February 2022 – Where to go?

The boys had a winter break in February. In years before COVID we’ve been to places like Paris, Rome, Dubai, and Spain, we kept it domestic last year with our trip to Miami. Since we moved last summer, we haven’t had as much time to plan trips and of course COVID has come into play as well.

Staying Local

Since traveling to places during school vacations can get expensive, we decided to look for other places we could go to keep the kids occupied during the break. Since my wife has several free nights certificates with Marriott, we were looking for places we might be able to drive to that we could utilize them.

We came up with the idea of going back to Massachusetts near where we lived for a few days during their break. We know of hotels that have indoor pools and we thought we could visit our old gym for periods of the day to keep them occupied. Tomatico could hang out on the squash courts and basketball courts while his brother could hang out at the gym’s pool while my wife and I worked. It wasn’t a great plan, but we’d get a jumpstart qualifying for 2022 Marriott status and have fun revisiting the area the kids grew up in, possibly meeting up with some old friends.

Exploring

We had been pretty set on that idea until about 3 weeks before vacation was to begin. I was doing some research on what direct flights were offered from the airport nearest to us. We live about 25 miles from NYC so there are the obvious choices of JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, but also Westchester Airport which is just a few miles from our house. It’s a smaller airport with limited flights, but wondered, for future reference, what options there are for nonstop flights.

In my trusty Google Flights site, I explored the options from HPN (the airport code for Westchester County Airport). For fun, I entered the first Saturday of the boy’s vacation week and was surprised to find $70 nonstop flights to Miami. In my previous searches, everything to Florida seemed to be incredibly expensive during school vacation week so this was an intriguing find. I searched for flights back to see if it was a case where it was cheap to fly out but impossible to returnfound several dates with the same low return fare.

I consulted with my wife on this new good news and she was all in for a warmer destination than Waltham, MA in February. Time to start making some plans!!!