It Is Good to Be Back – But It Was a Great, Crazy 3 Months!

If you are regular reader, you will have noticed that posts here have slowed waaaay down from what is normal. Thanks to Dustin, there have been posts at least every Wednesday but my posting dropped way off for a couple of reasons.

Just a note: Since I am getting back into blogging, there may be some posts about things that you have seen at other blogs already. Just so you know if you see something that was written about elsewhere last week or so. 🙂

It Is Good to Be Back!

Our family was traveling around the US for fun, family, and work for 3 months and it was a lot busier than I had anticipated! I am used to normally being able to write posts in the morning or late at night since I am 7 hours (normally) ahead of NY time. Being in time zones across the US didn’t really allow for that to work so well!

Not only that, but my mornings were generally busy as were the rest of the days and some evenings. So, taking time out to write – or even catch up on the miles/points blogosphere – was not really an option. We also dealt with sickness in the family and a lot of driving and some flying!

There Was a LOT of Travel!

Over the course of 3 months, I had flown over 52,000 miles, most of which included multiple trips between the US and Europe. We also drove over 7,000 miles, most of that within 6 weeks or so. We were in 12 different states (not counting airport layovers) as well as staying in a bunch of hotels along the way (reviews of them coming!). Many of our stays were at Hyatt brand hotels and that put me 2/3 of the way to qualifying for Explorist status (even though I am only 40 nights away from Globalist with 10 months to go, I don’t think I will reach it this year).

Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.

We rented a number of vehicles from several companies (some reviews and posts coming about those!) as well and really got to put some different car rental statuses to the test.

Courtesy of Shutterstock

Takeaways

I will say this – having elite status when traveling with a family is huge as it does things like allows quicker access in lines while also giving upgrades that saved us thousands of dollars in what we would have had to pay in travel expenses.

I never thought I would say these two things but 1) I am tired of traveling and glad to be in one place again and 2) it was nice to get a break from the daily posting on the blog. Make no mistake, I really missed writing and diving into various travel deals and news updates but it was nice to step back for a bit and not have that kind of self-imposed deadline on myself for posting and numbers. Suffice it to say, the pageview count on the blog went down quite a bit! I rarely even looked at stats because I knew it would make me sad. 🙂

Back to Business!

But, I am excited to get back to normal and really looking forward to getting some of the posts done about various areas of travel throughout our trip. Oh, yeah, I also ran a marathon – the first one I have done in 2 years! A post coming on how even my time for training for that didn’t go as planned…

Anyway, to all of you regular readers, thanks for stopping by and I hope I can make your future visits worth it with content that is both helpful and maybe even entertaining.