7 weeks and 3 days to go …

Things have moved along quite rapidly since our last posts. Yesterday we finalised our itinerary and booked our tickets. While the Star Alliance website is great for planning a trip (I can’t imagine us having used a travel agent to do this), when it came to actually booking the flights we had to do it manually through Lufthansa in Germany as when we got to the final payment step it failed (probably because the amount was quite large). After a bit of back and forth and getting an authorisation number from the bank to debit the credit card we now seem to be all booked.

The itinerary can be viewed here. A lot of thought and planning went into this. In the beginning we thought we would leave our options open and not plan too much so if we liked a particular place we could hang around or change our plans as we felt like at the time. However in reality we were both eager to fit in as much as possible within reason (which probably demonstrates both our attitudes of not wanting to miss out on anything but we also realise this could be a flaw) so in the end we have had to plan most things down to the day. For example, some flights like the one from Honolulu to Nadi only happen once a week so in such cases there is little room for too much flexibility with the dates. A side note on that flight; we cross over the International date line and loose a complete day. We are simply not going to have a 16th of April in 2011 at all. Thank goodness that is not one of our birthdays!