I just got a notice from my travel agent asking me to inform him of any additional changes to my itinerary before he issues my tickets tomorrow. Since I haven’t even looked at my itinerary since I decided on it many months ago, I thought it might be a good idea to reevaluate it. I ended up making a few slight changes: Removing days from England and adding them to New Zealand and my destinations in Asia. Also adjusting my itinerary so I depart for Perth from Christchurch instead of Auckland (saving me an additional $65 ferry ticket and a lot of time traveling back up north).

I also just found out that the RTW ticket requirements are much more restricting now (probably because flights are so much more expensive)…and the itinerary I submitted in May would normally not be allowed anymore. I feel lucky and relieved that my travel agent is still allowing me to stick to my original plan (especially since I already got a few of the visas and I spent so much time planning it).

I guess I’ve never planned a trip by myself before, and I never realized how much work is involved in planning a long trip like this. My RTW ticket requires that I plan my route prior to departure, so the hardest part for me was choosing all my destinations ahead of time (Seriously - who knows what I’ll want to be doing 6 months from now.)

Another thing I tried to take into consideration was weather (I hate to be cold!). Although after playing around with several different routes and departure dates, with both eastbound and westbound itineraries, I decided that it would be virtually impossible to have pleasant weather in every place I want to go. I’d have to choose which scenarios are least preferable and try to time my trip so I can avoid as many as possible, making sacrifices based on what I care about most (for example, freezing my ass off in China so that I don’t hit monsoon season in Thailand; traveling around India when the weather may be hot and muggy so that I don’t end up in Croatia when it’s too cold to swim; and risking some rain in Borneo so that I can arrive in Iceland when the animals are still there and the public transportation is still operating.) I’m excited for this opportunity and I do feel that made good decisions and used my tickets wisely.

This spreadsheet makes me feel a little anal retentive, but given the fact that I had to plan a year in advance, I do think it was helpful in determining the ideal route.

I included this simple formula in the date column:

=DATE(YEAR(F4),MONTH(F4),Day(F4)+E5)

This allowed me to plug in the amount of days I want to stay in a place and see the dates adjust all the way down.

Posted on September 9th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Trip Preparations