Let’s face it - the news is a shit show and it’s really hard to lead a quality life (nomadic or not) knowing another anvil could drop on us at any minute. We got to Mexico to do some practical life stuff (permanent residency, surgery for me, eye doctor and dental stuff for Levon, sorting through our increasingly mouse dropping filled storage) in mid February, just in time to experience all of the cartel news that went down on February 22. We never felt in danger and our part of Mexico (San Miguel de Allende) was perfectly quiet. But that didn’t stop us from feeling the stress and strain for all of the other innocent people caught in the chaos (whether real or AI generated) around the rest of the country. Not to mention other world events that are directly and indirectly impacting all of us.
With Cuba in the news, I couldn’t help revisiting our trip there in 2016 with our dear friends Diane and Denis. It was a magical trip and the Cuban people were amazing. May they have peace and an end to economic suffering soon.
As we sketch out the rest of our 2026 travels, we’ve been thinking less and less about moving around large swaths of the world, and thinking more about nesting in a small handful of places for several months at a time. Moving a little slower and with more intention will also help us pivot if necessary based on global events (and frankly, as Americans, how welcome we feel wherever we are).
We’re also considering how the cost of travel is likely to change, very likely in a pretty big way. As Thrifty Traveler shared in their most recent newsletter:
Flying is going to get more expensive. Where? When? By how much? For how long? Nobody can answer that. But there’s a growing chorus of airlines signaling - if not outright admitting - that fare increases and higher surcharges are on the way as jet fuel prices skyrocket.
United’s CEO said it himself last week, saying fare increases will “probably start quick.”
Over in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific is preparing to increase fuel surcharges by more than 100% next week
Both Air New Zealand and Air France/KLM have said much the same.
Importantly, these changes are bound to affect both cash ticket prices and award travel booked with miles, in the form of those higher fuel surcharges that get tacked onto award tickets.
Here are some bits and bobs that we are leaning on to help us with planning our next few months of living while traveling.
If you’ve ever spent hours hunting for airline seats using points and miles, AwardTool is basically an award search engine on steroids. It searches multiple airline loyalty programs across many dates and airports at once, shows real-time availability, and can send free alerts when seats open up. Try plugging in a few “home bases” and see at a glance where your existing points balances can actually get you instead of bouncing between airline sites.
The Points Guy recently highlighted a new wave of tools that track your already-booked flights and automatically pursue credits when the price drops. Services like pAiback and Junova work with major U.S. airlines, monitor your fares via forwarded confirmation emails or inbox connections, and charge around a 20% success fee only when they actually save you money.
MaxMyPoint is a hotel award tool designed to help you find outsized value redemptions and award availability. It lets you filter by brand, category, point cost, and even your credit card benefits, then surfaces concrete “you’d save roughly this much cash with points” examples, plus alerts when good deals or standard rooms and suites open up.
They also run a sister site, MaxFHR, focused on Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts (FHR) and The Hotel Collection (THC). MaxFHR helps you compare FHR and/or THC rates and benefits against regular cash prices so you can quickly see when it’s worth booking through Amex for perks like late checkout, breakfast, and property credits versus paying another way. Having a tool that shows when FHR meaningfully beats a standard booking is making it much easier to justify (or skip) the occasional fancy hotel option and get the most out of our most expensive credit card.
We already use CardPointers as an app for tracking which cards to use where; the new AI Assistant turns it into an always-on, “which card should I use for this?” brain. It plugs your actual cards, bonus categories, and Amex/Chase/etc. offers into tools like ChatGPT or Claude so you can ask natural-language questions and get personalized answers. Our day to day expenses are easy to work out in the CardPointers app. But every now and then, we have more complex questions like “which card should we use to pay for this rental car so we get the most out of included insurance benefits?” or “which card should we use to book this hotel to use travel benefits from the card’s portal most effectively?” This new AI function promises to be very helpful.
And if you want something a little more analog, Ben at One Mile at a Time has a great evergreen guide laying out which specific cards he uses for airfare, hotels, dining, groceries, international purchases, phone/internet, gas, and “unbonused” spend. You can read the full article here: The Credit Cards I Use For Each Major Spending Bonus Category, And Why. You can scan his picks (Amex Platinum for flights, Sapphire Reserve for hotels, Amex Gold for dining and groceries, Bilt/other options for housing and foreign spend) and quickly spot gaps or overlaps in your own credit card setup. We’re using it less as “copy this exact wallet” and more as a cheat sheet for generally knowing what cards we hold to use for which categories of spend and when we’re deciding which new card to prioritize next for our slow-travel lifestyle, where international and everyday spend matter more than US gas stations and Door Dash perks.
The BBC just rounded up six high-profile museum openings this year, from the flying-saucer-shaped Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles to the new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and a stunning Islamic Civilization Center in Tashkent. You can see the full list here: The six most anticipated museum openings of 2026. The list also includes the Larrakia Cultural Centre in Darwin, the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, and Kanal-Pompidou in Brussels—each framed as a reason to build a trip around art, history, or Indigenous culture rather than just squeezing a museum in on a rainy day. We’re not going to chase all of them, but I love having a short “if we’re nearby in 2026, this goes to the top of the list” roster to check against our route planning.
My current happy place for a few minutes of Zen is the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s live jellyfish cam on YouTube. It’s a 24/7 stream of sea nettles drifting in soft light, set up as a fundraiser for the aquarium and running continuously since late 2025. It’s been a gentle way to clear my head for a few minutes a day.
Over the next two months, we’ll be enjoying a Western Caribbean cruise (our first cruise for the sake of cruising cruise - we don’t know yet if this will be our “thang” but it will be a nice extra week of relaxing and recovering from my surgery), then the US for a bit of family and play time. In April, we take off for Europe and will be primarily in France and the UK until October (unless the world shifts once again).
How are you taking care of yourself during these turbulent times? We would love some self care advice!
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