Category: Travel

Planning a Round-the-World Trip – Book Excerpt #2

I have a healthy distrust for anything on the Internet. It’s one of the reasons I have snopes.com bookmarked. It’s also one of the reasons I have a Mac. I have been sent every warning, every fake Andy Rooney transcript, and every offer of a magical coupon that will suddenly appear on my screen if I just forward an email to ten other people. So as I mentioned, I tend to research. And research. And research.

It’s amazing how if you do enough travel research, you’ll eventually find the right deal, while knowingly tossing the ones that seem too good to be true. They are. (Word of advice: If there is a free trip to Hawaii involved, run!)

Yes, it is true that they say time is money, and you’ll spend a lot of time researching. But really, there are worse things you can do with your time than looking to see if visiting Hong Kong before Bangkok would be cheaper and have better flight times than the other way around. Trust me, you will receive no pity from anyone over this conundrum.

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Windy City

If one were to take a first-time trip to Chicago, who would choose that time to be in December? Me, of course. But what better way to experience a new city than to do it when there are fewer tourists around? And while it was cold, and yes windy, at time, it certainly wasn’t unbearable. Walking down Michigan avenue my first night found the city to be very much in the holiday spirit.

As a baseball fan (maybe not as long-suffering as Cub fans), checking out Wrigley field, even if just the outside , was a thrill. It’s pretty quiet around the ballpark this time of year but one can sense the aura of excitement that fills the area on game day.

Of the many iconic images of Chicago, one of the more recent ones is Cloud Gate, or commonly referred to as “The Bean.” Located in Millennium Park, within the Chicago Loop, one can easily reflect (pun intended) on the surroundings that make this a world-class city.

Under “The Bean”

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Done

4 Continents, 9 Countries, 15 cities, 26600 miles, 84 days. I’ve just completed my own Amazing Race!

Only casualties:
1 Duffel Bag that made it, but barely
1 SIM Card because the fly-by-night company, Ace Telecom, seems as if it went out of business leaving me without service since mid-November
1 Pair of sunglasses
5 pairs of socks
1 pair of shoes

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Friendly Skies

Throughout the course of this trip, I have flown many airlines. The one constant is that none of them were US domestic airlines. Even the United flight I booked from Madrid back to the states was operated by Aer Lingus. Only the short commuter flight from DC to Philly was on United, but that was a 24 minute flight. Hardly much time to screw up.

Way back, I had blogged that Air Tran had already changed the time of my flight back to LA, pushing it later. Little did I know that when I called to verbally accept the change to the 5:16PM flight from Philly to Atlanta, that the moron on the phone had rebooked me on an even later flight by mistake, at 7:03PM, thus giving me a whopping 35 minutes to change planes in Atlanta, one of the nation’s busiest airports. I only realized this when I logged onto Air Tran’s site to check the flight information.

Now, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a flight from Philly that late in the day that actually left on time. And I don’t know how they accept 35 minutes between flights as an acceptable timeframe. But a call to Air Tran customer service (can we even call airlines support lines “customer service?”) resulted in nothing but frustration as I was told there were no seats on the flight I thought I was on and that should I miss the connecting flight, I would be placed on the “next available flight.” Of course we are talking about winter and the holidays. Something tells me the next available flight will not be the next flight.  Here’s hoping my 84 day trip doesn’t suddenly become an 86 day trip with an excursion to Atlanta. Gah! Domestic airlines are the absolute worst.

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