What a great cruise we had with our family – it will remain as one of our fondest memories forever. However, Brad’s and my old bodies can only take so much fun and we are glad to be back home in our own bed.
I enjoyed the 10-day vacation from my computer, phones, and snail mail – but now I am coping with an overflowing Inbox with hundreds of e-mails to “process,” umpteen phone messages to return, and stacks of mail to go through. Since we were gone over the ending of one month and the beginning of a new one, the casino mail stack was especially high. I had to go through it all the minute we got home yesterday afternoon – and found that Brad had a full evening of pickups – three casinos where we had bounce-back free play that would expire at midnight. The Palms is close to us, but then he had quite a road trip, out to Red Rock and then to Silverton. Thank goodness he likes to drive all over town to do pickups. If I had to do it, I just wouldn’t! But we are a good pair. While he is running all over town, I can sit at my computer and do research, plan, and organize. That way when we both go out to play and pick up cashback, we can use our time efficiently.
We were surprised with a nice bonus at the end of our trip. We finally scored a airline bump on Southwest, something we had been trying to do for years. (They are just too good at filling every seat but not overbooking!) When we got to the airport in Seattle on Sunday afternoon, as usual I was first at the gate to check to see if our flight was overbooked. It was and we were the first 2 names on the volunteer list. We wouldn’t be able to get home until the next day, Monday, but that was okay with us.
Soon it became apparent that we definitely would be bumped since they were calling over the loud speaker for more volunteers. We had been told we would each get $300 in flight vouchers plus our hotel room for the night, but when they started doing the paperwork they said they also were giving us the amount of the fare we paid for this leg of our trip. So our voucher was a total of $989!
We took the free shuttle to the Comfort Inn and had a relaxing rest of the afternoon and evening. They had offered us a 8:30 a.m. flight the next morning, but since we aren’t morning people, we asked for a later flight and they gave us one for 12:30 p.m. That allowed us to sleep in and enjoy a leisurely free breakfast in the cheery hotel dining atrium.
We almost got bumped from the Monday flight but at the last minute they found they didn’t need any volunteers. In a way we were glad – by now we were very ready to get home.
I need to go back to catching up with paperwork, so I’ll sign off now. But I will give more details about our cruise in a couple of days – the exciting ziplining, seeing a bear very close up, driving the Klondike Highway, and gambling in the ship casino. And hopefully I will learn how to post some pictures on this blog.
There are times when I think that a realistic calculation of whether or not a “frugal” move is worthwhile might evoke the answer, “not really”. The Southwest move is one I’ve done before–in my case, I received $450 in vouchers for delaying my return by 7 hours–obviously worthwhile, in terms of $/hr. But then, I never used the voucher, and wound up giving it away before it expired–so how much was it REALLY worth?
Similarly, a free play run (when there’s no other reason for going across town) might not be worth doing. The route you described for Brad would be about 70 miles round-trip and would consume three hours on the best of days (especially since he would have to park, go inside, play off the free play, cash out, etc.). A midsize sedan costs at least fifty cents/mile to operate, and I don’t know what you or he consider his time to be worth, but let’s consider that to be a very modest $20/hr—that means that you are spending the equivalent of $95 to pick up the “free” play. That diminishes the value of the bouncebacks in general, and since you are undoubtedly playing mildly -EV machines (since +EV machine players pretty much get nothing these days), the cost of collecting that free play/bounceback/etc. has to be factored in to an overall calculation of whether a play is worthwhile or not. I used to have a threshold for driving 5+ miles to pick up free play, and I felt better about that threshold when I figured out that picking up small amounts of free play was actually COSTING me money. Of course, if you can put that free play “on the back burner”, that makes the detour easier to swallow, as you can save it for when you’re in the neighborhood–but of course, the casinos put restrictive time frames on the free play redemption for the exact purpose of thwarting that strategy.
Welcome back! I found it a little funny that you ziplined in Alaska. My husband and I live in Alaska and he’s going to zipline in Boulder City in October!