An update is in order. It looks like we're going to do this thing - this Round-the-World trip. After a couple of weeks of discussion or more accurately, conversations where Mary told me where we were going and I nodded sagely, we've settled on an itinerary.
The minimal input I offered was to avoid any place where the phrase "Where can I get treatment for yellow fever, por favor?" was in common use. That eliminated several SE Asian countries and a few of our neighbors to the south, as well as Alabama. Not that any of these countries have a yellow fever outbreak at this time - just playing it safe. And we threw in Alabama because if we go there I might have to go bass fishing with my brother-in-law and overall I think I'd rather take my chances with yellow fever, thanks.
We already had a trip scheduled to Hawaii in January to take advantage of an opportunity to use some Starwood points before the rates went up. Originally we had considered pottering off to Europe in fall 2008 and starting the RTW there, in order to take advantage of the lower rates on RTW tickets bought in Sweden. But that would, due to the arcane and mystifying rules of the oneworld alliance, have resulted in a lot fewer allowed segments in Europe. I, in what was almost certainly an accidental utterance and not as far as I know a conscious effort to participate meaningfully in the discussion, made the point that we could use the Hawaiian trip as a jumping off point and move the whole journey up by close to a year. Mary pounced on this idea and made it a reality in short order.
So we'll go ahead and fly out to Kauai as planned. Then we'll fly back to San Diego, also as originally planned. From there the plans diverge. We'll fly up to San Francisco and spend a day catching up with friends. Then we'll fly to New York, where we'll spend the night again.
From New York we're off to Hong Kong, where we'll take in the sights for a few days. From there we go to Bangkok, Thailand for three more days. Then we'll fly to Tokyo and visit Tokyo Disney. From Tokyo we're going to take the bullet train (yay!) to Kyoto to view the temples. Back to Tokyo. Wrapping things up in Japan, we're off to Singapore.
Once in Singapore we're going to take a fast train up to Kuala Lumpur for an overnight stay and then take a slower train with a sleeper back to Singapore (again yay!). From there we fly to Sydney for a few days and then we pop over to Adelaide and the Barossa Valley and some serious wine sippage. Back to Sydney and right off to Christchurch in New Zealand. We'll get a car (now that Mary's an accomplished international driver) and make our way up to the Marlborough region for yet some more wine sippage.
From here we return to Sydney for one last night before we take a short little aerial jaunt (only 23 1/2 hours) to London. After a few days of soaking up pints of bitter and following Mary around the V&A museum, we'll fly back down to Dubai and see what the exotic Gulf States look like. A couple of days of Dubai will pretty much exhaust the possibilities there and then we're back to London, because you just can't get enough of London. And then we fly down to Madrid.
After a few days in Madrid we'll take the train to Seville for an overnight stay and then on to Barcelona. We'll spend a couple of days there trying to see how many tapas we can consume and then we're going to take an overnight train (again with sleeper) to Paris. Much as we like Paris, with the current exchange rate we'll limit ourselves to only a few days here, which should be sufficient to find our favorite little bistro again and pretty much empty the bank account. We'll take the train yet again out to Disneyland Paris (aka Euro Disney) and spend a day there. Following that we're taking the Eurostar train that goes through the Chunnel back to London (final yay!).
More bitter, followed by a quick side trip to Iceland. The trip to Reykjavik in Iceland isn't actually in the RTW airline ticket - we're just going to add it in because we can. After a couple of days sampling the icy delights of Iceland, we'll return to London where we shall jet off to Los Angeles. One day there, just sufficient time to hit Disneyland, and we finally, after 10 weeks, arrive back home in Colorado.
At this point we have the plane tickets and we have the hotels mostly reserved. We may and probably will change some of the hotels as we go along, when we see better deals pop up. But we're set now and it looks like, come hell or high water, we're gonna do that crazy waltz.
We are planning to generate a bunch of information both before and during the trip. For one, I'm going to blog it as we go. Two, we're also going to generate some articles for MouseSavers.com about doing all the Disney parks worldwide in four months (we have an already-planned trip to Disney World in December). So in order we're going to do Disney World in December, Hong Kong Disney in January, Tokyo Disney and DisneySea in February, Disneyland Paris in March and to cap it off a visit to the original Disneyland in Anaheim in March also. Four months - five parks.
Mary has warmed the cockles of me heart with a number of mighty cool train journeys along the way. We have a couple of trips on the Shinkansen (high speed bullet train) in Japan, and an overnight train trip from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Singapore. And several train trips between various Spanish cities followed by an overnight train ride from Barcelona to Paris. And finally a trip on the TGV from Paris to London through the Chunnel - something I've been wanting to do ever since they completed the tunnel. I'm just filled with glee over it.
