TGIF!  I’m not sure I’ve ever been happier to see a week come to an end.  So much has been going on this week so let’s catch up, shall we?!

First, you may have noticed that last week I strayed a little from my normal posting schedule.  I shared my travel toiletry packing list for our two week trip to Europe and a look from Berlin, and I had planned to share my normal Week In Review post on Friday, but we ended up waking up super early Friday morning (when I normally would draft and publish the WIR post) to get out to the I Amsterdam sign to beat the crowds, and then we wandered around the city on our last day in Europe.  So yeah, the post didn’t go live.

Michael and I got back to D.C. on Saturday night, and after an 11 hour sleep and a SoulCycle class on Sunday, I was ready to tackle this week!

You may have seen on my Instagram Stories that I attended portions of IPW, a travel conference that was in D.C. this week.  I knew it was going to be a lot to hit the ground running with this right after getting back from Europe (oh hey jet lag!), but I really wanted to take advantage of the conference being in my city!

I attended a press conference with Brand USA, a fun happy hour with the Visit Arizona team (Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix!), a lunch date with Visit Dallas, and spent an evening at National Geographic with Tanvii.  It was so great meeting tons of people who share my passion for travel!

On the blog front, I shared a Father’s Day gift guide on Monday, and I had every intention of publishing a new post on Wednesday, but life happened, and my grandfather passed away that morning.  My papaw, as we call him, was quite the character and went out with a bang.

I’m home in Shreveport, Louisiana this weekend to spend time with my family and celebrate that hard-headed man’s life (if you’re interested, you can read his obituary here – it’s a hoot!).

I know this post is a bit all over the place, but hang with me … With my sudden trip home, I had to book a last minute (like, next day) flight home.  When I first looked at the flight options from D.C. to Shreveport, the cost was around $750 on the low end.   But thanks to my travel hacking ways, I have a mountain of Chase Ultimate Rewards points.  I was able to find award availability on United flights to and from Shreveport for just 25,000 points + $86 for the entire trip.  As a side note, usually the fees would have only been around $10, but since I booked for the next day, the fees on that leg of the trip were around $75.

A perk to accumulating Ultimate Rewards points is that they transfer to a ton of travel partners, United being one of them.  So I transferred the necessary UR points from my Chase account to my United account (an automatic transfer!) and was able to book my flight.

Probably not the highest value use of the points, but they helped me save a huge amount of money in a time crunch.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!  Be sure to stop back by next week for regularly scheduled programming! 🙂