The Log Dog Blog: Spring Break 2021: Day 8

On Saturday morning, we landed in Phoenix for a pretty uneventful five-hour layover. During that layover, our flight time changed a few times and our seats changed multiple times as well. With absolute no communication or reasoning. When we went to the customer service desk, they couldn't answer any of our questions or explain what was happening. We ended up being seated ten rows apart and I was not happy about it. This leads me into my thoughts about American Airlines.

Way back when I first moved to the U.S., I was fresh out of university, with no credit history here and a job that paid $7.02 per hour. In the interest of building a credit history in a new country, I applied for a credit card and was approved. It was affiliated with American Airlines and C and I used it for everything (of course always paying it in full every month) for about 20 years. Over that time, we earned over 860,000 AA miles and we've taken a lot of flights with those miles! However, over the years, we have grown less and less enchanted with American Airlines. The flight routes, the customer service, the planes themselves...just awful. We decided to stop using that credit card a few years ago and use up the miles so we could be done with American Airlines. Having traveled on so many different airlines over the years, it's clear that AA simply cannot compete as far as we're concerned.

As I've written countless times, C is an incredible travel planner. Flights. hotels, tours, car rentals, activities...you name it, and he will find the best way to do it. Long ago, he figured out that the most efficient way to utilize the miles, which were flights to California, so that was how we used the majority of them (although we did also fly to Hawaii, but those are generally about three times as costly in terms of miles). We were getting down to the final chunk of miles toward the end of 2019, and we booked three trips to California for 2020 to use them up, but we all know what happened in 2020. We ended up canceling those three trips and having the miles refunded to us, so then we had to figure out what to do with them. We decided to use them to go to Hawaii for spring break, which used up almost all them (I wasn't kidding when I said Hawaii was about three times as costly as California). The small chunk of miles that were left over got donated this morning, so our balance is finally 0 miles! Yay!

Goodbye, American Airlines!

The good thing about the flight home from Phoenix is that despite sitting so far from C on the plane, the lady in the seat next to me had a little dog as her carry-on! So she, the man in the aisle seat, and I chatted about dogs before the plane took off and at the end of the flight while we were waiting to deplane, she let him poke his head out of the bag. Adorable!

After landing at DCA (don't get me started on what a nightmare that airport is!), we drove to my mom's and picked up Ginny. My mom is so amazing and I don't know what we'd do without her. She takes such incredible care of Ginny whenever we go away and this time was no exception. As Ginny gets older, taking care of her does require more and more effort, especially with her medication, but my mom never bats an eye when we ask her to watch Ginny for us. She is always willing and we are always so, so grateful to her!

That wraps up our spring break trip! What a great week!