[Blackadar]

I’ve been traveling on business for the better part of 4 months and I’ve racked up quite a few freebies – 100,000 Marriott points, 2 free rental days with National Rental Car, 2 $300 vouchers with United, thirty thousand frequent flier miles with US Air – all since January 1, 2010. I’m exhausted. It’s time to plan a vacation.

I’m going to parlay all that stuff into a cheap vacation for me and the wife. The real question is…where?

Details/Specifics (please read)

Our last vacation without the kids was 5 years ago (Las Vegas). Our last vacation with the kids was Chattanooga, TN (and we had a great time, believe it or not).

Our newest addition will be only 9 months old, so it’ll have to be a relatively short vacation. We’re in Charlotte, NC and we’re going someplace domestic – don’t bother suggesting anything outside the USA. We’re both in our 40s and so the adventure/whitewater/hiking type vacations – stuff we love to do – are a little impractical. We just don’t have time to train for anything remotely strenuous. We’re not big partiers and so going out every night to get blitzed has no appeal. It’s going to be a mid-summer vacation, probably 4 (5 max) days including travel days. At 4-5 days, I can’t afford spending an entire day in the air, though direct flights can make things easier.

Forget the beach. We used to live at the beach.

I have a few ideas: Vegas (again), New York, Chicago, Niagara Falls, Santa Fe, Denver/Boulder, New Orleans and San Fran (though that’s probably impractical for the distances involved). The wife hasn’t gone many places – Vegas and Denver are the only two on that list. I’ve been to them all except New Orleans and Santa Fe, but most of that has been on business. For example, I’ve never been to New York on pleasure, but I did get to go to the NY DA’s office the last time I was there. 

Money is always a consideration, even with the freebies above. Since I had to pay for the birth of my daughter out-of-pocket, our vacation budget isn’t robust…consider it non-existent this year. We both love nature, hiking, aquariums, planetariums, some museums, great food that I don’t have to dress up for, cheap flea-market type shopping (we wouldn’t be caught dead in a Sax 5th Ave) and a bunch of other stuff. Frankly, we’d rather have a cheap but tasty cheesesteak than dropping $200 at a stuffy restaurant. It’s just not our style. Spending a day riding around Charleston, SC looking at old homes would bore me to death, but spending 90 minutes on a trolley checking out New Orleans is something we’d both like. We both dislike crowds, but that’s not going to be easy to avoid at the height of vacation season, so we’ll deal with it.

So, where do we go? I’m up for any and all suggestions and they’re appreciated more than you know. And since you’re making suggestions, what do we do when we get there? Where are the local, cheaper, great places to eat? What attractions do you recommend?

P.S. – Just to give you an idea what we did on our last trip to Chattanooga, we hit the aquarium, saw Rock City (always wanted to say I’ve seen it), checked out Ruby Falls, did a bit of shopping in small shops, saw a movie, panned for gems in the mountains of NC, did a bit of hiking and relaxed. On our last trip to Vegas, we stayed at the MGM, toured the casinos, gambled very little, ate at PF Changs, went to the overpriced Mandalay Bay aquarium, saw a Cirque de Soleil show, went to a comedy club and saw Hoover Dam.

EDIT: Just in case I wasn't clear, this is just a trip for me and the wife. No kids.