Apologies for the lack of posting, I’ve been under the weather but I have exciting news today, or at least for me.  This post’s title “ExciteMINT is in the Air” is actually the tagline of the e-mail I got from JetBlue for my newly made flight reservation and I AM super excited!

Basically, this morning I was doing my daily (I try at least) check of deals on The Flight Deal when I saw “[Summer Business Class] jetBlue – $996: Los Angeles – Boston (and vice versa). Roundtrip, including all Taxes“.  Now I’ve been wanting to try JetBlue’s Mint class for a while now and even got their credit card with the plan to use the bonus points to get book in Mint.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, I ended up using all those points to book on their partner Hawaiian Airlines to get to/from Maui, Hawaii since paid fares were through the roof.  However, that meant my dreams of flying in Mint class were not going to be happening in the near future.

Going back to the deal I saw today, $996 round-trip for lie-flat seats and Mint service is a pretty good deal.  Also, as my brother later pointed out to me, LAX-BOS-LAX is the longest Mint service out of LAX so you really get to maximize the experience.  Anyways, I decided to take a look at dates.  The page said that the deal was valid from June – December but that doesn’t always mean much.  Also, I wouldn’t want to fly in the winter since I was thinking a very short trip plus winter weather plus the northeast US could equal delays and a short trip turned long.

After browsing through Google Flights, I noticed that the weekend after my birthday (a Thursday) was actually at the $996 price point.  Thus far, I hadn’t made any plans for my birthday yet though I had been throwing ideas here and there.  This could be a good opportunity for some fun for my 30th (the horror) birthday.  But still, we’re talking almost $1000 for one will come down to what is practically a day trip to the other side of the country.  I think at this point I was about 75% on board with making this happen so I decided to text my brother and see what he thought.  (Okay, honestly, I pretty much knew he’d say go for it since he’s done worse but I wanted a little validation for this idea.)  Funny enough, when I texted him, he said he was just about to ask me what I was doing for my birthday and very graciously offered to pay for the return flight so I could fully experience Mint at its longest.  Let’s just say 75% became 99.9%.  There was still that 0.1% that was going, really?

I started booking and then remembered I still had travel bank credit that would expire this year and that 0.1% of doubt disappeared.  I’d been wondering how I would use that credit.  The only question I had was if I wanted to book the afternoon flight or the redeye.  If I book the redeye, I won’t need a hotel night but it’ll be $100 more and the flight not as satisfying since not much goes on during a redeye but sleep.  I ended up booking the afternoon flight that gets into Boston right before midnight but I’m still debating if I should make a change since I have the 24 hours cancellation available.

Anyhow, for now, I have practically a full Sunday in Boston since my flight out is around 8:30 PM.  I’m looking at hotels and things to do or eat but if you have suggestions, please let me know!

Now the only question is, should I go to Chicago the weekend before?  I told myself I wasn’t going to do so much back-to-back weekend travel since it gets exhausting but… Chicago would be fun too!  I still have the Maui trip after the Boston trip too for a friend’s wedding.  Decisions, decisions…