Traveling on Cash and Points, Oregon Edition

Whenever I travel for leisure I look at whether it's better to pay with cash or points. I have points with several airlines and hotel chains, so I have lots of options. While it's almost always possible to pay with points, the rates aren't always worth it. Often I end up booking less than half the flight/hotel costs with points. On our recent trip to Oregon for the long July 4th weekend, though, I found decent points rates for most of it. Five Things:

• We booked all four of our hotel nights on points. For one I used a free night cert I get from owning a credit card. I look at the certs as paying for the card's $49 annual fee. We saved almost $200 by using that cert vs. paying cash for comparable accommodations, so the card's fee is more than paid for this year. (I routinely expect to make these certs worth $150.)


• Three of the nights came from Hawk's points. Yes, she collects points, too, though not as aggressively as I do. Basically I recommend where she open a new credit card once or twice a year for the signup bonus and then suggest when/where it's worth redeeming points when we travel. In the lingo of the card churning discussion boards I participate in she's a "P2".


• The flights I split. We flew on points out and cash home. There was a cheap enough points rate on the outbound leg. Home-bound it was more expensive so I paid cash.


• When flying Southwest there's another variable in the calculus about when to use points vs. cash: status. Redeeming points is great, but it doesn't renew my elite status each year. My plan to remain dual-elite with Southwest this year (A-List Preferred and Companion Pass) entails buying tickets worth a certain amount of money. That helped push one of the flight legs above the threshold where it makes more sense to pay cash than redeem points.


• The rental car we paid with cash. I stopped chasing free-day rewards with car rental companies years ago when they all massively devalued their programs. I credit car rental points to my airline programs instead. The car rental cost us a bit over $200. But I look at it as having gotten our money's worth by driving it 738 miles.

Hiking Susan Creek Falls

Monday morning I was awoken by the sun blazing through the windows of our corner room at the hotel in Eugene Oregon. It was only 6am— a terrible time to have to wake up on a long holiday weekend, right? Actually, no. Getting up early didn't suck because there was a lot I wanted to do. Monday would be a long day of hiking waterfalls in the Cascades then driving back up to Portland for the night.

From Eugene we headed south on I-5 toward Roseburg then skirted around town to State Highway 138 climbing up into the mountains. It wasn't long until we reached the trailhead of the first hike on my list, Susan Creek Falls.



The trail to Susan Creek starts in a burned area. Most of the trees still standing are dead, though in the years since the fire shrubs have thrived. We passed by a lot of wild berry bushes... and poison oak. The trail zig-zags up the side of a hill for a bit before cutting around a corner into the Susan Creek canyon. Here, as you can see in the photo above, some of the taller trees survived the fire.



Once around the bend it's a pleasant walk of another 0.5 mile or so to the falls at the back of the canyon. The trek is just 1.5 miles round trip with an ascent of about 200 feet. Susan Creek Falls pours over a rock ledge and drops about 50'.



The trail offers both a small vista partway up the right side of the hill in front of the falls and a little picnic area below the foot. I found the best viewpoint (above) by going to the lower area then hopping over a few rocks and downed trees to get closer to the falls.

A Very Oregon Experience: Pumping Gas

I forgot to mention on the way to hiking Susan Falls on Monday we stopped to fill gas in our car. As an American that's normally a non-event, a basic thing of life I've been doing since before age 16. Except this was in Oregon. It's one of the two states in the US that ban self-serve gas. A 1951 law cites the reasons as youth employment and life-threatening dangers. Yes, it cites those two arguments in consecutive sentences. Pumping gas is so dangerous, let's make kids do it for menial wages! 🙄

...Actually Oregon only partly bans self-serve gas. Diesel has always been self-serve, and starting several years ago Oregon amended its laws to allow self service for gasoline in rural counties. When we stopped at a Shell station umpteen miles outside Roseburg I thought we were in one of those rural areas. Drivers of a few other vehicles at the pumps were operating the pumps themselves, and no staff were on hand to pump the gas for us. I started up the pump as Hawk went inside to buy a snack.

Hawk came back out and told me the the cashier inside was aghast that we started pumping our gas. It turns out we were not in a self-serve area. "OMG, do you need any help with that??" the cashier asked, belatedly.

"No, we're from California," Hawk said.

What Hawk should have said was, "No, we're from the 48½ states in the US where this is normal."