Thursday, March 16, 2006
Of visitors and trips
This last weekend we had some very good friends in town from Austin, our first non-family visitors this year. We had really warm and fairly nice weather so we did quite a bit of touristing, including the Freedom Trail in its entirety and dinner on Newbury Street. Jie and I are aficionados of a “cult classic” board game called The Settlers of Catan, and I’m pleased to report that I won 5 out of 8 games. That’s unusual for me, as I generally drink myself out of contention on board game nights.
Summer travel plans are way up in the air for us right now. We’re planning on buying in Chicago and so it’s hard to rationalize spending $5-7k on a vacation right as we’re about to put $40k+ down on a condo, part of which we’ll be borrowing from somewhere. And that’s just to hit 10% for an 80-10-10 loan. It feels a little irresponsible to pay for a big trip, especially when we have a sweet lake vacation spot in Texas, with the home purchase looming. On the other hand, when are we going to have three months off at the same time again?
We leave tomorrow for Spring Break in China. We got our RT airline tickets to Beijing for just 30k miles each, and our hotel in Xian is paid for with Hyatt points, so it will be a pretty inexpensive trip. It should be a lot of fun, too, as we’ve never been to Xian and we’ll get to feast with Jie’s family in Shanghai for almost a week. I’ll put pictures up when we get back in a few weeks!
Summer travel plans are way up in the air for us right now. We’re planning on buying in Chicago and so it’s hard to rationalize spending $5-7k on a vacation right as we’re about to put $40k+ down on a condo, part of which we’ll be borrowing from somewhere. And that’s just to hit 10% for an 80-10-10 loan. It feels a little irresponsible to pay for a big trip, especially when we have a sweet lake vacation spot in Texas, with the home purchase looming. On the other hand, when are we going to have three months off at the same time again?
We leave tomorrow for Spring Break in China. We got our RT airline tickets to Beijing for just 30k miles each, and our hotel in Xian is paid for with Hyatt points, so it will be a pretty inexpensive trip. It should be a lot of fun, too, as we’ve never been to Xian and we’ll get to feast with Jie’s family in Shanghai for almost a week. I’ll put pictures up when we get back in a few weeks!
