Free and Reliable Wake Up Call

This past weekend, I booked myself a flight for 9am Sunday morning. I didn't realize it was going to be daylight savings time starting that day. So I was losing an hour. Ugh. 9am flight. At least I live close to the airport.

I was worried about being awakened by my smart phone, because I didn't know if the clock would reset in time. So this time I used Snoozester.com.

Snoozester is free and it works. I signed up online, entered my cell phone number and my time zone and told them when I wished to be awakened.

I got a call at 6:30 (which was really 5:30 in the standard time I was used to), followed by an ad. Funny, I don't remember at all what the ad was for. I was ASLEEP!

Note to self: don't buy ad space on Snoozester.

Magic Jack! $40 for a year's worth of phone calls...

It's a friggin' miracle! No, it's MAGIC. Yeah. Magic.

So we got the Magic Jack and within 5 minutes of taking it out of the box (30 day free trial, by the by) and plugging it into our computer, we had a new phone number with voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, three way calling blah blah blah. The works!

After the 30 day trial is over, we will pay $40 plus shipping and handling and that will give us a YEAR of free calling to the US and Canada. We provide the phone. Right now, we use Vonage, which is pretty inexpensive at $25/month. But folks: $40 a year is INSANE.

Here's the negative: the jack plugs into your computer, so your computer must remain on to receive incoming calls. Otherwise, they will go straight to voice mail. I haven't figured out the other negatives yet, but if I do, I'll let you know.

A no brainer -- and great for a new small business. I'm just saying...

YAPTA! Save on Airfare!

Yapta is a newish website where you enter in your flight information so that the website can track whether the price of your airline ticket is going up or down. It will send you an email alert every time the ticket fluctuates in price. When it goes down, you can decide that now is a good time to buy.

And that’s when the fun begins…

After you purchase your ticket, you let Yapta know at what price you locked it in — and it will continue to monitor the ticket price. If it goes down again, you will get the email alert and then you immediately contact the airline, telling them that you want a voucher for the difference in cost between what you paid and what the cost is right now. Yeah, they will actually send you a voucher.

Last Summer, I bought 4 tickets to Boise for $300. The price went down three times. The lowest eventual price was $240. Can you do math? I saved $240 on those tickets.

And when I bought tickets for Denver for this Spring, I was able to apply those vouchers to my next tickets (they expire in a year, so I had motivation). End result: we are flying from LA to Denver for $77 roundtrip each.

My arm hurts because I’m patting myself on the back so much.

...And another thing about our Road Trip to San Francisco...

When we drove to San Francisco over Thanksgiving weekend with our kids, we were loathe to eat at a fast food restaurant off of Highway 5 — one of the plainest, most boring drives in this beautiful country that we live in. We wanted… an experience. But Yelp doesn’t really cover I-5.

We had our GPS set up — I know, what for? I-5 is one straight line — but we’re techy people, so we had it on, just to satisfy our curiosity. My husband suddenly clicked on “points of interest” on the GPS. One of the categories was “food.” Yeah, we clicked that, too. There was a whole mess of restaurants only 5 miles off of the highway. Near the state prison. Yay!

We got off and found that gas was sixty cents cheaper (hello!) and we ate AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS Mexican food for a very low cost. And I was able to practice my Spanish with everyone.

Hey, if you’re a traveling mom, you must take some risks. When they pay off, it’s beautiful.