I think I either typed something weird so that people misread it or the first person misread it and everyone followed suit.

I was picking the winners at the end of the week, when I had posted so I'd have their names at the BEGINNING of MARCH and that we were departing around the 7th of APRIL. I still have 3 weeks left before we leave. I have the winners and they're all US citizens and one Canadian.

So far every country I've looked into that requires visas can either be granted in person or online. We shouldn't have any problems with that respect.

Thank you for all of your help. I'm just reading through this now since the thread got moved and I was blanking on how to find it. Now I've got it back.

I'm trying to stick with oneworld since I have EXP but it seems like their tickets are anywhere from 2500/3000 more expensive than the alternatives. It's a tough call!

I've been to Japan and my magazine has a huge following there. I've never had any issues with being heavily tattooed. I'm the most heavily tattooed visibly in the group and I am very well received in all of the countries that I've traveled to. I've been everywhere, with the exception of the middle east and some parts of Asia and Australia. Plus our hosts in Japan run Burst Magazine so we should be well taken care of and also won't have any problems going to bath houses or staying in hotels that ban tattoos.

My ideal travel situation would be that we could purchase tickets that would be the skeleton of our trip. Our routing would be cemented as well as our initial departure date but that our dates of travel would be more flexible. It'd be great to be able to extend or shorten our stay in a given city without having to pay hefty fines. If that's how RTW tickets work, I'd be happy as a clam but from the routing applications that I've been using, you need to pick the dates.

I had a really specific routing that I was using on various sites but now I seem to have misplaced it. I'm not at home and that's where I have my cute little map with our routing drawn on it. i'm guessing I didn't save it on this laptop. I had about 11 segments on it. I just found a one way fare sale to get us from LAX-SYD for 525 per person which seemed like it was a lot cheaper than anything else I'd seen. I need to figure out if it makes more sense to just buy a multi trip ticket or one way tickets using sales etc if it would be less expensive.

Here is my ideal routing:
LAX-SYD (travel in Australia would be based on what fit our needs while there, either an airpass, some train or bus travel etc)
Australia to New Zealand (figure we'd do that near the end of our trip to get advanced purchase for a 1-2 day trip to meet with Maori)
Australia - Japan (same situation in Japan where we move around ourselves as needed)
Japan- Bangkok, Thailand
Thailand - China (need to check out visa requirements, mostly want to see the great wall and more of a tourist stop than anything)
China (or Thailand) - Calcutta, India (same travel plans as above)
India - Isreal (relatively short trip, huge fan base there surprisingly enough!)
Isreal - Europe (once we're in Europe we'll be touring in a Tour Bus)

Russia all depends on if the promoters who want to bring us there arrange everything. I've had friends who live there who I trust their opinions and they had to live with armed security and didn't have very pleasant things to say about the country. I have a large following there as well so it's fairly important to me that we at least go to St. Petersburg and Moscow but it may turn into more of a weekend jaunt than anything.

I'm not sure if I have enough hard set destinations right now to use all of the 16 stops we're permitted with a RTW ticket. We're not going to South America or Africa on this trip. I just don't feel that there is enough time to squeeze those continents in. I'm planning on spending 3-4 weeks in Australia, 3-4 in Asia/India, a couple days in Isreal and then the remainder of the trip traveling around Europe in our bus.