Hotel Bookings Finished!

Yay! I learned my lesson after dilly-dallying on hotel bookings last year for Nicaragua and Portugal.

Mexico City: Hotel Zocalo Central in the Centro Histórico
Rio de Janeiro: Miramar Hotel by Windsor in Copacabana
Santiago: Hotel Sommelier Boutique located right in the center of Santiago by the Plaza de Armas

I mostly chose the hotels based on the following criteria:

-Safety
-Reviews that highlighted the positives from solo women travelers
-Proximity to tour group meet up areas or neighborhoods where tours pick up
-Metro access
-Pictures that make it seem like I will get a nice, luxurious sleep after a packed daily itinerary!

Now that I’ve got that taken care of...my visa for Brazil! I’ve decided to give up on changing back to my maiden name over 2018. First, I need my passport to be active for Mexico City, as my trip is coming up SOON. Second, I am sick and tired of taking my shoes off in the airport for my weekly Domestic Delta Destinations and will be moving ahead with my pre-check and Clear.Me ASAP. Finally, I had the chance to go back to my maiden name AND my easier-to-spell  nickname professionally, which I took! When all’s said and done, what really in a name? I’m tired and have better things to do than stand in line at an office.  Plus my married name is pretty and it’s only on my ID cards at this point. I’m going to keep this as an end of year goal but go ahead on the travel  security steps needed to make my life easier (TSA pre-check and Clear.Me) on a weekly basis. 

My 2018 Delta Destinations!

Normally I plan all my travel by Q1, but 2018 brought other amazing changes to my life and I put my travel hobby on the back burner till everything settled down. 

So here are my 2018 Delta Destinations! I bought the tickets and filed for vacation.

Mexico City (4 days) 

Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) and Chile (Santiago) (7 days) 

I'm super excited. Mexico City is up first and will take up most of my travel planning attention since I'll be heading out within 6 weeks. I've been circling around going to Mexico City for a while, so I think I have all four days set up from an excursion perspective, but there's still a lot to be done in terms of getting my hotels set up and picking out the restaurants etc.. 

Why go back to blogging?

I started my first blog in 2004, during my last year of law school. It petered out pretty quickly, but I managed to keep blogging on and off for the next six years before I quit practicing law and went back to business school as part of a major life/career overhaul.

My old online journal was your typical old-school blog. I started out on Blogspot, migrated to Typepad and ended my run on Wordpress. It wasn't photography focused or even particularly well-designed and was mostly about interactive journal-keeping and trying out my writing skills. For me, blogging held a comparable level of excitement to when my family got AOL in the 1990s and I (and pretty much every teenager) discovered the power of the online chatroom. No social media platform, most of which I enabled access to towards the end of the aughts, held as much intrigue as blogging and "getting on the internet" did in the 90s and 2000s.

So here I am, where it all began, on Blogspot! I'm much older than I was in 2004 and I have different plans for this blog, as noted below. It promises to be a) mostly slanted towards informative travel details and b) updated in spurts as I plan or go on vacations.

The Premise of this Blog

I finally started traveling consistently in 2015! Since then, I've been to France, Switzerland, Italy, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Nicaragua and Portugal. Not bad for 3 years!

After some thought, I decided to put all my travel thoughts, ideas, wants and planning in an online space where I could (organically) help people interested in the same travel destinations and also interact with the friends who are actually interested.

Explaining the Blog Name

I also travel a lot domestically (mostly for work). Anyone who has known me for any significant length of time will find this extremely amusing, because I am not a huge fan of flying. However, my post-law career necessitates being mobile and working closely with my clients, most of whom are not located within driving distance of my home. I started a gradual shift to becoming a low-level road warrior in 2015.

So, as part of that shift, I've been Delta for life since December 2014 and have (finally) started to carefully manage my points strategy. Even though I'm trying to make up for lost time and see more of the world, I do take PTO to take domestic vacations. There's a 99% chance that I fly Delta domestically, and I've also started to book on Delta for my international vacations as well, hence the blog name. Yes, I legitimately love them. Especially Mary, the most amazing gate agent ever in Columbus, OH who got me on on the flight out to LGA that one time, and the very sweet customer service agents who pick up my calls when I need to re-route around bad weather to get to meetings on time.

Not looking for sponsorship of anything and I buy all my own tickets, tours, hotel rooms and sundries! Basically, this is just a place for me to write and share. Plus, I enjoy my real life job too much.