Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: September 2007 Archives
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
We already had a trip scheduled to
So we'll go ahead and fly out to
From
Once in
From here we return to
After a few days in
More bitter, followed by a quick side trip to
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
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
Well, a Round-the-World (RTW) trip has been the topic of discussion around here for the past couple of weeks. See, Mary thought that we didn't have enough adventure in our lives. So she wanted to do something exciting and daring. The last time this came up I got to paddle three miles through an inky black cave in
Mary came across a reference to RTW trips on Flyertalk.com and that triggered some research on the subject, which in Mary's inimitable style means intensive Internet searches for a total of 40 hours out of the last three days. It turns out that there are any number of variants on the RTW theme offered by airlines and airline consortiums such as the oneworld alliance (which apparently is not really in favor of world domination, at least outside of control over airline ticket prices), each of which offers a completely different RTW ticketing option. And each option has more rules and fine print than a cell phone contract.
The oneworld Explorer RTW ticket is really complex but basically it's a pass that you can use to fly around the world, hitting either three, four, five or six "continents" along the way. Naturally oneworld doesn't define "continents" in the same way normal people would, which makes things even more confusing. You're allowed a total of 20 "segments," which are flights between two points. If you want to get off in
Plus there are odd rules, such as you can only fly in one direction between continents, but you can fly back and forth within a continent. There are no mileage limitations, however, so it's actually in our best interest to maximize the length of each segment so we get the frequent flyer mileage. So, for instance, say you want to go from
One of the simpler RTW options is something called The Great Escapade, though I think they should have called it the Great Escape instead. Then you could use a shot of Steve McQueen jumping a motorcycle over the border of
Obviously we aren't contemplating an itinerary like an around the world trip in Coach. No, that would be just too much to ask for those of our age and girth. We're going First Class, baby. Or Business, depending on how much pain we can take when we see the proposed costs. I'm thankful I have a high pain threshold.
If we decide to do this, in keeping with the theme of "ADVENTURE!" we're thinking that we'll make hotel reservations in advance and then forgo almost all research on attractions and restaurants and the like until we're on our way. Through the miracle of the Internet we'll do our research on the fly. Sure, we may miss out on that five mile swim through the inky black depths of the Malaysian Cave of Deepest Fear due to the requirement to make all reservations five days in advance, but that will just be a price that will have to be borne.
