8 Places to See Before You Have Kids

Paris, France - Paris is the most visited city in the world with 45 million visitors each year. Paris is on my bucket list no doubt! But I think you could easily take a long weekend here and have family watch your kids. That is my tentative plan on visiting Paris, a nice romantic vacation away from the kids!

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New Zealand - New Zealand seems to offer so much, it has beautiful rugged mountains along with crystal waters. It is also on the bucket list but I think this one will be on there for a while, although it would be nice money doesn't grow on trees! Plus that flight is so long I think I would want to be over on that side of the world for a month before flying back.

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Disney World - Did it when I was a kid and looking at it as an adult it's just another theme park so I think I'll stick with the memories I have from when I was in 5^th grade! If you're into Disney stuff then by all means go! You don’t have go when school is out so you can go in the off season and save money!

Route 66 Road Trip - Eh, nothing I see on it seems super awesome…plus I was able to watch Karl Pilkington do Route 66 on Season 2 of Idiot Abroad!

Napa Valley, CA - I think Napa would be another nice romantic weekend away from the kids!

Macao - Located near Hong Kong ...its another place in a far off land that costs a pretty penny to get to…

Angkor Wat - Now this is on my MUST SEE list!!!!! OMG I want to go there so BAD!!!! I am trying to talk the hubby into a trip to Thailand and Cambodia before we have kids. (we will be relying on mileage points for the flight!)

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Transatlantic Cruise - Although this sounds like it might be fun, I think I would get bored spending SO MANY days at sea...I think its something like 18 days from Florida to Italy.

See original Yahoo! article here.

Where are some place that you think are worth visiting without kids? Any places you wish you had visited before you had kids?

Weekend Work

This past weekend was a busy one! We are in the process of looking for a new house...and that means getting our current home ready to sell. Over Christmas my brother came and helped us redo our baseboards. He did an AWESOME job! Thanks little bro! So ever since then I have had the wonderful task of painting it..ugh! This weekend my mom and dad came over and helped us finish the baseboards and take our "donate" pile off our hands.

And on the travel side of things tripadvisor started giving out some new badges, here is where I stand:
Hotel Specialist
Restaurant Expert
Attraction Connoisseur

Thanks tripadvisor!

Hope you all had a great weekend! And a good start to the week!

Under Bite: The Tail of Two Bulldogs

Here are some pics of my babies this week. Max is a friend of mine's bulldog that we babysit sometimes!

Lovely Lola

 

Crazy Coco

Unimpressed Max

Hillary Clinton's Travels

This lady has been everywhere! And I think its awesome!!! Here is the list below. You can pictures on buzzfeed.com. I could only put dots on the bigger countries so some of the islands don't have dots over them.

Afghanistan	Dominican Republic	Latvia	Singapore
Albania	East Timor	Lebanon	South Africa
Algeria	Egypt	Liberia	South Korea
Angola	El Salvador	Libya	South Sudan
Argentina	Estonia	Lithuania	Spain
Armenia	Ethiopia	Loas	Sweden
Australia	Finland	Malawi	Switzerland
Azerbaijan	France	Malaysia	Tajikistan
Bahrain	Georgia	Malta	Tanzania
Bangladesh	Germany	Mexico	Thailand
Barbados	Ghana	Mongolia	Togo
Belguim	Great Britain	Morocco	Trinidad and Tobago
Benin	Greece	Netherlands	Tunisia
Bosnia	Greenland	New Zealand	Turkey
Brazil	Guatemala	Nigeria	Uganda
Brunei	Haiti	Norway	Ukraine
Bulgaria	Honduras	Oman	United Arab Emirates
Burma	Hong Kong	Pakistan	Uzbekistan
Cambodia	Hungary	Palestine	Vietnam
Canada	India	Papua New Guinea	Yemen
Cape Verde	Iraq	Paraguay	Zambia
Chile	Ireland	Peru
China	Israel	Philippines
Colombia	Ivory Coast	Poland
Congo	Jamaica	Portugal
Cook Islands	Japan	Qatar
Costa Rica	Jordan	Russia
Croatia	Kenya	Saudia Arabia
Czech Republic	Kosovo	Senegal
Denmark	Kyrgyzstan	Serbia

A Match Made in the Skies

Since 2008 major airlines have been nabbing up their smaller counterparts; Delta took Northwest, United absorbed Continental and Southwest purchased AirTran. And now is American Airlines' turn, as of February 14, 2013 they merged with US Airways. These four new major airlines now control about 3/4^th of the United States airline traffic! What I think might be something positive to come of this merger is US Airlines' CEO will run the company…any maybe fix their customer service department too, see my complaints here.

American will now have over 900 planes, 3,200 daily flights and an estimate of 95,000 employees. But consumers should beware, with only four major airlines they could start to raise fares. For more on the merger click here.

And in the spirit of Valentines day I give you the American/US Airways tail heart!

Pinspiration

So while preparing for our trip to Kauai last November I wanted to get a new dress for the occasion. I went to my favorite dress local, Dao Chloe Dao (winner of Project Runway Season 2). I picked up my dress but I couldn't find the right pair of shoes. I didn't want to bring heels and I didn't want to pay $80 for some embellished pair of sandals. So I had seen on Pinterest that some people were spray painting their shoes to add some flair (see her original post here). I had the perfect pair that could use a little something. I went out a bought some gold spray paint and it went a little something like this...

And my outfit was complete! I didn't get a pic of my dress with the shoes but you can see that they do match!

Happy Pinning! 

When Vacations Attack!

Today marks 2 years blogging and sharing mine and others stories. Hope you have enjoyed it all so far!

I found this article while I was checking the weather one morning at weather.com. This couple was on a nature reserve in South Africa and their guide told them it was okay to get this close to the rhinos… Well…right after this picture was taken the rhino attacked the woman. As far as I know she only suffered from a collapsed lung. I think we should all us our best judgment and not stand that close to any animal that large and with a big horn on its nose!

Travel RoundUp

1 - You wanna know how much it cost for the President to take his vacations to Hawaii??? In 2012 it was $6.4 million-US citizens-tax paying dollars. See how much it costs to keep the president safe and employ his entourage here.

2 - How about this to wake you up in the morning! An empty commuter train was stolen in Sweden and ended up crashing into an apartment building!

Hope you don’t plan on visiting China any time soon, they have some hard core smog going on over there right now! Check out the pictures here. My husband has an acquaintance that is over there for work right now and he says that his skin feels like sandpaper…ugh!

3 - A US Navy Ship is stuck on a coral reef in the Philippines, the reef is a world heritage site and it is being said that over 10 yards of the reef has been ruined! Not cool, not cool! Their only way to remove the ship from the reef is to chop up the ship.

4 - Canada prints the wrong kind of maple leaf on their new paper bills. They used the silhouette of a Norwegian Maple instead of the Canadian classic, Sugar Maple. Photo from original article here.

5 - Do you ever dream about scuba diving into one of those cool blue holes in the Caribbean  Well now you can own one! Check it out here!

6 - How about this story of airport security finding 18 heads in a bag?!?! What the ... right? Totally legitimate though!

Airline Bias

Do you have a preferred airline? We do, we like United (well I liked Continental but we all know what happened there) and they have a hub in Houston so it is really convenient for us. However when planning our first trip to Hawaii in 2011 our vacation package was substantially less if we went with American Airlines. So we flew American. Here are my thoughts on American… the seats were noticeably more uncomfortable and on the flight back the flight attendant was one of the worst ever! There was a family with a baby and toddler and the toddler was really upset and crying. The dad asked the flight attendant if he could have a pillow and blanket for the kid and she rudely said, "for $7!" Since when does a pillow and blanket cast money on a flight? And she said a few more rude comments before he asked for her name to which she responded, "We're not allowed to give our names, you can call me flight staff #2 on flight …" um, not allowed to give your names PLEASE! The 1^st class attended had a name tag on…what a bitch! I felt so bad for them.

I have read so many bad things about American since then. Including this mess up with Kristin Chenoweth when a attendant yelled at her for traveling with her pet, even though she had all the paperwork and paid for the pet to fly. She the article here.

You can also read here why American Airlines was ranked number 7 on the Top 10 Hated Companies in America.

Whats your preferred airline?

Extreme Travelers: 1 Million Miles in 365 Days

Tom Stuker has flown so many miles in his life that United Airlines named one of their 747s after him! They did that after he flew 10 million miles with them of course. Tom lives in New Jersey and is so lucky to get to travel for work (he is an automotive sales consultant). You'll be able to get to know Tom on a more personal level when his new show, Car Lot Rescue, premiers on Spike TV in February 2013.

How did he come up with this idea? He talks about it here.

Courtesy United Continental Hold

How many miles do you have? I have 29,956 Lifetime miles with United...I have a long way to go before I reach 1 Million. But I also only became a frequent flyer with them in 2008.