Girlfriend Getaways

[TheAmericanTravelProject]

Obviously I love to travel. My main focus involves family travel, but there are times when I like to get away with just my husband or as couples or with my girlfriends. I consider myself to be extremely lucky because I have lots of great friends from various times in my life. Some of my best friends are those I met in childhood, and others I have found along the way, through college, grad school, jobs, and through my kids.

For many years now, my childhood best friends and I have planned ‘girls weekends’ (as we call them) a couple of times a year. With all of us living in different states (and one of us in Spain), getting away together for a couple of days is a great way to reconnect and talk non-stop for hours on end without boring the heck out of our families. Plus, my friends will tackle my bucket list items that my husband isn’t interested in (Lucky Chengs…check…don’t worry girls I won’t post those photos). New York City is a common meeting place for us, but we’ve also had fun in Cancun (you can read about that trip here), DC, Florida, Chesapeake, MD and the Jersey Shore, to name a few.

I recently had a girls weekend with some friends to celebrate a milestone birthday for one of our group (don’t worry friend, I won’t say which milestone birthday). We used some travel tricks in order to make the weekend affordable for all of us. We were able to get an enormous room (with 3 full bathrooms!) at the Hyatt Regency Penns Landing using a Hyatt Diamond Suite upgrade (one of the reasons I heart Hyatt Diamond status). We also got a free breakfast buffet for all 4 of us in the hotel restaurant. I forced asked them to sign up for Uber using my link so that we ended up with free Uber rides all over the city. We used Goldstar in order to get deeply discounted tickets to a comedy show. And we chose a great BYOB place for dinner (Philadelphia is known for great BYOB restaurants) so that we saved money on drinks. It was an economical way to have a fabulous Girlfriend Getaway!

They don’t call them Boyfriend Getaways, but my husband also takes trips with his friends. Sports are involved. Watching them, not playing them. I think that it’s important to keep and build friendships, for both of us. We have also taken trips with other couple friends of ours. With and without the kids.

Do you take Girlfriend (or Boyfriend) Getaways? Where are your favorite places to go? Things to do?​

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