Category: Travel

One of the questions that Tim Ferriss asks his podcast guests is, “What’s been your favorite under-$100 purchase this last year?” I’ve always loved that question, as I always have a good answer for it.

In this blog post I’m sharing about a recent purchase that I’m very happy about, and though it was more than $100, it’s been totally worth it.

In October I purchased my first ebike. Before I tell you about it, let me set up the back story. In October, 2021 Mandy and I took a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. On one of our days there we rented bikes. I rented a regular bike for me and an ebike for Mandy. After riding around Duckbrook Pond together, she wanted to walk around and take photos, so I decided to take the ebike for a spin. I absolutely loved it.

Fast forward to our trip last summer to Switzerland. One of the highlights for me was renting an ebike and riding from Lauterbrunnen to Interlaken, and then taking the train back to Lauterbrunnen. What I discovered was that I could ride a much greater distance on an ebike than a regular bike. And a greater distance means more great things to see.

This past fall the four of us were back in Bar Harbor, and we rented bikes again. The boys and I rented regular bikes, and Mandy rented an ebike. And like last time, after spending some time riding together, I took off on my own on the ebike. I think I ended up riding 20 miles that day.

That evening I started doing some research on ebikes, and as luck would have it, Rad Power Bikes was having the biggest sale they had ever had. The Rad Mission was on sale for $500.

I had three goals with this purchase. First, I wanted to ride more frequently. This is the exercise and fun goal. Second, I wanted to be able to ride greater distances when I rode. And third, I wanted to drive my car less often.

This third goal was inspired by Mr. Money Mustache. Based on this, a specific goal was to bike to Kroger whenever I needed just a few items. Like many midtowners, the Kroger on Union isn’t my favorite place to go. One of the issues is the parking lot. This year I purchased a Walmart Plus membership, so we’ve been having our groceries delivered once or twice a month. But there’s still the need to stop by Kroger every once and a while, but “just stopping by” can be aggravating. But riding my bike, and securing it right in front…that sounded appealing.

So those were my three goals. After a few days of research, I took the plunge. I found out later that the reason for the sale was that they were discontinuing the Mission. Some have been concerned about this. I wasn’t.

Here’s what I liked about this bike…

• Price – just $500!
• Single speed
• Lighter than most ebikes yet feels solid
• Battery is sufficient for my needs
• Throttle

Besides the bike, I knew that I would need some accessories. Here are the accessories I ended up purchasing.

• Rear Rack – this was so that I could get groceries
• Top Tube Bag
• Water bottle holder
• Kickstand
• Mirror
• Comfort Grips
• Pannier bag
• Alarm

I spent around $800 total for the bike and accessories. I was quite pleased.

There was one issue, though…

Rad underestimated how many people would take advantage of this sale, which meant that they oversold. I lucked out that I still got a bike, but I ended up getting a different color than the one I ordered, and it also meant that there was a long delay. The bike didn’t arrive until the beginning of December.

It came in a box, which meant that I needed to figure out how to assemble a bike. I ended up buying a torque wrench but had the other tools I needed. Rad provides some helpful video instructions, so it ended up being easier than I thought it would be.

I rode a couple of times in December, but in January I rode several times. Aren’t mild January’s just the best! I’m looking forward to riding even more once spring rolls around.

I can without hesitation recommend an ebike. And though my particular model is no longer available, I can recommend RadPower as a great company.

Several years ago our family took a trip to New England. One of the stops was Bar Harbor, Maine. It quickly became our favorite stop, so much so that we cancelled the next leg of our trip so that we could stay an additional day. Since that time we’ve gone back twice.

We had a trip planned to Bar Harbor last fall but had to cancel due to COVID. I looked at planning a trip there this fall, but the boys’ fall break schedules did not align. So we decided to wait another year. Then one day, about two months ago, I asked Mandy the question, “What does a rich life look like to you?” It’s a question I had heard listening to a podcast. Without skipping a beat she said, “going to Bar Harbor this fall.”

That’s pretty specific, so I started thinking about ways we could make it happen. By searching for vacation rentals two weeks after the week we were originally looking, there were more options to choose from. We booked our flights using American Airlines points and found a cute apartment right in the heart of the town.

We spent last week there, and it was a wonderful trip. Mandy asked me the other night what we should call this area. We have three options. Bar Harbor is the main city. Acadia is the national forest. And Mount Desert Island (MDI) is the island that it all sits on. No matter what you choose to call it, for Mandy and I it’s our favorite place.

Here are a few highlights from our trip.

Watching the sunset at the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse

The view from the top of Huguenot Head after a lovely hike

Riding bikes on the carriage roads. This is one of the nineteen Rockefeller Bridges scattered throughout the park.

Sitting on Sand Beach. A traveler from Indiana took this photo of us. He said it looked like we had the beach all to ourselves.

And finally, sunset on our last night from the top of Cadillac Mountain.

If you’re looking for a great place to travel, we highly recommend Acadia!

In my last post I shared about our desire to go back to Switzerland this summer. In this post I’d like to document the planning process. We still have many months to go, but I’m happy to report that all of our flights and lodging have been booked!

This post is going to be long and very detailed, but that’s how the planning process really is. Planning a trip to another country is a complicated process, but hopefully what I share here will help anyone else who wants to take it on.

I mentioned in the last post that I hoped to pay for half of this trip with points. I first discovered “travel hacking” right before we took our month long trip to Europe in the summer of 2018. We had saved up for over a year for that trip, but it was a bit frustrating to learn that I could have saved SO much money had I understood travel hacking earlier. I won’t make that mistake this time, and hopefully you won’t as well.

To get started, we knew that we wanted to go back to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and we wanted to stay at the same chalet. It’s in a small car-less village called Wengwald. Mandy found and booked this place a year before our last trip. It was affordable, and it had so many great reviews. To help explain how magical this place was, this was our view every morning we stepped out the door.

Now you can see why we felt the immense need to get back to this place!

Once we had decided to spend our entire two weeks in Switzerland, we knew we could spend at least five days here. So that’s what we are going to do.

We also decided that we would like to spend some nights in Mürren. The elevation in Wengwald is around 4200 ft above sea level. In Mürren it’s 5500 ft. We did some of our favorite hikes in this area. And one of our favorite memories from our time there was eating Magnum ice cream bars on a bench and having a little old lady stop by and ask us to make sure that we didn’t drop any of the chocolate onto the street. Never had that happen before!

So we booked this place in Mürren for five nights. Ten nights down. Where else should we go? Before I get to that, let’s discuss flights, because this is where things get pretty tedious. I started the process off by going to Google Flights. I had at first assumed that we would fly out of New York like we did last time. So I began searching for the best flights there. We then decided that Chicago would be a better option since we could fly nonstop via Southwest. So I started searching for the cheapest flights from there to Zurich. There I discovered that we would save a lot of money going at the beginning of June rather than the end of June or July.

From there I went to the Chase Ultimate Rewards site. My default credit card for the past several years has been the Chase Sapphire Preferred. And since it had been four years since I had gotten the bonus, I was able to apply for a new one. I first had to downgrade my existing card to the Chase Freedom Unlimited, which has no annual fee and gives you 1.5 points per $1 spent. And then I had to apply for a new card. The new bonus is 100,000 points, which is the highest ever. If you don’t have the Chase Sapphire Preferred, you should definitely get it. And if you do decide to apply, it would be awesome if you used this link, as they’ll give me some points as well!

There are times when it’s best to transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to partner airlines and hotels. I’ve done that with Southwest and Hyatt. I looked into those options for my flights. I ended up booking through the Chase travel portal though. Here is a great tutorial for using this site. The bottom line is that you search for flights just like any other site, but instead of paying with cash, you use your rewards, and the rewards when you have the Chase Sapphire Preferred are worth $0.125. So four tickets from Chicago to Zurich costing $2425.76 cost us 194,060 points instead. Not a bad redemption, especially considering the fact that I paid a $95 annual fee to get 100,000 of those needed points through this credit card!

Since we knew that we would be flying in and out of Zurich, we knew we wanted at least two nights there. Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland. It’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world. So now we had a large city. And we had villages in Wengwald and Mürren. We decided that we wanted a couple of nights somewhere in between. So we settled on two nights in this apartment in Luzern. We will be arriving in Zurich mid-afternoon, and the next morning we’ll probably wake up around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Jet lag will hit us hard in Luzern, but it will be a good place to shake that off by exploring a new city.

And then we were down to Zurich. Did I mention that Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world? It’s #5 according to this article (have you even heard of #1!). As with the other stops on our trip, we opted for apartments rather than hotels since our boys are only getting bigger. More space is helpful. I read lots of blog posts and purchased Rick Steves’ book so that I would better understand which neighborhoods would work best. We settled on this apartment for two nights.

At this point I have booked flights from Chicago to Zurich as well 14 nights in vacation rentals. All that is left is our flights from Memphis to Chicago, plus a night in a hotel on either end of the trip. Our first thought was to fly Southwest. We’ve had the companion pass for the last couple of years, which has really saved us money. It expires at the end of 2021, and I may opt to wait a year before trying to get it again. The other issue with Southwest is that they fly into Midway, and our Zurich flight is in and out of O’Hare.

I went back to the Chase travel portal and found that I could book four nonstop flights from Memphis to Chicago for $1035.20, or 82,816 points. We went with the points. The good thing with that, besides using points instead of cash, was that we would fly in and out of O’Hare instead of Midway. Now all that was left was booking hotels. I chose a Hampton Inn for our first night. We will arrive at O’Hare that morning around 9:30 and then will take the free airport shuttle to our hotel, where we’ll leave our bags before heading downtown for the day. We’ll have the next day completely free as well. We’ll check out, leave our luggage, and head back downtown. Our other thought is to do a college tour or two that day. After a fun day of something, we’ll had back to the hotel, pick up our luggage, take the airport shuttle to O’Hare, and fly our at 10pm .

Our return flight from Zurich arrives in Chicago around 6pm. It’s going to feel like 1am to us, so once we clear customs and get a bite to eat, we’ll take that free shuttle to the Hyatt Place, which I paid for with Hyatt points, and crash. The next morning we fly out at 10am. Nice to not be too rushed that morning, even though I’m sure we’re going to be up EARLY.

Since this post has gotten rather lengthy, I think I’ll save a bit for a last post. In that post we’ll discuss transportation once we get into Switzerland, plus I’ll share some things we learned during our last trip that will help us this time around.