If you’re not super up on the rest of my family, my little brother, Matt, moved to San Francisco, CA, in the summer of 2012.
Since he’s just one human and the rest of my family is all out here on the East Coast, he usually comes here when we all want to visit. However, since I’ve never been to Cali, I’ve been meaning to get out on my own and visit him. Life has been crazy for both of us, so an opportune time hadn’t quite come up yet, when a few months ago, I called to change my hotel reservation for Nekocon, the anime convention I go to every year in November in VA Beach.
Soooo when I called to change my reservation, there wasn’t any kind of issue or anything, in fact it all went off without a hitch. After I changed my room for Nekocon, the Hilton representative I was talking to asked if I wanted to listen to a promotional offer for bonus Hilton points (I’m a rewards member). I wasn’t really rushing off to do anything pressing, so I agreed… because free points(!). I honestly wasn’t planning to get sucked into the offer, but hey why not?
So as the rep was talking to me, I had to answer a few questions about what my ideal destinations were off of a list, and she gave me a custom offer based on my answers. I ended up hearing a pitch for Las Vegas, which is somewhere that I’d never been, but figured I’d consider going to at some point in the future. Again, why not? As the representative was finishing her pitch, she of course asked if I would be interested in the offer, which was 3 days, 2 nights in Las Vegas for $150 and 10,000 bonus points. As I mentioned, I wasn’t really planning to spend any money so I gave her a “thanks but I really don’t think I can afford it right now” kind of answer. She quickly replied that she would talk to her manager to “see what she could do” and before I had a chance to tell her not to worry about it, I was on hold. Whoops. Oh well… To shorten up this part of the story, I was escalated two more times, and ended up with the offer of the 3 days, 2 nights for $100, with a $200 Hilton gift certificate, and 15,000 honors points. Honestly at this point, I figured even if I went to Vegas by myself, fuckit, I wanted to go anyway. So I bit the bullet and gave the girl my credit card info. GOING. TO. VEGAS. BABY.
After I got off the phone, I called my Little, Tali, since we’d talked about going to Vegas together before. Unfortunately lil didn’t have the money for a shotgun trip, but that’s ok because I honestly felt super guilty about calling her before I called my actual blood sibling. >.< Soooo as soon as I properly consoled Tali for lack of funding, I called Bonus. The conversation went a little something like this…
Me: Mowmow!? (We have our own sibling language. Deal.)
Bonus: MOWMOW!
Me: Ohai! So how do you feel about going to Vegas?
Bonus: Good. Why?
Me: Well I sort of bought a hotel deal…. That I have to use within 6 months…
Bonus: WHEN ARE WE GOING?!
My brother is the bom diggity. Seriously. So, after that we realized that it made all of the sense for me to actually make a gigantic trip out of it and visit him out in SF before Vegas, and then head out together. WHY NOT RIGHT?!
After picking and booking the Vegas dates, we realized that my trip, when we backed it out, ran right into Thanksgiving. SCORE. I ended up extending my planned trip by 4 days and included Thanksgiving out on the west coast.
This plan was solidified in August, and the fly-out date was November 27th, for arrival the day before Thanksgiving in SF, December 5-7 in Vegas, and returning on a red-eye to the East Coast on December 9th (and heading straight to work, mind you).
And so, our story begins…
Get. Excited.
Cause we’re excited.
