We’ve spent over 10-15 hours on the phone with the American AAdvantage International Travel desk trying to come up with a valid itinerary ….
We can’t have more than 16 segments (take off-landing)
We can’t go over 35,000 traveled miles
We have a year from the day of booking to finalize our trip
Each flight only has a handful of AAdvantage seats available……
Currently the only way to get from USA to Europe is on Aug 8th from JFK-Madrid. Unfortunately we cannot travel that date, the earliest we could travel is Aug 28th or so. There are NO seats available for any day in Sept, Oct, Nov, etc….
Option 2 was to fly to South America and then fly to Europe. We found a flight from Santiago to Madrid on Sept 15th … what do we do from Aug 28th ’till then? Burning man? Nah… Easter Island for a week. =)
What we have so is:
9/5/2011 lax lima
9/7/2011 lima santiago
9/7/2011 santiago easter island
9/12/2011 easter island santiago
9/15/2011 santiago madrid
visit Europe by land, and go to Iran from Istanbul.
12/5/2011 Istanbul Amman
12/11/2011 Amman Delhi
12/30/2011 Delhi Bangkok
5/2/2011 Bangkok Sydney
5/17/2011 Sydney Auckland
5/25/2011 Auckland LAX
Currently we have that on hold, but we hope to find a direct flight from USA to Europe.
Second debate was what cities should we visit in Europe… we arrive either early or mid September. We are hoping to do Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy and then Turkey and Greece are a maybe … by the time we get there it will be November and all the islands in Greece will be closed and Turkey will be cold. We’re thinking of skipping those countries for another trip.
OR
Maybe we can skip Wester Europe and head straight to the Greek Islands before they close in September?
OR
Maybe we can skip Europe all together and go directly to Iran and then come back to Europe?
Decisions decisions … the hard life we lead. =)
So, where should we go? Help us decide!