Thursday, 9/14/2017 – Sunday, 9/17/2017

Our first trip together, less than a month after meeting each other, was to Bike Week 2010 in Ocean City, Maryland.  We’ve made it a tradition to make it each and every year, no matter what.  It’s our end of the summer, get ready for fall, hunting season and snow party and I look forward to it at the beginning of each new year.

We did something a little different for Bike Week this year.  We had been staying at the same hotel, year after year, for a number of years.  We really like the location of the hotel – it’s easy to walk to a lot of different things, it’s close to a drunk bus stop, there was room to sit on the porch and watch the hundreds of motorcycles pass by on one of the main streets,  But, two years ago, the hotel did us pretty dirty on our reservation that was made 9 months in advance of Bike Week.  We decided that would be our last year there.  Last year, we stayed at another hotel (right across the street) that wasn’t that great either.  I did some recon before making our reservations this year and found a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom cottage for the same price as a hotel room, right across the street from where we had been staying.  2 designated parking spots, full kitchen, sleeps 10 and has it’s own front porch and YARD!  It ended up breaking down to $149 per person for the entire weekend for the cottage…so much better than a small hotel room filled to the gills with helmets, boots and people.

Conveniently, Kent Island is on our way to Ocean City, so, we got to take a half-way pit stop at The Jetty for lunch.  The weather was beautiful for lunch on the docks.  I was BEYOND pleased when we arrived at the cottage and we’ll definitely be booking it for our yearly pilgrimage to Bike Week!  We had a great weekend – food, cocktails and tons of motorcycles – and got to visit our favorite spots in Ocean City – The Oasis, Seacrets, Phillips Seafood, Kohr Brothers, and, of course, The Purple Moose.

Since we’re really focused on our debt-free strategy, it’s worth mentioning that we did really well (again!) on this vacation.  We chose to cut this vacation down to a few days instead of an entire week, mostly because we went to Colorado earlier in the summer and weren’t sure exactly how we would do, financially, with that trip.  Cutting our Bike Week trip down to Thursday – Sunday instead of Sunday – Sunday helped our wallet our A LOT, so, despite not having as much cash saved as we usually do (because we put it toward paying off our debt), we didn’t restrict our spending and did really well this time, too!  We used our new fancy rewards Visa card to earn 2% cash back on all of our bigger bills (hotel and food, of course) and then moved money from our checking account to cover the purchases, while getting the 2% cash back.  Hurray for becoming debt-free and still having fun!