So, we left Indonesia with our running average below $123/day which was the goal. Then Norway came along and undid our hard work, which we were expecting. To offset some of the damage, we used a ton of credit card points, some of which were saved up over the past 5 years. We could have used them at the start (in Egypt) but we wanted to see how spending would go before emptying out our point balances. Ultimately it didn’t matter at what point we actually used the points since everything (points and money spent) falls under our running average. I won’t lie it hurt a little to go through SO many points so quickly.

Some notes:

– Credit card points was our largest category. We redeemed the cash equivalent value of $3,115 worth of points. Majority of this was used to offset lodging costs. We had a flight credit that we were able to redeem for $850. We then emptied Peter’s credit card of ~226,475 points (cash value is $.01 so $2,264.75). We got 19 free nights of Airbnb/hotelsand also a domestic flight from Oslo to Tromso

– Our highest spend category besides points was the rental cars. We rented cars twice for 24 days total (12 days each). Our car that we used in southern Norway was $70/day while the one we used in Lofoten was $102/day. Ouch. Gas cost $525 over those 24 days. Then we had some sort of additional fee for our second rental that was $73

– We only ended up paying $602 for lodging (we ran out of points on the one card at this point). Also slept in our rental car a few nights to save money (2 for 1!)

Everything we did while in Jordan can be found in our Norway Itinerary.

Click here to see what we spent in Prague.