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!