Weekend Blitz

Plateau Mont-Royal: 330 Rue Marie-Anne E , Montréal, QC French $$$ — Around 35-50 CAD/person

Hungry for some dinner and wanting to try something French (I mean we are in French Canada, after all), we referred to Urbanspoon and settled on Restaurant Le P’Tit Plateau. When calling to make reservations, they reminded me that they are a BYOB restaurant, meaning they don’t sell any alcohol but have a special license to allow for patrons to bring in their own wine. It’s a new concept to me and I immediately loved it—I mean why pay the 200 to 250% markup on a bottle of wine when they encourage you to bring in your own straight from the wine store? One thing to note, [...]

On our weekend ski trip to Colorado, we were eager to book a Starwood Resort using Cash + Points to keep the costs down. Mainly based on availability, we settled on the Wildwood Snowmass for 4,000 Points + $60/ night. The alternative was paying $220+ a night, so the Starwood Points yielded about a 4¢ return — perfect use for Starwood Points.

The resort hotel just reopened under the Starwood program in November 2012 after an extensive renovation. Before that, Trip Advisor reviews all cited the need for updating, accusing hotel management of letting the resort slip a bit.

We were excited to try it out during its inaugural season.

We got in [...]

We took advantage of an awesome secret Delta perk when we took a free “shuttle” between LaGuardia and JFK airports. The shuttle ended up being a voucher with a $73 face value providing Town Car service to JFK!

Update 1/5/14: This still works! We used this last week on our way back from The Maldives. We were provided a free taxi ride from Newark-EWR to LaGuardia-LGA.

Delta has 2 hubs in the NYC area: LaGuardia and JFK. It is possible, based on flight schedules, that you’ll have to fly into one and out of the other. In most cases, the transfer is up to you and it’s not an easy one. If, however, you fly into Newark (EWR) or LaGuardia (LGA) and [...]

Translated, Guyana means “The Land of Many Waters” and, of their total area, more than 8% of it is made up of water.

Guyana is about the size of Minnesota, Utah, Idaho or Kansas (I know, all pretty boring-ly shaped states).

Put differently, and more appropriately for my narrow view, it’s the size of North Carolina + South Carolina combined. Or about 1/3 of France:

Its population is only about 750k people (similar to that of North Dakota or Alaska). As such, it has one of the lowest population/mi2 figures in the world (they’re 230th of 242 countries).

Guyana’s economy is driven by rice & sugar [...]

As a frequent reader of flyertalk.com, a mileage run deal caught my eye back in July (thread here) for a (relatively) cheap flight from JFK to Georgetown, Guyana. Flights were over 50% off, down from the $800s to $399. As if I needed an excuse to take an impulsive weekend trip.

The best piece of advice you’ll read when planning for Guyana: “It is a pain in the ass to plan for Guyana.” There isn’t much info online, there are no international hotel chains in the country and few hotels are bookable online. You’ll feel like you’re planning a trip in 1989.

Planning things to do presents an even harder problem: not only do tour companies [...]