July 30, 2018
Our travel cost breakdown
1. Food and lodgings, $100
2. Gas, $114
3. Trolley: $40
4. Gifts and stuff for us, $125
5. Badges, $572
6. Dogsitting, $250
7. Stupid tax, $10
Total: $1,261
1. We lodged with friends and they never let us pay for that. This year we weren’t able to pay for a meal out because of our timing but I have a thank you gift in mind if I can find it.
4. $125 of this was gifts, $50 was $100 worth of gift cards to the Out of Stock Clothing store. We’ll stack these with a $10 off coupon they may eventually send to us and probably use it to buy gifts.
5. Four days plus Preview for two adults. JB attends free up to age 12.
6. A dear friend dogsat for us because of some logistical complications. She protested that this was way too much but she treated Seamus and Sera to a doggy spa like experience for several days when I was most worried about Seamus post-op so I don’t agree with her. We did agree to disagree and that she could consider this a deposit for caring for them again in the future.
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June 27, 2018
It seems like everyone was spending time in Hawaii and we wanted to go too (Angela’s week and GenYMoney)! I originally planned to travel hack most of this trip but that didn’t happen. (Belatedly I realized that GenYMoney’s hacking did NOT include their lodgings.)
Getting ourselves ready for travel has become such a hassle, though!
For the travel itself, we have to book the transportation (flights, car rental, lodgings), call to make sure that our PreCheck number is on our reservations, put everything in TripIt to keep it organized. I usually download whatever promo code there is for cabs or rideshare, if we’re going to use them, a few days ahead of time so that it’ll be valid for our whole trip.
For work, I had to make coverage arrangements at work which always means updating people’s training, and working ahead on some things, and planning which days I’m still going to check in because there are a few things only I’m senior enough to do.
Preparing at home means tons of logistics 3 weeks before we travel.
Humans: checking all our security is in place, putting the mail on hold, making sure that all our packages are delivered before we leave. Doing everyone’s laundry, packing the medications bag for our carry-on (I’ll never forget leaving the Tylenol in our checked luggage and then having JB have teething pains on the flight!), planning airport and plane food, picking and packing all of our travel clothes, plus carry-on clothes. Packing 5 hours’ worth of entertainment for a 3 year old.
Dogs: getting a good sitter and booking them, doing all of their laundry, packing their food, supplements, medications, snacks, treats, beds, bowls, and blankets. It’d be easier to pay someone to stay here with the dogs but I’m still not comfortable with the idea of a stranger in my home and having to provide food for them as well.
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November 1, 2017
Coming so closely after our massive renovations and moving, I was unconvinced I should fly off to Texas and leave PiC with a toddler for five days. I sure wouldn’t let him ditch me for five day, solo! 🙂 At least not without calling in reinforcements!
I didn’t leave him high and dry, though! I made them a crafts box to keep them busy: special crafts scissors, construction paper, glue sticks, play-doh, half price Halloween googly eyes foam stickers, a list of projects they could do. A meatloaf was baked and left in the freezer to make sure they could eat real food at least 2 of the week days since we all know it’s a huge pain to start dinner after you get home at 6:30 with a toddler also demanding that you play with zir. We scheduled zir favorite local person to come over for dinner one night, and a playdate with a favorite toddler friend for the weekend. Seamus wasn’t forgotten, of course. Our sitter was great, dropping by to take him out for the afternoon walks that I normally take care of, and we arranged a swap of walking favors instead of payment.
Thankfully, we all survived!
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August 9, 2017
Our travel cost breakdown
Food and lodgings, $125*
Gas, $143
Parking, trolley: $20
Car rental, $317
Books, $100
Badges, $240**
Total: $1,022
* We lodged with friends this year, and they never let us pay for that, so we paid for take out one night.
** This was for two days and two adults. SDCC has a great child badge policy – children are free up to age 11.
This year, the weather was so much better than last year when it was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit!
The lottery systems this year
Badges: success for us by the skin of our teeth. A good friend wasn’t able to get enough days to make it worth coming out so this was only sort of a win.
Hotels: not necessary this year.
Parking passes: one of the 7 of us got into the lottery! (It was me.) I bought passes for all four days but on consideration, passed that along to my friend because we decided to try the trolley this year. And also because he missed the lottery. Now that JuggerBaby is mobile, it was a really big place we could save, assuming we survived the experience. Every parent of a toddler knows that they go boneless, right? This kid has been practicing that since infancy. It’s awful.
Anyway, the passes were $191.80, versus the $20 we paid for two adults, so it’s a big price tag. That convenience can’t be overstated some days, if you’ve been trudging along for 8 hours logging mile after mile on the exhibit floor! But we were already paying for a rental car to reduce wear and tear on our two cars that are incidentally due for service, so we survived without it this year.
On making it happen.
I found myself dreading the week, rather than anticipating it. This is the second year I’ve felt this way, this time it had everything to do with all the work we had to complete before and after, with the reno. Too much stress!
It was also a bit weird because many of our friends couldn’t come this year, so it was an awfully quiet year but I’m so glad we went. That’s the most relaxed and at home I’ve felt all year, eating with and catching up with Mama S.
On food.
We thought we’d try our hand at cooking with Mama S this year, but it wasn’t a good time for it. We feasted, still: my annual pancit and lumpia, the original baked pasta and garlic bread.
We packed our PB&Js for lunch this year, avoiding the fancy deli meat and veggie sandwiches we used to be weighted down by, and snacks, as always, to avoid the atrocious and overpriced convention center food. I always think it might be better this year, but it never is.Â
On having fun.
This was a funny old year. Half of our now-usual crew were in attendance, and we picked up a handful of first timer friends to escort around the exhibit hall. We have a Marco! Polo! system by text – we clump together when we find a good booth, we expand and filter out to explore, then text our location to re-cluster the group. There isn’t planning or rhyme or reason, it just works organically.
This year’s exhibit hall was chock full of cute things and fantastic displays. I was hard pressed not to go on a buying spree – only the knowledge that I didn’t want to pack another 60 pounds of detritus saved me.
There was an astonishing Tamatoa cosplayer, a life size Lockjaw promoting the Inhumans show, fabulous (as always) new Lego creations.
We discovered awesome artists, we visited awesome favorites, we laughed til we cried at JuggerBaby.
Empowered by the fantastic superhero costume my unspeakably awesome friends had commissioned, ze spent the whole first day “flying” in spurts through the crowded exhibit hall. No sooner did one of us catch up to the slippery scamp, ze would throw zir “wings” out and race off again shouting “uncle, look at meeeeeeeee!”
Uncle was charmed, of course, and threw over all his plans to run along behind my stampeding bull toddler all day.
I tell zir often that ze’s lucky to be cute but cute won’t last forever.
The second day, ze kept chanting “where is Spider-Man?” No one knows where that came from – we haven’t introduced Spidey to zir lexicon yet! All day, where is Spider-Man?
Uncle spotted a particularly good one and shouted back to me, whereupon I turned and pointed to our right, look, JuggerBaby! Spider-Man is right there!
Spidey heard us and went into a web slinging crouch for zir. As Spideys do.
JuggerBaby, face frozen in a rictus of horror, scaled my leg trying jump right back into the womb. “NO NO NO!”
Poor confused Spidey. He crouched further down to make himself shorter, inoffensive, non-threatening. He did a stupid little jig to look like a clown. Finally he cowered, hiding his head a little, apologetically, because JuggerBaby was having NONE OF IT.
Sputtering, I tried to reassure zir that it was ok and Spider-Man wasn’t going to hurt zir but my sincerity may have been muffled by the choked back laughter.
For the next twenty minutes, ze declared vehemently: I don’t want Spider-Man.
Never meet your heroes, y’all.
On family time.
This is the only place I feel at home away from home. At peace. I forget sometimes that this is the home away from home to retreat to, then I arrive in July and find myself breathing serenely again.
Mama S is the mother of my heart. She’s the best. Period.
This isn’t to malign my irreplaceable mother who physically raised me, just filling my heart with people who are still here so it’s not so lonely. It’s a strange feeling to grow up with tons of family and then be separated from all of them whether by distance or by feud. I’m related to terrible people so I have chosen to distance myself from them and fill that space with good people.
That means being welcomed with open arms, seeing your pictures mingling with the family pictures, sitting around comfortably chatting about old times or random events that have meaning. That means knowing Grandma’s got your back when the toddler is trying to pull a fast one.
Books books and more books!
Highly recommended books are great.
For the adults:
For the whole family:
- Skottie Young and Eric Shanower’s Oz Omnibus Hardcover
- Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy is highly recommended, I might pick that up even though JuggerBaby’s not ready for it yet. For investigative purposes, you know.
For the kids:
Little Golden Books does Star Wars books! And DC books! I did not know this. JuggerBaby loves:
:: What would you have your eye on if you made this pilgrimage?
May 31, 2017
Know what happened? We survived our trip!
It was a weird trip for me, not having prebooked every single item with my own hands, but that’s how some of these trips go. It’s been a while but I made myself just go with the flow as much as I could, and work on self preservation instead.
The flight there
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It definitely could have gone better. We enjoyed a relatively easy boarding, except for that rush to get a tag for our stroller that we had to gate-check, but ze was pretty happy to run down the plane aisles to our seat and get buckled in like a pro flyer.
It was a very long haul from there. Food was fun, airplane food trays are great, and so is knocking liquids off my tray like a grouchy cat. We did lots of stickers on windows and climbing over Mt Parents, and cleaning up spills.
JuggerBaby only had a few mini, thankfully brief, meltdowns. Ze hates being touched or cuddled when trying to settle down for sleep, though, preferring to fling zir arms wide open and flop like a half stunned fish out of water, singing like an alley cat for about 20 minutes before passing out cold. Good luck doing that on a plane seat!
We offered laps to lay on but Angry Cat was Angry. We spent 5 of the 8 “sleep” hours with PiC providing a bookend on the aisle seat and me being a human barrier on the edges of all three seats so ze could sort of flop safely in the remaining trough of the seats. Pretty awful, pretty much. I didn’t get a wink and ze maybe got four hours of naps pieced together.
The flight back
Peaches and cream, how I craved sleep on this trip! We kept waking up at 2 am, 4 am, 5 am.
You know what’s great? Baby safe melatonin! JuggerBaby had a bad cough while we were gone, and one of the things we discovered was that Zarbee’s also makes a nighttime version of their cough syrup. I timed it poorly, giving it to zir half an hour before the food was served so ze conked out without eating dinner. Whoops. That bought us a solid blissful six hours of non-wrangling time.
What we packed
Everything in ziplock bags as a cheap alternative to buying packing cubes. I can squash a lot of clothes in my pseudo cubes and they’re reused endlessly.
Snacks
2 hard containers that are the perfect size to hand off to JuggerBaby to clutch, and refillable with the magic that is raisins. We’re not insane, we go nowhere without a pound of raisins. Everything else goes in disposable ziplock bags.
ToysÂ
JuggerBaby still licks everything and thinks cleaning up / packing / unpacking is awesome fun. Therefore everything we pack is geared around that.
We avoid small bite size things that ze will just eat: paper clips, erasers, bottle caps. Instead I packed three ziplock bags o’ fun.
Bag 1: a deck of cards, a bag of hair bows, crayons and paper, watercolor play pad.
Bag 2: legos, 3 colorful strings of beads, 5 sheets of bubble wrap rolled into a zipper pouch, disposable stickers hoarded from every illicitly-baby free trip to Trader Joe’s.
Bag 3: reusable stickers, window clings, a notepad and pen.
We rotate bags: one is checked for the ride home, one per parental carry on.
Make use of your surroundings
Never underestimate the wonders of the seat back reading material. At 13-15 months, they were weapons to be brandished dangerously, or flapped to make floppy fan noises to the pure delight of a giggler. At 2 years plus, they’re great for spontaneous “what do you see” games. We went through a 22 page transit magazine in another language twice, spotting pictures. Still no idea what the magazine was about, but that was 20 solid minutes and now I know JuggerBaby has no idea what a pineapple actually looks like.
Seamus
I missed his face excessively. I also missed our previous dogsitter excessively. It’s good to have a back up but as nice as these folks were, they’re just not the Original Best sitter. OB would send updates and pictures without reminders, and paid very close attention to his medical needs. She would even catch him licking when he was starting a flare up and take care of it before it got worse. She’s even bathed him and done his laundry when we’ve been on long trips.
The back up sitters fed him and medicated him, as far as I can tell, but his bedding was grubby, I had to keep reminding them to send me updates, it was just … not right.
:: What’s your favorite international destination? Would you go with or without family (chosen or blood)?Â
May 10, 2017
With a touch of Type A-ness, and as a chronic illness person who has to be very careful about allocating energy resources, I approach all travel with the intensity of an astronaut preparing to go into space.
I’ve had to get a lot better at this over the years.
I’ve made just about every mistake under the sun, starting with forgetting to pack my laptop charger and pants on a business trip, booking flights for the wrong travel dates in the early days of internet booking, and even going to the airport on the wrong day.
Trial and error has been a harsh, but mostly effective, teacher.
And yet when I booked a trip for PiC last month, I still had a moment of panic when the confirmation email landed in my inbox – had I accidentally booked it for myself??
(No, but it was a plausible error.)
I’ve developed a very involved to do list to follow before we travel but this was our first international jaunt. This trip wasn’t a vacation, it was mostly obligatory family stuff that I can’t get into, but it was still travel with all the inherent packing and planning needs of a vacation so I made what I thought were the appropriate adaptations for flying overseas.
Three months out
- Check the dogsitter’s availability and save the date.
- Research flight and hotel costs. Research also: best seats on various planes, best mileage earning options, lounge access (thanks to the Chase Sapphire Reserve).
- Fill out passport application for JuggerBaby. Take the whole family on an adventure to the processing center and pay $80 to the U.S. State Department, and $25 to the processing center. Wait anxiously for the passport and birth certificate to be returned by mail.
Two months out
- Make a final decision on flights and hotels. Book ’em, Danno!
- Check everyone’s vaccine records, medications, and other critical supplies to ensure we have enough for the next 3 months. I don’t want to run out while traveling, nor to come back and find out that we’ve got one day of meds left! This has happened before, in unhappier days.
- Scan a copy of everyone’s travel documents and back them up in two places in case we lose the physical documents.
- Make up packing lists.
- Find out that the sitter isn’t available for either this Big Trip or a smaller trip that’s going to happen sooner. Have a minor panic and spend several hours finding possible replacements. Spend more hours interviewing.
One month out
- Get last check-ups. This round, only Seamus and I needed to be checked for clean bills of health.
- Confirm dogsitter booking.
- Decide that for 2 adults & 1 child, over 10 days, we’re taking 2 carry-on suitcases (9″ by 14″ by 22″), and 2 largeish backpacks. Redo packing lists. Pretend that we don’t go through more than one garment a day. Laugh because it’s utterly foolish.
Two weeks out
- Put together Seamus’s vacation pack: dog food, medications, supplements, launder his bedding.
- Order a refill of his medication from the mail order pharmacy – it takes 5-7 days to deliver.
One week out
- Triple check Amazon subscribe and save order – make sure that all the essentials will be delivered the day after we return.
- Ditto mail – put it on hold until the day we return.
- Recall that JuggerBaby has been the Worst about going on walks, demanding to be carried at least half the distance that ze can easily run six times over given the proper motivation. Panic about traveling with a heavy well fed toddler without a stroller, having sold your awesome but bulky infant / toddler stroller on Craigslist three weeks ago (+$50). Buy an umbrella stroller that’s only a little broken (-$35) but still functional and only 1/3 the size of the last stroller.
- Realize you’ve run out of time to have a night away for a trial run with the dogsitter. Realize you’re a neurotic dog mom who didn’t want to be parted from him for even a day, much less a week, and mentally stomp your feet about going without him. This is the second hardest part about travel.
The day before
- Top up travel sized liquids for carrying on the plane. This was a masterpiece of jigsawing and make do. I rescued a sturdy plastic zipper bag, our free-with-baby package of hospital amenities from JuggerBaby’s birth, and filled it with rescued bottles. Motrin replaced liquid infant Vitamin D, Zarbee’s replaced now useless teething tablets, eczema lotion filled the 3 year old mostly empty jar of Noxema. All under the required 3 ounce liquid limit, all reused, nothing had to be bought! Tiny frugal victories.
- Break the plastic zipper on my document envelope and curse the cheap plastic roundly. Force the clip back on and proceed with maximum caution because losing our passports at any point on this trip is a big fat No.
- Overpack our carry-on backpacks: a change of clothes for everyone, a day’s worth of diapering supplies, all the medication for everyone, a sleep pack for JuggerBaby (pajamas, book, stuffed animal, blanket, lotion and nighttime chest rub), a thousand toys and “toys” (stickers, bubble wrap, Lego people, window clings, reusable stickers, Crayons, colored pencils, paper).
- Print boarding passes because some airlines are stuck in 1993.
- Wash, dry, fold two last loads of laundry so we’ll come home to clean clothes and towels. If I were really ambitious the sheets would have been done too. Â #Nope
- Triple check the lounges we have free access to for departing and returning airports, make sure we have our lounge passes and be heartily annoyed that PiC’s has gone missing. If my desk weren’t a certified disaster zone I’d know exactly where it was. I think.
My policy is not to spend while traveling unless it’s absolutely necessary, but that has to be balanced with our ability to carry everything. This round of planning and packing went well. I had to replace a few things on the trip itself (cheap plastic!!) but overall I managed to pack only 15% more than we actually needed and part of that 15% was simply because the travel was overbooked and we didn’t have the leisure time we anticipated.
:: How do you prepare for international travel? Is it old hat to you, or do you get the giddy pre-travel anticipation that I do?
April 19, 2017
I’m a recovering workaholic and it’s been 6 years since my last real* vacation.**
*defined as a time where I wasn’t required to log onto work and I didn’t do it more than once out of worry that something had become a steaming pile of waste on fire.
**maternity leave doesn’t count as a vacation in any stretch of the word and I will slap you with a wet fish if you try to argue with me about that. Fair warning.
Despite my recovering workaholic label, this isn’t entirely a situation of my own making. I didn’t mean to go this long without a true break. We haven’t just been sitting at home, dully Kermit-flailing at our keyboards in an endless grind. We’ve logged more travel for fun days in the past few years than I have in my entire career before this! It’s just that I’ve been making it work by doing it all, at the same time: traveling, working, and now, also parenting.
It hasn’t been without its flaws but it has included some amazing food so it’s hard to argue against the logic that if I can have it all, by doing it all, why not?
Because when you’re a recovering workaholic, you shouldn’t be looking for reasons to keep your work strapped to your hip!
Truly, the trouble with knowing that you can’t coast on talent, knowing that you made it to this point in life or work by dint of unbelievable amounts of hard work is that it’s incredibly hard to care about the research that says taking a break and refreshing your brain is good for you AND your work. That was my problem, early in my career. Stepping away meant I was losing ground and will have to work harder to catch up on my return. Like Leo McGarry (The West Wing) who didn’t want to take out the time for his AA meetings, I don’t want to be a half hour dumber than everyone else!
But that’s stupid. For one thing, information acquired as it develops takes far more time than catching up on most situations to get up to speed. It actually only took Leo about three minutes to arrive at the same place everyone else was waiting, for their next update. Surely nothing at my job is so complex or critical as Aaron Sorkin’s fictional White House, The West Wing version! (versus the American President version which is a whole other thing).
For another, your brain is a resource and running it continuously without respite is shoddy brain ownership. Even actual machines need downtime and maintenance.
What’s my point? My point is that even knowing all of the above, it’s been six years since my last vacation.
Money is about to be anywhere from pretty tight to OMGTIGHT, but you know me, I’ve already made contingency plans. I have a stockpile of points / miles and I will plan a real vacation.
But my laptop may still come with me because my addiction to being connected is not on the table for discussion at this time. One problem per post, please.
Assuming a small budget and travel companion who varies from being an utter delight to a tiny terrorist, and a preference for being with Seamus rather than boarding him, I think we may be talking road trip!
Colorado? Canada? Washington?
:: Where would you head after a long vacation drought? When and what was your last vacation?Â