$35 Balance and Other Hawaii Pre-trip Excitement

I wrote a post last fall about how we are taking our family of 5 to Hawaii for (almost) free using airline miles and points that we accumulated by reading and following advice from several travel blogs. At the time I wrote that post, it was looking like we would just have to pay $50 total in taxes for our airline tickets and a few hundred dollars total for 8 nights of hotel.

I'm excited to report that our current hotel balance is only $35.56! And it's looking like we are on track to pay off 100% of our hotel expenses through travel credit card rewards before our departure in a few weeks. Woohoo!

We can thank Discover card and Ebates for this extra "free" money. Over the holidays, Discover card sent me a letter offering an extra $120 in cash back bonus if I spent a total of $1000 on my card over a period of 4 months. It was easy for us to switch our normal monthly spending over to this card until we had accumulated enough for the extra cash back. I also used the Ebates portal for some online purchases of Christmas gifts, which gave us more "free" cash for our Hawaii hotel fund.

In other pre-trip news....we have spent the past few months learning about Hawaiian history and culture with our kids. We do this prior to every vacation, and there was a lot of accessible information for Hawaii at the library and online.

We checked out some kid-friendly books from the library:

And we watched some videos on Amazon Prime and YouTube about Hawaii and Oahu specifically.

But can you guess what my kids' favorite pre-trip activity has been??? Watching 3 episodes of The Brady Bunch where the family goes to Hawaii.

The Brady Bunch in Hawaii

My boys thought this show was HILARIOUS! And it actually shows a lot of the sights on Oahu. (See this post for The Brady Bunch Guide to Hawaii). They even asked to see other episodes of the show that were not Hawaii-related. I might have to download some on an iPod for airplane viewing.

So what's left to do before our trip? Buy new water shoes and sunscreen, figure out what we're going to pack and find things to occupy our kids for 9 hours on the airplane.

I can't believe this trip is really happening!