When my parents naturally asked me if there was anything I wanted for my birthday, I threw out the idea that, what if we drove the kids to their house with our au pair, and they all could watch the kids for a week, and we could take a 40th birthday trip?

They said yes to my surprise, and it was time to plan an entirely different trip. So, first step, I canceled the kids' tickets to Paris. We ate the 140-euro fee because, of course, they weren't coming. And we canceled our return flights, which, thankfully, because I booked with a few more aeroplane miles, had no fee.

And now we needed to figure out a plan. And so we started with return flights. And the reason we did this was because we had a lot less flexibility. And so we really had two dates that we could find flights back home, but we only needed two seats. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find two seats from Zurich back to San Francisco direct.

I think we were using a combination of Point.me and AwardTool, but we found these flights, And we were actually able to use some of those refunded Air Canada miles to book them.