Disclosure: That photo is of Turks and Caicos, but since I’m poora poora, let’s pretend it isn’t for the purposes of this post.
I’m probably not the first one to say this but 2020 was supposed to be my year. A year to travel like a celebrity. Of course, all those plans were poo-poo’d on real fast thanks to Covid.
Let me give you some background on how determined I was about this being a travel year for our family.
In 2019, I traveled for work almost every month sometimes twice in a month. With a toddler at home, that separation anxiety was unreal. For me. I would avoid staying a night if possible, just so I could get home to my baby. Even if that meant a 6am inbound flight and 10pm outbound flight. I would be dead tired, but that was always my default.
The plus side of this was I racked up my Delta status real fast and by mid-2019 planned to hit Medallion status so that as a family of 3 we could have perks like priority boarding, standby upgrades, etc. Problem was I was just a few MQS (for you Delta noobs that’s Medallion Qualifying Segments — or how many flights you take). Believe it or not, I was just a few shy on MQS even though I had met the MQDs (Medallion Qualifying Dollars — meaning I had already spent enough money on flights for status). Crazy, right?
So to ensure I hit that by December 31st, I took 3 roundtrips to Nashville on a Saturday (spaced out across the month of October and November). I was the idiot you read about on Reddit. Literally got on a plane to fly to Nashville from Atlanta in 40 min and boarded off the plane, only to re-board after 20 minutes. There was even one time that I was afraid of missing the flight because the Starbucks line was too long. Ha!
So, that’s how bad the travel bug got me. Once I knew I had got the status, next was planning trips. We knew this was the time to take more expensive/longer trips before we expand the family except we don’t have a Kardashian budget. So, in comes Scott’s Cheap Flights to the rescue. We snagged deals to plan and book the following in 2020:
- Bora Bora for 7 nights (paid $1,600 roundtrip with 1 stop for all 3 of us — otherwise this trip may not have been possible)
- Amalfi Coast and Naples for 10 days (another snag thanks to Scott’s with $1,500 biz class nonstop roundtrip)
- London for 5 days (don’t remember how much we paid here but 1 adult ticket was covered for a nonstop thanks to all the miles we racked up in 2019). We also got lucky and took this trip right before the lockdown. Had to make some tweaks in our plans to be safe but it was still fun!
Others on our list that we planned to book, but didn’t were:
- Seattle
- Denver
- Costa Rica
- Australia
- Japan
To say I was heartbroken when all our travel plans got cancelled is an understatement. But thankfully, we were able to recoup the bookings either back in airline credit or refunds. We’ll see if we can use any of them into 2021 but for now I’m just thankful we were able to experience what we did pre-pandemic.
In the meantime, I’ll continue daydreaming about being in one of the overwater bungalows sipping a Pina Colada.