San Diego 2023

If any of you are familiar with Southwest Airlines, you may know about their Companion Pass. Essentially, once you earn it, you designate one person as your companion, and they can fly for free on every flight you take. It is an amazing deal and I've been trying to earn it for 25+ years!

I finally succeeded last July and when I received the notification, I learned that my Companion Pass would be good until December 31, 2023 - so for 17 months, C and I would be able to fly with only having to purchase one ticket. Incredible!

We started making plans and looked at all of the destinations that offered nonstop flights from one of the three area airports. We booked a monthly trip starting in September and were so excited about being able to travel so frequently! Unfortunately, life happened. My mom got really sick in September, had her surgery and lengthy hospital stay in October, and we dealt with the aftermath of that in November and December. We ended up canceling trips to Denver, Chicago, Austin, and New Orleans. Extremely disappointing, but my mom needed us.

We were finally able to use the Companion Pass for the first time last month, when we flew to Orlando for the weekend. You might recall that the trip was a Christmas gift from B1 and S1, so it was nice to be able to save them some money because C was able to fly for free with me! Then a few weeks ago, we used it again when we went to San Diego for the weekend!

We had a great time in San Diego, with absolutely no particular plans other than to try and relax. C has a friend who lives there, so we met him and his wife for lunch and we hadn't seen them in far too long, so that was the highlight of our time there! San Diego is a beautiful place and I could do nothing more than sit and stare at the Pacific Ocean and I would be extremely happy!

In case you're wondering how I earned the Companion Pass, Southwest had a promotion with its credit card and C and I are all about taking advantage of as many travel perks as possible. It had to do with spending x amount within the first three months and also x amount over the course of 12 months to earn the Companion Pass. All we did was shift all of our regular spending to that credit card, of course paying it off in full every month, and voila!

We are going to try to use it as often as we can before it expires at the end of 2023 - as always, jobs get in the way of being able to travel whenever we want, but we're aiming to get at least ten free flights from it, and I hope we can meet that goal!

we had an empty between us on the flight there

AND on the flight home!

Happy Tails to you!