Travel Diaries: My 2016 Travel Plans!

It's been a while since my last Travel Diaries post! 2015 was such an incredible travel year for me, and I'm definitely wanting to keep that streak going. My husband and I have been suffering from severe wanderlust, and we've been planning our next vacation for the past few months. We looked into a few destinations - Istanbul, Marrakesh, Cape Town, Helsinki, Warsaw... but my husband and I couldn't agree on anything! He wasn't interested in any of my top picks, and I wasn't interested in his. And then we started looking into Japan. We've both wanted to go to Tokyo for years, but we always thought that it was out of our budget, so we never really looked into it further. Well, we finally decided to bite the bullet and I bought our plane tickets for a 2 week vacation in Tokyo, Japan for this coming September! That will give us enough time to adequately save up and plan a fantastic itinerary for this dream vacation!

Last year, when we were flying back from Prague, our final connection from Detroit was overbooked. This had happened to us once before when we were flying home from Beijing, so we already knew the drill. When flying with Delta, if your flight is overbooked, they start to ask for volunteers to get bumped to the next flight. We weren't in any hurry to get back to snowy Ottawa, so we were happy to volunteer. To compensate you for the inconvenience, Delta provides you with a travel voucher, but the amount varies depending on how long you'll be bumped for. Delta put us up in a hotel for the night (the hotel was pretty basic, but we got to spend the night watching American TV and eating American snacks!), and we flew home the next morning. Not a huge inconvenience for us, a young couple travelling without children, but it might not be an option for everyone. Along with the compensated night in the hotel, Delta provided us with a $1300 USD travel voucher, which converts to roughly $1700 CAD! We used half of the voucher for our flights to Paris/Belgium, and the remainder was used for our flight to Tokyo! We actually only ended up spending $29 CAD each on our flights! So since our flights were basically free, we figured that we'd have more money to spend in the expensive city of Tokyo - no more putting it off!

We're definitely wanting to stop by the Robot Restaurant!

So right now I'm looking into different hotel & Airbnb options - if you have any recommendations let me know! I'm also trying to create an itinerary, and figuring out what day trips we want to plan out. I'm wanting to get to Kyoto for at least a day, and I know that Dylan has a lot of places in Japan on his wishlist!

Kyoto Japan

Aside from Tokyo, we're also heading to Las Vegas in November, when Dylan and a few of his family and friends will be running a half marathon. I won't be joining them on the run, but I will be there to cheer them on! We've never been to Vegas before, so again, we're open to any recommendations that you might have! I'm wanting to plan a day trip to see the Grand Canyon, since it's so close to Vegas and it's super high on my bucket list!

And lastly, we want to get back to New York City for a night or two! Last Spring we booked an impromptu trip to the Big Apple, and it was so much fun! That was our second trip to NYC, so we were a bit more relaxed about it, and we able to just explore the city. We're hoping to plan another mini getaway for April or May, but nothing is set in stone just yet.

View of Central Park from the Top of the Rock

I'm super excited about all three of these travel plans! If you've been to any of these places, then definitely let me know of any travel advice and/or recommendations that you might have. Of course I'll be sharing all of my travel photos over on Instagram and in future Travel Diaries posts!

Do you have any upcoming travel plans?