Well it's been awhile and I know some Cellar dwellers live vicariously through my travels to see the world! We did spend 2 months in Hawaii this spring but since then my wife has mostly been working at Dow Chemical near the Houston ship channel so there hasn't been much travel. She had 4 upgrade certificates with United that would expire if not used by January 31st so we decided to start the year off with a trip that would get us some decent miles and also get us into business class. I did the research and found we could go to Istanbul for $960 each and could be upgraded for the first 2 of the 3 legs and also the last 2, the reason being we have to fly a codeshare flight on Lufthansa from Germany to and from Turkey and they don't do upgrades for that. And the trip gets us about 13,000 qualifying miles.
So it is off to Istanbul from January 7th to the 18th and we will stay at the Hilton and a Marriott near Taksim Square using points so we just have to worry about eating and touristy things. It can be a bit cold and rainy then but there will be lots of photographic potential.