I’ve been terrible about writing but my current trip inspired me to get back to it!
Late summer I decided that I did indeed, need to take some time for myself and take a trip to recharge and honestly get away from the world in many ways. When I started searching out options, there are so many amazing places I want to travel, that I realized I needed to set some stipulations of what was I looking for… so I did…
- It needed to be beautiful
- It needed to be a place where I could just relax and not feel compelled to GO GO GO every minute to see “all the things”
- It needed to be far away (FAR AWAY)
- It needed to be somewhere I could get on United miles and hotel points. While I have status at both Marriott and IHG I had more IHG points so I decided that I would go with that brand for this trip
- Oh and it needed to be somewhere that I could enjoy on my own because yes, I wanted to travel by myself. If you have never done a trip for pleasure by yourself, you need to. It’s one of the most empowering things you will ever do.
With all those stipulations in mind, I started to do some research… I am almost ashamed to admit it but I’ll just be honest, initial research started at 2:30am on a night where my insomnia had kicked in.
In searching for all the above criteria with hotels, I found that with my IHG points there are some places that you just can’t find rewards nights (even though they say you can) such as Tahiti. To be clear, they claim that you can use points at these places, but I have literally searched every single day in a six-month timeframe and couldn’t find a single night available so you be the judge on that…
There were some beautiful places I ruled out because while they met 2 or 3 of my above criteria, they didn’t meet them all. And then… I landed on the idea of Bali! Looking at airfare, it was some brutal flights (nearly 24 hours of flying across 3 flights) but doable on United. So then I started to research hotels and found that these were doable and honestly more reasonable than I expected.
I looked at what there is to do in Bali and found that there were some things I wanted to do (and lots of things you can do if you want to) but that it also was a place I could just kick back and relax too. Oh, and the fact that there are monkeys definitely feel in the positive column of reasons to choose here.
So it was decided – to Bali I would go!
This is what these miles and points I have are for…
I’ll share with you my adventure in my next blogs… stay tuned!