After nearly 12 months of intensive planning, lots of teeth gnashing and garment rending over how much time to spend in each destination, getting hotels lined up, flights booked, visas arranged, drivers confirmed, ground activities selected and booked, the trip is finally upon us!
We depart this Wednesday, December 13, 2017 in the First Class cabin of a Japan Air Lines 777 as we wing our way to our first stop in Seoul, South Korea.
Here’s how the whole trip looks on a map:
Our itinerary is as follows:
December 13 – Chicago-Tokyo-Seoul
On our kickoff leg we’re booked on Japan Air Lines in First Class. To say the least it’s a great way to start the trip.
We’re excited about flying JAL because their First Class experience is recognized as one of the 10 best in the world. Plus Jeff gets jammies on them!
At the end of the JAL journey we’ll be in Seoul.
Of course Korea has been in the news a lot lately, and we’ve been crossing our fingers that Trump doesn’t blow it up, but we figure we’ll be fine for a couple of days. We are planning a trip to the DMZ, hostilities permitting. Seoul is gigantic, BTW, and by the looks of it the Koreans like to have fun.
December 17 – Seoul-Ho Chi Minh City
Our second visit to amazing Vietnam, this time to the south end of the country. It’s going to be difficult to top Hanoi but we could be surprised!
We have just two days in Saigon because we needed to steal a day for Sri Lanka, which is our next stop.
December 20 – Ho Chi Minh City-Bangkok-Colombo
This turned out to be a surprising part of the trip. Originally we intended for it to be a quick stop in Colombo for a couple of days but as we started to research Sri Lanka we realized there is an incredible amount of things to see and do and so we scrambled and reworked the plan so that we could spend more time here.
We are really excited about this stop. Wait until you see what we’re doing.
December 24 – Colombo-Muscat, Oman
What? Where? You ask? O-M-A-N. It’s at the very end of the Arabian peninsula and while it’s not back in the stone age it is one of the lesser known, and lesser developed countries that ring the peninsula. Lots of ancient stuff to see here.
It’s the anti-Dubai and we’re also very excited about this stop.
December 28 – Muscat-Vienna
We finish the trip in the city that gave us Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Liszt, and Strauss among others. The “City of Music” also known as Vienna.
We’ll spend a few days here taking in the culture that Vienna has to offer, a little Sachertorte and apple streudel, a Wienerschnitzel or two and maybe some waltzing.
January 1 – Vienna-Chicago
We return to Sweet Home on New Year’s Day via Austrian Airlines renowned Business Class non-stop to Chicago.
Altogether the trip is 20,641 miles from beginning to end, and this trip will put Jeff and I at over 200,000 miles of travel in our nearly 13 years together!
Weather will be a challenge with winter in Seoul and Vienna and summer everywhere else. So packing will be interesting. Oh, and make sure you tune in for Seoul as we’ll have a special guest star joining us for that leg.
We hope you join us over the holidays for our third trip around the world. I know some of you are email subscribers, which is great because you’ll never miss a post – BUT – you do miss out on the pictures that get posted to the blog via Twitter through each travel day as sort of quick visual activity update. So make sure you stop in once in a while to catch up on those OR you can also follow us on Twitter at @pointyenders.
See you on Wednesday!
