As some of you may know, our family trip (10 of us) to Ireland, which had been planned since early last year, ran into a little snag when the house we had rented suddenly became unavailabls "due to unforseen circumstances".

Being only 60 days out, trying to find reasonable accomodations for 10 people is a difficult task. We checked out everything and were considering changing the venue from Ireland to either France or UK (at $100 change fee per ticket) when I suddenly remembered that Choice has a couple of nice hotels in Dublin.

They're pretty much all 20,000 points/night but, as luck would have it, their seasonal rate drops to 10,000 points/night on April 15. Whoo-hoo.

10 minutes on the laptop, and I have 4 rooms for 4 nights and another room for 2 nights, for a total of 18 room-nights. All one bedroom suites at the Clarion IFSC in downtown Dublin. Retail value (after converting euros to dollars) is in excess of $11,000.

So as I think of all those nights in less-than-stellar hotels (I'm writing this at an EconoLodge at $32/night)), my inner self is smiling.