Transportation in London and around the UK to Scotland

 I almost forgot this Blog existed! But, to be fair, not a lot has happened in the planning of our trip since my last post. We did book all our hotels, and a few backups as well, almost entirely using credit card points. It took a couple of months of earning sign-up bonuses on 3 new cards, then making the reservations, but they're all done. Then I took a break while there was a lull in things I could book.

This weekend, however, turned out to be a lot of work on transportation solutions. See, the itinerary has us spending 6 nights in London, then 3 nights in York, 3 nights in Inverness, and 4 nights in Edinburgh before flying home. Hubby and I decided we were definitely not going to drive or rent a car, so we chose public transportation in the form of London Underground and buses to get around the city and trains between cities.

Yesterday I was able to get "early access" tickets for the train between London and York, and then a direct train between York and Inverness. What I found was the last 4 seats in First Class on the only direct train between these 2 cities on the day we want to travel.  There's something about this that makes me somewhat suspicious that I missed other options. Given that these were non-refundable, though, I'm not even going to search for anything else, so I don't have any regrets and just congratulate myself on getting the last available tickets we wanted.

Today I ordered 4 Visitor Oyster cards for London, which will be shipped to the house and we'll need to remember to bring them with us. (ooo, off to add those to my packing list right now) Okay I'm back.

Left to do is book our final train ride from Inverness to Edinburgh, but right now those aren't showing as available to purchase. I'll be watching for them throughout the week. 

Booking Hotels with Points

 Today, my darling husband's (DH) sign-up bonus for his IHG Premier card arrived in his IHG account. It was just barely enough points to book 3 nights in Edinburg for one room (2 out of 4 people going on this trip). I had to buy a few extra points to "top off" to get enough to book the one room.

I booked the Indigo Edinburgh under his account, 1 room for 2 adults. I modified my cash reservation at this same hotel to go from 2 rooms down to 1 room. I still have 2 rooms booked at the Holiday Inn Express on the Royal Mile, for cash. This hotel was more expensive for both points and cash bookings, probably because the location is so much better. 

I think I'm going to hold on to the Royal Mile reservation for now. I may change my mind and instead cover our hotels in York and Inverness with these points and just pay cash for the Edinburgh rooms, if that works out to be cheaper. I'll need to do the math in a little while and see what it works out to. When I do, I'll add the details here!

Here we go again!

 We just got home from another family trip, this time a domestic adventure to California! This post covers the logistics of planning and booking. If you just want to read about what we did, please be patient - those posts are coming!

We took lessons learned from our trip to Europe and:

• Kept the total duration under 2 weeks (seems like our family hits vacation burn-out around 10-11 days straight of activities);
• Left a few days "unplanned" - general ideas of what we could do, but nothing pre-purchased or set in stone;
• Made sure we had separate rooms for sleeping so that everyone got a decent night's sleep;
• Scheduled the trip to Disneyland at the end.

This mostly worked and mostly taught us a few new things about how our family likes to travel. Over the last year, I have also started to learn how to quickly earn points and miles to use for travel, and applied some of that new-found knowledge to this trip to help defray some costs. That helped immensely and really opens up the possibility of getting more bougie trips in the future!

For this trip, we did the following:

1) Flew Southwest airline between Philly and Long Beach

2) Stayed at Hotel 1 in West Hollywood

3) Toured Hollywood, and surrounding areas

4) Did a VIP day at Universal Studios Hollywood

5) Moved hotels to Hotel 2 in Anaheim

6) Went to Disneyland and California Adventure for 4 straight days

We booked this almost in reverse, putting the Disneyland part on the books before anything else. Disneyland in California is 2 "small" parks. Many people claim you can do each park in 1 day, but it would require crowds to be low, paying for the Genie+ (skip the line) service, and skipping things like shows, parades and character meet-and-greet lines. We much prefer to experience ALL of Disney parks' offerings, so decided to do 2 days in each park to fully experience everything and possibly have time to double-up on things we loved. So, with the help of our awesome sister-slash-travel-agent, we booked a "good neighbor" hotel for 5 nights. This is a package deal of hotel room with park tickets, saving us a bit of cash and a lot of hassle. The hotel we picked was the Courtyard by Marriott - Anaheim Resort Convention Center because it advertised "family suites", and is just under a mile from the front gates (totally walkable distance for our family).

I then tried to book flights. I wanted to use as many of our credit card points as possible, so searched all the airlines our points work with. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Southwest ended up being the best deal...but not quite the dates we had booked! There was a much cheaper flight home a couple of days later, so we got our Disney hotel dates shifted to line up, and booked the flight. I made 2 one-way reservations, transferred points over to Southwest, and got the tickets for "free".

Tangent: Originally this trip was going to be a couple days longer, and was going to include a 3-day visit to the King's Canyon and Sequoia National Parks first, to see the famous giant redwoods. We had booked the flight into Fresno, and a hotel room to stay in the park. Over the winter, the parks got record-breaking amounts of snow and rain, that literally washed away parts of the highway to get into the park. In the spring, they announced delayed openings of the park and hotel we'd booked - with predicted opening dates of "mid-June" (right when we were planning to go). We decided to abandon this part of our plans and sadly gave up our hotel reservation, and re-booked the flight from Fresno to Long Beach instead. Thank goodness Southwest does this easily and for free! We ended up getting quite a few thousand points back, and now have those waiting to apply to a future flight someday.

I can't remember what order we did the rest of the bookings, other than I made several reservations for multiple hotels, just to "hold" while we made decisions on what would work out the best. We knew we wanted to go to Universal Studios, and ideally, I'd hoped to get a hotel within walking distance. The goal was to not need to rent a car - although I did have a reservation for one for several months just in case the price ever dropped to something reasonable. In the end, we used Lyft to get around everywhere.  

I was trying to get as many of the hotel rooms as possible using our points, but learned that only Hyatt brand hotels will allow renting family suites with points. Everywhere else only will let you book a "standard room" and then hope for an upgrade. So to work around this, we booked the Tilt Hollywood (an Ascend Collection hotel in the Choice hotel network) using the Chase travel portal which lets you use points to erase cash bookings. It's not the most fabulous use for points, but saved us several thousand dollars in cash.  Because of needing to cancel one hotel (in Fresno) and add additional nights in Hollywood, I ended up making 2 reservations - one with cash and one with points - at the same hotel. This was minorly annoying and there were a few snafus at check-in, but it all worked out in the end. I had intended to try to swap the cash booking for points, but never got around to it and actually regret that now because it probably would've saved a few headaches as well as several dollars...but now this goes into my "lessons learned" for next time.

I used the same trick to get our tickets to Universal Studios. This was another place where we knew it would be busy and probably would need to pay extra to get on all the rides - like buying 2 days of passes or upgrading to their "Unlimited Express" pass. However, I heard that the best-recommended way to guarantee to ride everything was by doing their VIP experience. This gets you a private guide who takes you to the front of the line on every ride in the park, an expanded studio lot tour, breakfast and lunch, and unlimited express pass access for the entire day. I booked on the Chase travel portal with points, saving another several thousand dollars on this trip.

Now we had 3 days on the trip with no specific plans. We had nebulous ideas of seeing a beach, some museums, "Hollywood", The Chinese Theater, Madame Tusseaud's, the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood Sign, and the La Brea Tar Pits, but with only a couple of these really being "must do" items. I used ChatGPT for ideas on how to spend a day touring the Los Angeles/Hollywood area, looked at Google maps, and several websites for various attractions to get ideas of cost and hours they were open. I had a list of all of this info in a Google sheet for future reference, and then decided we'd mostly just "wing it". 

A couple of weeks before we left, "Viator" had a sale of 30% off tickets. I bought tickets to the Natural History Museum of LA County, believing this was the museum attached to the La Brea Tar Pits. I found out later I'd gotten my museums confused, so this ended up being a donation to the museum that we never went to. 😖 I also purchased 2-day passes for the Big Bus Tours. This is the same company we'd used in Paris and had a pretty decent experience. They also had 2 routes - one touring the main Hollywood landmarks and one going to several LA beaches including the Santa Monica Pier.  The pass included admission to The Chinese Theater tour, and a separate Celebrity Homes tour. Given it replaced some of the costs of taking a Lyft to places we wanted to see, this ended up being a pretty good deal.

Well, those were the plans, and how we got to them...read on to see how it all played out!

Start here: Hollywood Exploring and Tar!

Disneyland and California Adventure

I don't normally blog our trips to Disneyworld, but considering we're unlikely to visit Disneyland ever again, I thought I'd give a short recap and long photo dump instead. :)  

Day 1 at Disneyland was rides, a fun adventure where we were pirate-knapped by Red, and ended the day with fireworks.

We're here!

Taking a private ride up Main Street USA

But...where's the castle?!

Oh THERE it is! (sooo teeeny!!)

As we were making our way to find a seat for the parade, we spotted Jack getting off the raft from Tom Sawyer Island. We chased him down for pictures:

And then, the pirate Red came flying out of nowhere and grabbed S for a hug to welcome us on our first visit. She then adopted us and led us on a hunt for treasure all over the island for about half an hour. We missed the parade and have zero regrets!

Days 2 and 3 were at California Adventure. Again we rode rides, watched the World of Color (first night during the Dessert Party which Curt missed due to not feeling well that afternoon), and met as many Avengers as we could. Avenger's Campus was my favorite part of the trip and the pictures don't do the atmosphere any justice at all.

I did get to see a fake Giant Sequoia tree - instead of the real ones I had wanted to see on this trip.

Goodbye, California Adventure!

Our last day was back at Disneyland where we focused on rides we'd missed the first day, character meets, and favorites we wanted to do again.

We DID finally get to see the parade, after standing around a couple of hours to stake out a spot. Then just before it started, a cast member sprinkled some pixie dust on us and gave us seats in the reserved area! Our feet were SO thankful!

Excellent view!!

After the final fireworks show, we went back to the hotel and stayed up late to pack. 

On the walk between hotel and parks

Thus ended the "big" family vacation for 2023. 

Recharging our Batteries and Tikis!

Day Four was an open day, on which we had originally thought we might try to go visit a local Beach or something of the sort. However, everyone was feeling a little bit lazy so we ended up sleeping in and hanging at the hotel until early afternoon. At that point, we went back to Universal's CityWalk for dinner at Johnny Rocket's, a diner-themed restaurant, and then went to catch a movie at the theater there. We saw the new Spider-Man movie "Across the Spider-Verse" (all loved it!) and then headed back to the hotel and packed up all of our belongings in preparation for checking out the next day.

The next day, we relocated hotels to our Disneyland Good Neighbor hotel, the Courtyard by Marriott Anaheim Resort Convention Center. We arrived at the hotel well before check-in time and left our luggage with the front desk. On the advice of one of the attendants there, we made our way to a local Beach called "Seal Beach.

Once again we were not expecting how cold it was for southern California! The wind was intense, and the waves were really high for playing it. We still spent a couple of hours there, while NJ and I played in the sand and waves and the rest of the family people-watched and enjoyed some sunshine.

Around 3:00 p.m. we headed back to our hotel and checked into our room and got settled in. We had dinner reservations that night Italian restaurant in Downtown Disney, so we walked there from our hotel and learned that the Google estimate for how long that walk takes was a little lower than what reality was. After dinner, we explored Downtown Disney and did a little bit of shopping, checking out the Lego store of course!

I want to bring this set home...

We then made our way over to Trader Sam's for our reservation there. Trader Sam's was an absolute blast! The girls loved their first experience in a bar (shhh, I know my eldest is legal drinking age where she goes to school). 

We were able to get some snacks and drinks and acquired souvenir Tiki cups. (As a side story, Friday before this there was a special release of the Tiki mug to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Tiki Room opening in Disneyland. The First edition Jose mug had been available for purchase on the mobile app, but I was not able to find it or purchase it that way because I forgot about it until Saturday. We asked our waitress if there was any left over and she confirmed that they did have a couple more in the back. We bought one for me and one for our best friend to cheer him up because we know he collects tiki mugs as well. SCORE!)

The drink that came with my mug...mug not shown

More Disney ahead!

Being VIPs

Day three was our day at Universal Studios Hollywood.

In doing research on how best to get to ride and see everything, I found out that a VIP package was actually not much more than 2 days of tickets for our family. I added on the Early Access tickets to get into the park an hour early for access to just Super Nintendo World. This was not part of the VIP package, however we still got to check in to the park through the VIP doors. This meant we skipped the lines and the crowds, were given our passes, and then allowed into the park through a special entrance. It was all very bougie and we're already off to a great start to the day.

From there we had to walk to literally the opposite end of the park to get to Super Nintendo World, but we strolled leisurely, followed the crowds, and were there within less than 10 minutes. In this special access hour the crowds are reduced because of the limited tickets so we were able to get to all of the games and all of the attractions within this area. We skipped the ride because we knew we were getting on that later, so we took our time exploring everything else. This little land is extremely immersive, and a lot of fun!

Once 8:00 hit, the main gates were open and the crowd started to increase and so we made our way back to the VIP lounge. Free refreshments for waiting for us before our tour started. We wandered through the Wizarding World which was still delightfully empty explored some of the scenery and the kids were able to play with the wands that they had from our trip to Universal Studios in Orlando a couple of Summers ago. We also stopped for a very unique Father's Day picture:

When we got back to the lounge, we enjoyed a delightful spread of food and drinks in a comfy atmosphere while we waited for our tour guide to arrive. Bianka-with-a-K picked us up along with two other families forming a group of 10. We got free sunscreen, water and ponchos that would come in handy later!

From there she escorted us to every ride in the park, skipping the line on each What I especially loved was that she gave an explanation of the intensity (or not) of the ride or experience so that we knew what to expect and could decide to ride or not. Those that chose to skip something were given a spot to meet back up with the group. We got through pretty much every ride in the park, including the Bowser's Challenge ride in Super Nintendo World all before lunch!

Lunch was VIP access to a special restaurant that you can't even get into as a regular park attendee. It was an all-you-can-eat-style buffet with selections that everyone enjoyed. The desserts were a little disappointing but otherwise, we ate our fill and had a great time. We were visited by Dracula and Doc from Back to the Future during our meal.

After lunch, we were taken on the Back Lot tour which also was an extra special treat as VIPs. The regular tour takes you around all of the Backlot filming Studio areas on a tram, but you are not allowed to stop. On the VIP tour we are able to stop the trams and get off and walk around the sets. We got a tour of inside a filming Studio building, as well as some additional VIP special treatment.

Back to the Future set

Captain America set

Yes, the actual Bates Motel

Once the tour ended, Bianka took us to one other ride and then left us for the day. Our VIP passes then acted as unlimited Express passes for the rest of the day, and we were able to get on several other rides repeating our experiences from earlier in the day. Our first stop was to go back to Super Nintendo World and ride Bowser's Challenge again. We went back to the Wizarding World for dinner at The Three Broomsticks inside Hogwarts Castle. The decor was lovely but the food was horrible.

We hung around the park a little bit longer to explore and get a bite to eat. Loved the view of Hollywood from the middle of the escalators:

We did not stay past sunset, as people were starting to feel a little bit of heat stroke or something else to make us not want to hang out much longer. We really enjoyed this park and definitely felt the VIP access was totally worth it!

Beaches and Tikis