Planes, Trains & Automobiles

The hardest part of any trip is finally done! There have been about fifty changes since my last post, the most important of which is that we ponied up to go Business class instead of coach. We were looking at a half dozen 15-20 hour plane flights to make the SkyTeam alliance work and the increase in price seemed worth it. I’ve only flown in first class once when I was bumped and business once so this will be a cool trip. We’ve booked the tickets through Delta for the following flights:

San Francisco – Auckland (via LAX, Tokyo and Seoul using Alaska, Northwest and Korean Air respectively) – Sydney (overland) – Hanoi (via Seoul …

We sat down this past weekend to hammer out our itinerary and came up with the following plan:

SF – New Zealand – Overland to Australia – Vietnam – Overland to Laos – Overland to Cambodia – Overland to Thailand – India – UAE – Tanzania – Overland to Kenya – Brazil – Peru – Costa Rica – SFSeoul. Flying from Thailand to India, practically neighbors, involves taking a KLM flight some 4000 miles through Amsterdam. Oh.

There are two ways to look at this; either a) we are going to be sitting on a plane A LOT or b) we now have some layover opportunities we didn’t have before. I’ve never been to Amsterdam despite my time …