Truth be told I can think of some bigger ones than this one. Also, in my experience the beauty of travel is that the mistakes one makes often work out to result in a better travel experience overall. It doesn’t matter if that mistake is getting on the wrong bus in India or as it is in this case of finding out 48 hours before you’re supposed to board a plane to Barcelona that you didn’t actually make a reservation…

Yeah… that happened.

Yesterday I went online to confirm our American Airlines flight, the first international leg of this trip only to discover that I’d only put that reservation on a 7 day hold, I never actually went back and confirmed it. That realization was quickly followed by a long stream of phrases that started with “Oh my…” and “Holy…”. Each was repeated many more times than I think Elena has ever heard come out of my typically dispassionate mouth.

Back in July after a full day or two of researching and coordinating flights I put that critical booking on hold pending confirming the other 3 bookings I’d researched but needed to make. Those other flights all being separate cash purchases (as opposed to mileage award tickets like the AA flights). After booking each of those three flights, BCN>SOF, SOF>FCO and TRN>BCN, I was supposed to go back to American Airlines and actually confirm that award booking.

The irony here is that for the last several weeks Elena and I have been some what lamenting that we’d booked a return ticket. With so much available to do in Europe we were sad that we were so tightly scheduled into our 6 weeks bookended by that round trip flight that all the things that have come up in the last few weeks were out of the question.

A side trip to Milan? no.
A quick trip into Switzerland? no.
A stopover in London? no.
A house in the countryside for a few weeks? no.
A diversion on the way home to see in Oaxaca for Halloween? no.

It’s not that we could or would do all these things, we may not do any of them. It’s the frustration of them all being excluded by our itinerary before we even left home.

My second reaction however upon realizing our flights weren’t booked (the first was the long stream of expletives) was to immediate try to rebook the exact same routing. Thankfully before I completed doing that Elena reminded me, “We don’t necessarily have to book a return flight you know”.

So, yes we’re coming home, but no we don’t have a return flight. It’ll still probably be sometime in November…

Oh, end the new flight to BCN is 5 hours shorter (no layover in PHX and a short one in LHR), and gets into BCN at 8:35pm instead of 10pm.

Earlier this year Elena and I went on an amazing 4 month adventure around Asia visiting Thailand, Bali, Laos and Singapore. It was long planned trip and it was fabulous. As many of you know the highlight came at the end when we got engaged.

Well, I just finished booking flights for our next adventure: we’re headed to Europe for 2 months.

I made a little animated map of our route using a cool new service I found called Tripline which imports from TripIt, making it pretty easy.

Hit Play in the top right corner, enjoy the show and then let me know how the map works for you in the comments. I’m thinking I’ll do one after the face for Asia, and maybe make a “year end round up” map if it works.

The focus of this trip is to attend Terra Madre and Salon de Gusto in Torrino. Elena will be attending to represent SlowFood’s Maui chapter. Coincidentally WordCamp Europe happens a month before Salon de Gusto, so being us, we’re heading over early and combining the two events. Then while researching flights I found out that I can book American Advantage MileSAAVer award airfares into and out of Barcelona. So we’re using my 100,000 American Airlines miles. 30k miles each for the flight from SNA (Orange County) to BCN (Barcelona) and only 20k BCN to OGG (Maui). The flights from OGG to the mainland are Hawaiian and Alaska Miles. The european flights are all cash, but I found some great fares from Barcelona to Sofia, Sofia to Rome and Turin to Barcelona.