Seeing the World

Wel it’s a charge card to be precise.  American Express Platinum Charge Card.

It’s something I’ve been aware of for some time, but have dismissed its value to anybody except the most frequent flyer.

But perhaps I’m about to fall into that category.  So will I get value from from what, on the face of it, seems like a rather expensive piece of plastic?

Apply via TopCashback and I bank £38.85.

35,000 points when I spend £2,000 within 90 days.  Those points can be converted to a couple of hotel schemes and also to Avios.  The latter has a direct value of around £235 when used as discount but if I leverage my redemptions well that could be doubled.  Oh, and 1 point per £ spent too.

Family travel insurance.  Particularly useful as my discounted employer cover ends soon when my redundancy is finalised.

Car hire excess insurance which usually costs £50 a year and is due up at the end of June.  I’ll be driving in Chile and Australia so it’s an essential.

A free lounge pass that would mean while slumming it on Ryanair (or other non-business class flights) I could access lounges at my preferred airports of Manchester, Leeds and of course most airports I’m likely to fly home from.  Although you could value this at £20 a flight the reality is that I can sit in a normal departures lounge minding my own business for free.  It could save me a few quid on food and drinks in airports though.

Gold status with a number of hotels.  I have this with Hilton and it’s due to expire.  While I rarely stay in a Hilton they do give golds a free breakfast.  And I do like a cooked hotel breakfast!  Extra points too.  I like extra points.

There are other benefits which are a little less substantial, but overall I reckon I can get enough value out of it.  The key being to cancel it before renewal to avoid paying a second £450 that doesn’t give 35,000 points.  Then wait six months and take out a new one!

Will I go for it?  Not sure yet!

If you wish to apply for an AMEX card, including a ee free one, get in touch and I can sort you out with a referral link that earns us both extra Avios, or use TopCashback.

A couple of years back, Halifax and a few other banks started offering incentives to shop with certain retailers if you activate a specific “discount”.  I think my biggest credit so far via this scheme was £3.40 for a tasty but overpriced Harvester breakfast.

Despite the relatively meagre pickings on offer I’m in the habit of activating all the offs available to me but never change my spending patterns to match.  I once generated 15p I hadn’t expected buying lunch in Waitrose when working in London and a couple of pubs have rebated modest amounts that I hadn’t expected because I didn’t realise they were part of a chain where I’d activated an offer.  Always a nice surprise, but in the great scheme of things small fry.

In reality, the offers I get seem to be for clothes retailers I’d never use, niche car hire companies and holiday firms I’m reluctant to utilise due to poor reputation.  But I do proactively trigger the offers just in case.

I waxed lyrical about the joys of TopCashback the other day and earned £15 on a car hire booking for the Atacama desert in Chile.  Yes, I will be driving Chris across the planet’s most arid landscape in something similar to a Ford Fiesta!

And I was more than pleased with the price I got and the cashback earned.  I usually prefer to use Avis for my car hire because they give me Avios back and, due to my preferred status, they automatically upgrade me and don’t try to flog he a series of insurances costing twice the price of the hire.  Avis don’t seem to operate out of Calama airport in the north of the country though so I checked a price comparison site and saw Europcar were there or thereabout for best buy.  Straight to TopCashback, purchase made, £15 cashback tracking, happy Dave.

But in the early hours of the morning, with insomnia in control, another moment of excitement in my life.  One of those offers from Halifax that I’d activated with little intent to use was Europcar.  An extra £23.90 will land in my bank account at the end of March that wasn’t even on my radar.  Easy money earned without realising it and generating of warm feeling of joy from getting two different discounts on a single purchase.

It’s not quite Extreme Coupining but I’ll take it!

It’s an impossible question to answer.  But lung cancer is a nasty so and so where average life expectancy is 6-9 months from the point of diagnosis.

I first saw a doctor with my upper back pain in April 2016.  I was prescribed painkillers and sent packing.  I contacted BUPA with lower back pain in June 2016.  I was referred to a physiotherapist.  Both events were actually cancer destroying my verterbrae.  The scans didn’t start coming until September 2016 and the final diagnosis didn’t arrive until November 2016.  By that time I’d declined quite significantly.  Walking was painful.  Stairs were a one step at a time event.  Sitting down was painful.  Lying down was painful.  Sleeping was painful.

While I’ve had temporary relief from my current medication, it crossed my mind that if I’d been diagnosed back in the April I was already into that 6-9 month average survival time and been treated with nothing more than paracetamol and physiotherapy.  So how close was I to dying last year?

One of the places I do want to visit is the Bay of Naples and Pompeii.  Whereas locations like Malta and Bratislava have been driven by “where’s cheap?” decisions, a flight into Naples and a sunbed in Sorrento are driven by a “when, not if” mentality.

So much so that a couple of weeks back a discussion with my landlord looked like we’d head off together in the Easter holidays.  Flight prices were a little on the punchy side but I managed to source a twin room for six nights for £200 including breakfast.

I am a fan of the cancellable hotel booking.  While it is often 10% or so more expensive it does allow you to change your plans.  More excitingly, it also allows you to check for cheaper accommodation nearer your departure time.  This has saved me £hundreds in the past.  Just book the cheaper rate and cancel what you’ve already secured.  Heads you win, tails you get what you were already prepared to pay for!

Anyway, back to Pompeii.  Or not … alas, flight prices have rocketed further so the trip is more likely to take place outside school holidays (or involve a drive to a Scottish airport where out of term holiday prices are often cheaper due to different holidays north of Hadrian’s Wall.

So I went to cancel my hotel and noticed a serious flaw in my booking.  Six nights accommodation booked for April 2018!  I’ve no idea how I’d managed to book so far ahead but the speed with which my finger clicked on the <cancel> button was pretty impressive.

It’s the kind of mistake you can correct on the ground if you arrive in a location and discover you don’t have a booking for that day, month or even year – although you might end up in a youth hostel rather than the privacy of a hotel room.  And it could lead to extra expense, especially if a town is busy at that time of year.  More importantly, it’s a sombre reminder to check and double check flight bookings before committing to them.  Turning up at the airport on the wrong day, or even in the wrong month, could be an expensive mistake!

Tuesday 28th February sees a lunchtime CT scan in Yorkshire.  I had thought Wednesday 1st March involved a lunchtime meal with my old team from work who’ve all been so supportive in recent months.  But I was chuffed to find out that the meal will be in the evening.

This frees me up to get down to the Sixfields Stadium to watch Oldham Athletic take on Northampton Town.  It will be the first time I’ve seen Northampton play there, although a couple of seasons back I did see Coventry play Oldham at the ground during their odd “let’s play home games as far away from home as possible” period.  As newish grounds go it’s a horribly soulless place!

Hotel prices for the area on the 28th are dramatically high.  I nearly cashed in my free Hilton night, but thought that seemed wasteful.  After a little bit of delving around on Hotels.com I found a classy looking bed and breakfast and remembered having a “free” night to redeem.

Alas free doesn’t include VAT but I’m paying £12 for the night, get a cooked breakfast and then have the opportunity to explore Northamptonshire the following morning before getting back to West Yorkshire for the evening with friends.

This does raise a question.  What exactly is there to do in Northamptonshire on a Wednesday morning?

Having packed my usual travel bag for Monday’s escape to Bratislava, it has crossed my mind that I need another bag for the weekend escape to sunny Swindon and Stonehenge.

Fortunately, toiletries for the first trip are all sorted by one of the “free” bags of goodies I picked up flying business class last July.  I might as well use them up or they’ll just sit there looking pretty!  Although last time I stayed at a Holiday Inn I managed to forget my toothbrush and discovered the joy of getting freebies from reception!  An opportunity not to underestimate if you need a new toothbrush and a slither of toothpaste!

Despite having very few belongings in my post-divorce world I do have two very sturdy bags which are good for travel.  The one above has a shoulder strap and slightly more space and is provably good for upto four nights overseas travel.  Which means the weekend option will be an M&S leather incarnation which is really nice and was a birthday gift for work travel a few years back, before they invented video conferencing and decimated my expenses claims!

I do also have a small case on wheels that I’ve never measured.  It’s been good for five night trips but I’ve only ever thrown it into the hold.  I might see if I can find a tape measure somewhere to see if it is suitable for hand luggage!

When I woke up this morning I had the urge to go to the Northampton v Oldham match on Tuesday 28th February.  I was thinking of finding a couple of exciting iconic landmarks in Northamptonshire, an overnight stay and a steady drive home on the Wednesday morning.  It’s in doubt though.  I’ve got a CT scan appointment in the morning, there are no iconic landmarks near Northampton, my initial check of hotel costs reveals some scandalous pricing and I’m meeting work mates the next day.

One to ponder …

I’ve always had an interest in volcanoes, earthquakes, geysers and the like.  The Yellowstone trip last year was wonderful.  And it’s no coincidence that I’m off to Iceland next month and Chile in July.  Vesuvius is on my list to do, but I’ve nothing booked yet.

But the seismic shift that continues to frustrate me most is the Bell’s palsy.  Having to hold the right end of my lip up to talk without a lisp is frustrating.  Having a nasal passage behave oddly without being able to sense it is embarrassing.  And having an eye that won’t close and ends up in pain and light sensitive is pretty rubbish too.

I did wonder if the palsy was a side effect of my cancer, but Google didn’t find anything to support the theory.  A possible link to stress.  There is a survey that suggests those who have Bell’s palsy are 50% more likely to get cancer within five years.  But the sample is small.

The most obvious side effect of cancer treatment I can think of is hair loss after chemotherapy.  I’m not at that stage yet and hopefully there are more magic pills to come to stop chemo ever being needed.  But hair loss isn’t something I’m worrying about.  My most obvious side effect from afatinib is spots.  The last 72 hours have seen a major series of eruptions across my face leaving me blotted with more marks than I ever endured as a teenager.  This is the worst it’s been since I started on the drug.

It’s not really known why some days are worse than others.  I’m quietly convincing myself that it’s the drug working extra hard to zap the cancers.  Complete guesswork on my part but it helps me through.

So I continue to suffer seismic events and eruptions across my face.  It’s a bit of a mess today!

Since the start of January I’ve earned ove £400 from clicking on the right links at the right time.

Instead of going straight to the Qatar web site to book my Australia flights, I went to TopCashback and received a £45 rebate on my fare.  The Chile flights were booked via British Airways, despite not involving a BA plane, and TopCashback netted me an extra £37.77 that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Now clearly I’m spending a lot more than these amounts while travelling.  But those sums have just paid for two nights hotel accommodation in Santiago.  Which I’ve booked through Hotels.com having earned another £5 or so from another TopCashback link.  Most of my accommodation has been booked through Hotels.com not just because of cashback but because they also offer a free night for every ten nights booked.

It doesn’t work for every airline though.  Ryanair never seem to have offered anything.  Easyjet will rebate Nectar points albeit at a measly 0.5%.  And while it does work for Flybe the 75p they’re handing over for getting me to Milan can be filed under “every little helps, but is that really the best you can do?”.

I booked car hire for the Atacama Desert last night.  £16 handed over by TopCashback. I only got 32p out of them for my £16 Malta car hire but that should trigger 700 Avios points in the next few days!

Airport parking has also generated a few extra pounds as have one or two other online purchases through non-travel retailers.

And while earning over £400 in six weeks is a sign of big spending on my part, it’s a number I’m pretty chuffed with.  Especially when I realise that it’s an amount that effectively pays for the trips to Malta and Bratislava in their entirety.

At the time of writing, you earn a fiver if you sign up via This TopCashback link.  And I’ll get a tenner out of it.  There’s no cost to you.  And it’s a damn good habit to have when shopping online.

You can also redeem your earnings for Avios which can be particularly handy if you’re chasing a few extra points to buy a flight.

The Chilean Lake District is proving to be a challenge.  I’ve booked flights and car hire, so my start and finish points are established.  And I gave seven days of routes and hotels to plan.

The intention is to stay two nights in three different locations.  My original thinking included a cracking route into Argentina, but the car hire companies charge silly money to cross the border so my Falklands number plate can stay at home.

This has left me a little bit stuck for the best route to take.  I’ve just spent two hours scouring the internet to try and work things out.  Usually these things fall into place for me but tonight it just hasn’t happened.

I’m going to sleep on it and seek inspiration from the specialist travel agents, without paying them, tomorrow.