2014 Travel Year In Review

Well, it's the last day of 2014, and wow, I've had an amazing year.

Since my father's an Asian math nerd, according to his excel spreadsheet, I have:

1. Flown approximately 51,422 miles this year.
2. Taken 26 flight segments (6 of which were 8+ hours long).
3. Flown out of 16 airports.
4. On 6 different airlines.
5. Traveled to 6 foreign countries.
6. Earned 25,931 frequent flyer miles!

I was able to earn Gold Status on Aegean Airlines, but unfortunately, it won't be lifetime as we hoped. I suppose I'll just go with earning United miles and try to hit 1,000,000 miles at some point in my life. I'm only at 5,279 miles with United, so I still have a long way to go.

On the hotel side, we have:

1. Stayed 43 nights in hotels this year
2. Across 21 different cities
3. In 20 unique hotel brands including all 9 of Starwood's.

Our most frequent brand was Westin (11 nights across Atlanta, Austin, Chicago and Costa Navarino). We re-qualified for Starwood Platinum status, but lost our Hyatt Diamond status.

So as we close out 2014, here's a photo snapshot of our favorite lapchild adventures each month.

Mid-2014 Check In

Back in 2008, when he was a care-free single man without any responsibilities whatsoever, my father took a Midwest road trip during the entire month of September  as a part of his MLB stadium tour. Using Chicago as his homebase, he drove out to the 3 M's (Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri) visiting Target Field (Twins) in Minneapolis, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, and Busch Stadium (Cardinals) in St. Louis.

Also, for about a week of that trip, he drove through the great state of Ohio, visiting the 3 C's (Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati). And today, as we hit the halfway point in 2014, my father finds himself back in Ohio for a two day work conference in Columbus.

So while he's gone, I thought I'd sneak onto his computer and take a look at all our 2014 travels to date and reminisce a bit.

January - Austin

February - Wisconsin

March - Hong Kong

April - New Orleans

May - Atlanta

June - Israel

So now the question is, what's the plan for the second half of 2014. Well, as of right now, we only have July planned where I'm tagging along with my parents on their 5th Wedding Anniversary trip to Italy and Greece.

After that, it seems we have the rest of the calendar a bit open. Any suggestions for Labor Day Weekend?

State Street Brats

We only had a few hours in the state capital / college town of Madison, Wisconsin. After cleaning off our snow covered Toyota Yaris rental from Hertz, we drove 10 minutes into town and went straight to State Street Brats on the University of Wisconsin campus.

A few years ago, my friend Liam's father (having spent 4 years in Madison for college) told my father about this little taste of Wisconsin while my father was nearby. Never turning down an opportunity to eat, my father ventured into State Street Brats and enjoyed some of their famous Red Brats (smoked beef pork bratwurst). Since then, my father has actually gone back to State Street a few times before forcing my mother and me to sample the red brats this past weekend.

Walking down the street, you don't actually see a sign for State Street Brats. Instead, you see massive letters that spell out Tavern on a German looking building at the end of the row. They have some outdoor seating, but given it was February, we opted to sit inside where it was warm.

Since the place is really a college bar that happens to serve amazing brats, the venue is very casual. When we arrived on Friday afternoon at about 5PM, it was almost completely empty. Of course, my parents didn't mind at all since it would be super awkward to have a 2 year old toddler and her parents mingling among a massive crowd of drunken 18-22 year olds.

We took some seats along the windows where they had enclosed booths to trap me while my parents ate their lunch. My father took a few minutes to look at the laminated menu and went up to the bar to place his order. Fortunately, they took credit cards because we were strapped for cash.

In about 10 minutes, the bartender came out of the back with small plastic red trays filled with deliciousness. My father had ordered the Red Brat Reuben (red brat sandwich with sauerkraut and Russian dressing served on a pretzel roll) while I had a grilled cheese sandwich with some Wisconsin cheddar. My mother went in another direction and ordered some boneless buffalo wings. My father and I loved our choices. My mother, not so much. Along with a Miller Lite, the total bill came out to $20 for the three of us. Not bad.

After spending the weekend in the Wisconsin Dells, we had to drive back through Madison to return our rental car at the MSN Airport, so my father tricked us all into another lunch at State Street Brats, but this time with my friends Jack and Connor. We got another booth in the corner and all went to town on our final taste of Wisconsin.

Most of us ordered the signature Red Brat platter with waffle fries. I chose another grilled cheese sandwich, and my mother went with a Triple Cheese Burger this time. But we couldn't leave Wisconsin without getting some Wisconsin Cheese Curds!

State Street Brats
603 State Street
Madison, WI 53703
(608) 255-5544

Wilderness Waterpark

Wilderness Waterpark is on the same resort property at Wyndham Glacier Canyon (WGC). We were staying at the timeshare condo portion of the resort (seen here as brown buildings at the top of the map here) while the other connected, buildings were more traditional hotel rooms.

But everything was part of the same complex so we had access to everything, including the indoor Wilderness Waterparks (seen here along the bottom half of the map). But if you know anything about drawing maps to scale, you'll see that things are pretty far from one another, separated by massive parking lots.

As it turned out, getting from WGC to WW was an adventure by itself. The resort is pretty massive and you have to do a fair share of walking through the hallways and a few elevator rides to get to your destination. From our room 8310 to the closest waterpark, I'd say it was a good 12-15 minute walk, but less if you ran the entire way like I did.

 

But eventually, you will start seeing other families and kids walking in the same direction, so you'll know you're heading the right way. And eventually, you'll feel the warm muggy air welcoming you to your indoor paradise! Here's some snapshots of the 1st waterpark and the giant wave pool. There is also another separate waterpark with a giant bucket that splashes everyone and more slides.

The good news is that the Wilderness Waterparks are open year round. The bad news is that when it's winter, everyone uses the indoor waterpark instead of the summer when people prefer the outdoor ones. So the place was pretty packed and crowded while we were there. In fact, we didn't even find a seat to keep our stuff while we were in the water. We had to find a dry corner on the floor to put our shoes and towels. But we didn't let that spoil our fun.

And if you're not in the mood for more waterparks after your first day, you'll have a lot of other dry activities to choose from including a massive arcade with more video games than you knew existed, a few different 3D/Glow in the dark mini golf courses, a massive treehouse/jungle gym, a sky ropes course, as well as laser tag!

Wyndham Glacier Canyon Lodge

Hotel Stay Details 
Hotel: Wyndham Glacier Canyon Lodge
Dates: February 14-16, 2014
Rate Paid: $119/night (incl. taxes)
Points Earned: 0 Points

We've been doing quite a lot of domestic traveling the past few months (Memphis, Scottsdale, and Austin), enjoying family time spent in the wonderful parts of the United States that remind us how much of a bubble New York City is. This time around, we wandered into the famous Wisconsin Dells (C on the map below), a local weekend vacation destination about an hour drive northwest of Madison (B) and 3 hours northwest of Chicago (A).


Booking
While we normally try to stay at Starwood hotels (since my father has his Platinum status perks like complimentary suite upgrades, free breakfasts, and VIP service), we actually went to Wisconsin specifically to enjoy the massive indoor water parks connected to the Glacier Canyon Lodge with our friends. Water parks are very popular in the Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin. I suppose being so far from a real beach, Wisconsin found a way to bring the water fun to them.

Because the resort was managed by Wyndham, we could have booked the reservation through their website and earned some Wyndham reward points, but my friend Jack's mother knew that using EBay offered a much cheaper way to book.

We secured a great 2 bedroom suite for the weekend all for the low price of just $475 total (split between 2 families). In addition to the room for 2 nights, the price included 8 passes to all the waterparks and all cleaning fees, taxes, etc. No timeshare tour/presentation required. Since the lodge is actually a timeshare property, many owners put their shares up for sale to the highest bidder when they're not in use, oftentimes priced significantly less than "retail." By way of example, the same type 2 bedroom suite was being offered online at $409/night (including taxes). We paid just $238/night. No reasonable amount of Wyndham points would be worth foregoing that $169/night savings.

Booking a hotel room via EBay was pretty easy, though there's always a risk when dealing with another individual as opposed to a professionally run hotel. Our seller was a couple from Minnesota who seemed to have a solid transaction history on EBay (226 Positive Reviews, 1 Neutral, 0 Negative). We prepaid online and received confirmation from EBay including the seller's contact information.

As a part of the transaction, we were supposed to send our name (exactly as written on our driver's license) to the seller so she could officially reserve her timeshare under that name. However, more than 24 hours had passed and no word from the seller. So my father then called the Seller and left a voicemail.

Within the hour, the woman called him back apologizing for being away from the computer. She confirmed the name we wanted on the reservation (apparently, only that person could check in and it's a huge deal to have to change the name later) and then we received the official confirmation email from the resort shortly thereafter.

We originally thought to put my father's name on the reservation (since we'd likely arrive before our friends). But given the chance of Midwest winter snowstorms in mid-February, we put our Chicago friends' name on the reservation instead since they were driving up. In the scenario where our flights from New York would get delayed or worse, cancelled, at least they would get to enjoy the resort.

The 2 Bedroom Suite

The 900 sq foot two-bedroom suite was perfect for a pair of families, especially having a full kitchen and dining room area. My mother appreciated having separate bathrooms.

Our friends took the bedroom with the double beds and gave us the larger master bedroom with the king bed. But most of the time, we were all hanging out in the livingroom/kitchen. All of us kids got to use the Jacuzzi bathtub too.

We didn't arrive to Glacier Canyon Lodge until about 8:30PM Friday evening. We had landed at 4PM that afternoon in Madison (about an hour drive away), but decided to enjoy some of the University of Wisconsin's finest to time our arrival with my friends who didn't hit the road from Chicago until mid-afternoon.

Check in was hectic with a lot of other families all arriving for the long President's Day weekend. But we finally got our keys to Room 8310. Here are some photos of the actual suite from this weekend.

 

 

 

Plenty of space for two families with young kids. And plenty of room for me to get to play with Jack and Connor.