When Nomads Buy Insurance...

Several months ago, Jeff was shopping around for travel insurance for our big trip. He came across a policy with IMG that he liked, that met all our requirements. When he started crunching the numbers, he realized that we could save a ton of money on the policy if we started it now, rather than waiting until May. The only catch was that the policy could not be activated while we were on U.S. soil. But the savings was such (and we're crazy enough) that we began looking into ways to leave the country on the cheap. And what I mean by that is that we literally looked at a map of flights and left our parameters for destination and date completely open, and then we picked the cheapest one: Buffalo, NY (because, surprisingly, it's not a popular destination in December, which is weird given the ridiculous snow storms it is prone to at this time of year). From there, we could rent a car and drive into Canada. We then checked to see if there were any Starwood hotels nearby (since we collect points with them and had a surplus). We found a gem of a place, sitting just across the border and overlooking Niagara Falls. As a bonus, the hotel is part of a resort, which includes an indoor water park, which we could get a discount on by being hotel guests. Win, win, win! This is my favorite insurance policy we've ever bought, and it was a good practice trip! One other thing that's super cool about this trip is that it has allowed us to add to our travel map over on the right hand side of the blog. If you're interested, you can scroll over the map to see where we've been. We will be adding more and more places to that map, with a goal of seeing it turn mostly green.

Welcome to Canada

Rooms with views (from left to right, top to bottom):
1. The view from our balcony at night
2. The view out the side window during the daytime
3. The continued view from the side window around dusk
4. The view from the balcony during the day time
5. Fallsview Restaurant, two floors above our room
6. The view of the falls, from the water park
7. The ridiculous view from our bathroom!
8. Sheraton on the Falls
9. Bonus view of dinosaurs (near the the ferris wheel)

Snow fun!

Fallsview Waterpark
(Your eyes do not deceive you.
We do, in fact, look like dwarves in that family photo.
We couldn't resist playing with the funhouse mirrors.)

Friday Night Fireworks at the Falls

So much sweetness at the Hershey store