How We’re Celebrating 25 Years of Marriage This Year

On June 25th, we celebrated our 25 year wedding anniversary.  It’s an awesome achievement and something to be celebrated for sure.  I dug this up out of our photo archives.  We looked so young in 1994!

At the beginning of the year, we thought about what we would like to do to celebrate our 25 years of marriage.  In true Christine & Todd fashion, we decided to have many smaller celebrations instead of one big one.  Why not celebrate all year long??

In April, we took a week of staycation to hang out around town.  We went to the beach a couple of times.  We went to the movies at the theater, and watched movies at home every night.  We ate out.  We made homemade nachos and chicken & dumplings.  We read books.  It was fun and relaxing.

For our actual anniversary, Todd took the day off.  We had lunch at Pacifica Del Mar with ocean view.

We went to the Aerospace Museum at Balboa Park.

And we went to see Toy Story 4 at the movie theater at night.

Todd’s company had a company shutdown for the first week of July, so he had the week off.  We had another week of staycation where we did many things around town, and also spent a day in San Clemente.

Sometime in May, we were in the middle of the final Game of Thrones season and having so much fun watching the episodes and listening to all the podcasts together.  I found out there’s an annual Game of Thrones convention called Con of Thrones, and this year it was July in Nashville, TN.  Wheels started turning in my head.  Part of the success of our marriage is we have so much fun together being obsessed about different things, and being quirky about it.  We enjoy being geeks together about different things.  I thought, what better way to celebrate that than attending the Con of Thrones in July?  So we booked flights and hotel, and we went!  I’m going to write a separate post about Con of Thrones so I won’t go into the details here, but we had so much fun!  Three full days of geeking out over our favorite podcasters, book details, themes, show costumes, show art work, cosplay, etc. 

In early August, we flew to Ohio for Todd’s 30th high school reunion and to visit his family.  We had an awesome time!

We have four more trips to go the rest of this year!  We will be going to Malibu, Vancouver BC (Canada), Ohio again, and Texas.  It is a full year of celebrating our 25th anniversary together!

But wait!  How are we splurging on all these trips when I’m not working anymore?  We actually got the idea for a year of celebration in January, when we found out about a really rare deal on the Southwest Rapid Rewards Priority card through Chase.  We applied immediately because it was too good to pass up.  Here are the deets:

• $149 annual fee
• Spend $4,000 in the first three months of getting the card, and you get FREE (well, for a $11.20 fee) companion tickets for the ENTIRE YEAR after that!
• You also get 30,000 Southwest points
• $75 of annual Southwest travel credit
• FOUR upgraded boardings per year (when available)

Here’s how we made out.  We used the 30,000 points to buy Todd’s ticket to Nashville.  My companion pass was free.  We would have had to pay $11.20 fees each for those tickets, but since we had $75 of travel credit, it was free.  We also used two of our boarding upgrades to board in the early A group, which would have cost $80, but it was free.  For the Nashville trip we saved $980 just by having the credit card.  You can see the savings from the rest of the spreadsheet.  We saved $2,135 (the green highlighted amount) by having the credit card.  I got to travel for free all year.  We only paid $1,357.12 (including the $149 annual fee) for FIVE roundtrip tickets for two people.

We couldn’t be more thrilled that we were able to do this on a budget this year!  If you ever see this deal pop up again, and you would like a year of free companion tickets to travel, you need to jump on it!