Preparation

After we took the big 'Family Graduation Trip' to Western Canada in 2016, Pauline now claimed her own big trip. She successfully graduated from high school on June 17, 2022. So I started planning in November 2021 for a trip to Hawaii, with a stay in San Francisco afterwards. Following the motto 'I've never been to New York, I've never been to Hawaii, I never went through San Francisco in .....', except we would skip New York for now (we thought). The whole family (Pauline, Marie, Anne) agreed and started browsing through various YouTube channels. I planned to spend 7 days on 2 islands in Hawaii and 4 days in San Francisco.

After doing some research on travel agencies or my own booking platforms, I quickly became disillusioned. I knew that Hawaii is very expensive, but when I added up everything, including hotel or Airbnb offers, excursions, car rentals, flights, and meals, it came to about €20k for 4 people. Since I have to pay for everything myself :-(, I was not willing to spend that much. So unfortunately, I had to cancel this trip. The family understood.

So we came up with the idea of reversing the above-mentioned song, 'I've never been to New York.....'

The daughters were immediately excited, while Anne and I were not as enthusiastic because I couldn't see the relaxation factor. I couldn't imagine staying there for more than a week. Then the idea came up to combine New York with the East Coast of the USA, and in the end, we decided on 8 days in New York and 8 days in Connecticut. Pauline immediately agreed to plan the 8 days in New York, and I started making bookings for flights, car rentals, and accommodations. Since we were still in the time of Corona, I didn't want to enter the USA via a third country, so I chose Lufthansa, which I booked through Canusa, a travel agency. It was a bit more expensive than an individual booking, but it included a Corona insurance package. I also booked the car rental for the 8 days in Connecticut through Canusa. I didn't find the hotel recommendations from Canusa very interesting, as they were all centrally located in Manhattan, but we would all have to stay in one room without a kitchen/breakfast, and they were all quite expensive. So I decided to individually book an Airbnb apartment in the Upper East Side, near Central Park, with 2 bedrooms and a kitchen, for €2.4k. Quite expensive, but okay for Manhattan. For Connecticut, we found a lovely little house in Guilford by the Atlantic, about 3 minutes from the beach. Before Christmas, I had all the bookings sorted out.'

In April, I found it strange that there were no new reviews for my Airbnb booking in Manhattan since January, but it was fully booked for the whole year. So I asked the host if the booking was still okay. She replied on the same day, saying that the homeowners' association had prohibited renting to vacationers and she had to cancel the booking. That was annoying because it had a very good location and there were no comparable apartments available in Manhattan. So after some consideration, I had to switch to Brooklyn, where we could get a nice apartment (with a rooftop terrace) with only one bedroom but with a large living room and a futon bed in it. Plus, the apartment was €500 cheaper :-)

Fortunately, there were no more surprises and I hoped that the pandemic would be over by summer. Unfortunately, it turned out differently....