Planning post: everything

Originally I was going to go to Portland for a little reunion with some friends, including Sarah, and Kathe. This last week plans changed so that instead, I'm going to have three of my favorite people ever come to visit me in Chicago. While I would have loved to go to Portland, which is a city I adore oh so much, but the ticket was probably going to be above $400 and I can focus a little more on other trips. It's going to involve a little bit of a challenge as three people from three different states across the country try to coordinate their flights to come to a fourth state, but we'll get there.

Then one of the things I'd done to try and get some free money was that when I signed up for cable (with Comcast), one of the incentives for the particular package I chose was that I got $300 in gift cards. I was going to pay off my credit card with that, only to find out then that I can only do that with a bank account, so instead I decided I'd use the gift cards on things I would have just used my credit card for. Which means travel. So I went ahead and got my ticket for Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at Disney World. It's more than I wanted to pay, but it's sort of a bucket list thing and the price goes up the closer you get to Halloween. That's just how it is.

And literally once I got that paid for, I headed over to my mom's, where Nick and I went to plan for our road trip to Philadelphia in a couple weeks. We worked out our timeline, and then bought tickets for Fallingwater. Nick works for an architecture firm, and so it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that we end up going to Frank Lloyd Wright houses a lot. (I've been to Hollyhock House in LA, past Unity Temple in Chicago, SC Johnson and Wingspread in Racine, outside a house in New Hampshire that someone lives in I think but we literally had nothing else to do in New Hampshire so we just took pictures outside, and this will be my sixth Wright building.) We'd wanted to do the in-depth tour, but it was already sold out and we couldn't get anything till June, so we're doing the guided tour for two hours, and that gives us access to the grounds where we can actually take pictures. After that we'll drive over to Philadelphia, which Nick and I have been to but Mom never has. And last weekend she learned that the odds of me going "I'm bored, let's have a Carly Rae Jepsen dance party" are high so she's at least prepared for that eventuality in traveling with us. So we have some idea of things to do in Philly, and some things we didn't get to do last time and get another shot at, and the rest will probably be us deciding what to do last minute.

Been a surprisingly busy day, yo.