Itinerary Excitement

Ted & I met with our travel agent this afternoon. We're pinning down our destinations and working out the timing of everything. It's a complicated business. Details like the fact that flights from Western Samoa to Los Angeles (near the final stage of our trip, in June 2010) only occur once per week and always on a Tuesday, well these details affect other decisions and plans. But it's fun and exciting - it means things are growing more imminent.

We have a great travel agent. Her name is Leah and she works out of the Adventure Travel Company. When I first started looking for a travel agent, one person I knew told me to go to the ATC because they have experience in the "whole Round-The-World thing". Duly noted. Then, I ventured into a Travel Cuts office literally down the street and around the corner from me, thinking wouldn't this be convenient? They recommended we go to ATC since they did not feel they had the expertise to do the "whole RTW thing". So that confirmed it. And so that has become our travel agency and we highly recommend them if you want to go around the world.

They are helping us with a million little details and answering all of our (possibly stupid) questions. We spent a fair bit of time today trying to find an affordable safari that accepts children as young as 7 or 8 and covers the highlights of Kenya and Tanzania. And it has to be in either November or December 2009. We talked about the best way to get to Lesotho, the best routes through South-East Asia, health insurance, and trip cancellation/interruption insurance. We also had to do the number-crunching to make sure we were below the Star Alliance limit of 34,000 miles.

Right now, it's looking like Toronto-New York-Paris-Rome-Johannesburg-Maseru-Johannesburg-Nairobi-Dubai-Bangkok-Tokyo-Sydney-Auckland-Apia(Samoa)-Los Angeles-Vancouver. Whew! Once we make the actual reservation, we'll have about a week to pay up. And the cost for all of this? Perhaps for another blog posting . . . if you really want to know?? Let us know!