Our Trip Around the World: Introduction

Our initial five flights from Des Moines to the Pacific Northwest, Middle East, and finally Northeast Asia!

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since I last posted, for which I’m sorry.  Fortunately and unfortunately, my work place got much busier in early March and has remained so since.  I’ve also spent quite a bit of time researching and starting to organize a very exciting trip for my wife and I.  Over the past two years, the two of us have accrued a combined 2 million airline miles/points, and starting in mid-October, we plan to use a good chunk of these points to cover our travel on an eight month trip around the world!

In order to do this, I’ve decided to leave my full time job just before we head out since, for some reason, the company wasn’t super excited to let me take such a long vacation.  In order to fund our travel, Annalisa and I are planning to spend 10-15 hours per week each working in various ways.  We are also planning to devote time each day updating this blog with our travel experiences.  Hopefully this means a lot of interesting content for you to read.  We may change our plans in the future, but currently, we plan to create posts in each of the following categories:

1. Journal type posts letting you know where we are and what we are up to

2. Review posts letting you know our thoughts on specific flights, hotels, restaurants, and activities we do on our travels

3. How to posts detailing how you too can accumulate points and miles, and use them on a similar trip! We think that everyone should experience traveling around the world, and I extremely excited to help you set yourself up to do it!  The initial 5 posts I wrote six months ago are a start, but I plan to expand your knowledge greatly over the next few months.  There are so many great resources on the internet, and my goal is to point you towards some of the best ones directly, rather then having to spend time searching for them like I did.

With this introduction out of the way, lets give you a bit of a preview regarding our trip! Below is a map from Great Circle Mapper, showing the flights we currently have booked!

Our initial five flights from Des Moines to the Pacific Northwest, Middle East, and finally Northeast Asia!

Before you ask the obvious, there is a very good reason we are flying the long way to Seoul, via Dubai; I’ve always wanted to visit!  It also helps that we were able to get an awesome redemption on Emirates, which I will explain in more detail in a later post.

Anna-Lisa and I have a few places we know we want to visit while on our trip, including Australia, New Zealand, Bali, and most of SE Asia, but we’ve purposefully not planned the entire trip in advance so that we can be more flexible once we arrive in Asia.  We currently plan to spend a month living in Chiang Mai, Thailand after we finish visiting Taipei, but haven’t yet organized our flights down there.  I’m currently in the process of deciding the best way to get from TPE to CNX, as there are many possibilities which will take us through different cities.

Join us again soon as I go into more detail regarding our exciting trip around the world!