and share!

Hello! So the last little bit, Sarah and I have been to a lot of new places. Let me start by saying that while growing up, we didn't vacation much. Okay, we never went on vacation. It can be expensive and my parents needed to work a lot. In fact, besides driving my brother to the Provo MTC from Seattle, our last family vacation was driving to Nauvoo in 1989. Mom made sandwiches in the car, we got the brick and the horseshoe, and we avoided driving through Kansas (ask my dad).

 I like beaches. A lot. Even rocky ones. (Nice, France)

Traveling to new places is really exciting to me. Probably, because I feel like I have so much I haven’t seen and I especially love beaches. But…travel can be expensive. Even small trips made a sizable dent in my accounts. A few years ago, while in graduate school, I was traveling more to conferences and I got excited about how many miles I was earning with United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and Hilton Hotels. 18 months ago, I found some blogs and started learning more about how to travel to all corners of the earth, in style, for a fraction of the cash cost published by travel providers.

We recently took a two week trip to Europe. It was a blast! Sarah has already talked about the places we visited. But just so you know, she picked where in Europe we went the first week and I picked the second week’s destinations. I really wanted to go to the French Riviera and Barcelona. So using the miles and points guidance I got from the blogs, I made it happen. I’m going to write more about How We Paid for Hotels in Europe in a future post. But this is how I bought our flights:

First time on Lufthansa (Boston Airport)

Outbound Flights
Boston (BOS) to Frankfurt (FRA) Frankfurt (FRA) to Paris (CDG)		Lufthansa Lufthansa
“Open Jaw” Return Flights
Barcelona (BCN) to Frankfurt (FRA) Frankfurt (FRA) to Boston (BOS)		Lufthansa Lufthansa
“Stopover” in Boston
Boston (BOS) to San Francisco (SFO) San Francisco (SFO) to Kahului, Maui (OGG)		United United
Cash Price	$3,140.81 per person
United MileagePlus Miles Price	62,500 miles per person + $128.30 taxes and fuel surcharges. (Note: price to Europe was 60,000 miles, adding Maui was another 2,500 miles)

So the trip cost us 125,000 United miles. That would take a ton of time and cost if we were to earn miles simply by sitting in the seat flying. However, there are tons of other ways to earn MileagePlus miles. Here is how we got the miles we needed for each ticket:

Thomas’ Ticket (62,500 Miles)
35,000 United Miles 27,500 United Miles	United MileagePlus Explorer Credit Card (35,000 Mile Sign-Up Bonus after spending $1,000 in the first 3 months) Transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (Partner Transfer)
Sarah’s Ticket (62,500 Miles)
28,000 United Miles 34,500 United Miles	Mileage Plus miles earned from flying on United Airlines 2011-2013 Transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (Partner Transfer)

Nice. Nice is Nice.

How in the world did we get 62,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards Points?

40,000 UR Points	Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card (40,000 Points Sign-Up Bonus after spending $2,500 in the first 6 months)
7,000 UR Points	Chase Freedom and Sapphire Preferred Bonus Category spending (1 to 4 bonus points per dollar)
15,000 UR Points	Normal spending on Chase Freedom and Chase Sapphire Preferred at 1 point per dollar.

My Chase UR points could be redeemed for 1 cent each (or $630), but by redeeming for international travel I got much more for each of those points. If you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Chase Ink Card, you can transfer UR points from any Chase card to select airlines, hotels, and train company loyalty programs--United Airlines included.

As a side note, we also purchased a flight from London (LGW) to Nice (NCE) on British Airways for $159 per person after taxes. The cost was pretty low so it made more sense to book these tickets with cash. So all totaled we got all 7 of our flight segments worth $6,600 on “the street” for an out-of-pocket cost of about $580. Awesome deal!

So that’s how we got to Europe and back (and a one-way to Maui)! I hope you enjoyed reading my first post about my travel hobby. More to come…

Villefranche Sur Mer, French Riviera

See posts from our trip: Pairs, Paris, London, London, London, Paignton, Trowbridge, Trowbridge, Nice, Nice, Monaco, Nice, Barcelona, Barcelona

Trunk & Trick-or-Treat

This year for Halloween the Dr. and I went as Sheldon & Amy from the TV show The Big Bang Theory. Not a lot of people knew who we were at the ward trunk-or-treat party but I loved dressing up anyway.

On Halloween night we headed downtown to the Beacon Hill neighborhood with some friends of ours. We left work early and took the train in. This is one of the most picturesque parts of the city to begin with and when the residents decorate to the nines for Halloween it becomes magical.

Let's take a closer look at the witch on this stoop. I don't know why but seeing a witch with her Apple laptop made me chuckle.

Our cute friends were dressed up as Tinkerbell and Peter Pan.

The streets were full of children and adults alike in full costume. We saw some pretty creative and clever costumes over the course of the night. There were spiderwebs, delicately carved pumpkins, ghosts, graveyards and ghouls everywhere you looked.

This man had carved the most amazing pumpkin lanterns to hang in the trees. I think this is a New England thing- hanging pumpkins from trees.

Thomas was in charge of stroller pushing duties and he excelled at it. Those cobblestone streets mean business!

John Kerry's house- whaaat?

As the evening went on the streets got more and more busy and before we knew it you could hardly move. The doorsteps got a little too busy for our friends so we headed back to the train and out of town.

One of the last houses we saw was this one- such a treat! They had a movie screen with some werewolf movie projecting, a big full moon, smoke machines, music and lights. It was truly unbelieveable.