Back on the Road
With the denouement of the pandemic, I'm back on the road, dragging my son along, and a colleague or two. Amazing it's been 18 months more or less of light or no travel.
NYC, Great Barrington, Killington, and Big Sky Montana. And a big trip planned for end of June, early July.
They say the journey not the destination is the secret, and I couldn't agree more, and that's why we are always in the front of the plane and on the top floors of hotels, courtesy many times of the gigantic amount of miles and rewards I earn by running our large company expenses through credit cards. I'm often amazed that these awards aren't taxed in some way (thank you credit card lobbyists!), even when they are giving you direct cash back, but I'm thankful. I earn enough awards that I feel I have to include them in my estate plans, since the material benefit is real.
I use an assortment of airline cards (delta, united, american), hotel cards (mostly Marriott for the W hotels), reward cards that you can use flexibly (Chase Ink), and even cards like Capitol One, where post-travel you can select to use rewards which I thought was really genius. The hotel and airline cards, especially for higher end travel, has gotten a little sketch in terms of points needed to earn free travel, requiring 2 or 3x what they used to - or as some old timer says somewhere, a million points isn't what it used to be.
The ski trips have been fun - one on the east and one on the west. Really the only thing they shared other than great getaways and time well spent with family was one day was stormy and poor visibility (wintry) and the other day glorious cold blue skys. Both have their attributes. In Big Sky, we got dumped on with 10" of fresh powder between Saturday night and Sunday, which provided a fresh powder experience none of my group had every experienced before and took a little getting used to.
On the business front, we have 4 closings coming up in the next 45 days, and that provides a lot of logistical work for us all. With the end of winter, that creates a lot of phone calls that start with 'hey i hear it's going to be nice out, can we do this or that?"