Originally Posted by
Fleck
Communicate what you know now and your bad experience(s) with future travel agents.
You are going to visit relatives, presumably, so ship you're luggage ahead of the flight. Carry-on only.
Along with better routing and built in stopovers, that's doing a lot to reduce the potential for wackiness.
Look into some sort of stress reduction. You're entirely too wound up for 19 or 20. It's going to be alright.
Shipping luggage to Asia and back will be expensive.
The routing involves flying east to get from the North Central USA to Southeast Asia as the SIN flight from IAH stops in Moscow even though it's a "direct" flight.
Unfortunately some travel agents seem to have never traveled much themselves, so they think that, for example, any legal connection is fine and will be no problem.
Originally Posted by
ORDnHKG
Doesn't even need to drive, the Van Galder bus (Coach USA) run between ORD and Madison every hour to every hour and a half, lots of students, even FA and pilots take that bus to commute to work and school on a daily basis, it is a bit longer than driving (3 hrs, as it makes stop at Rockford, Janesville, and Beloit), but it saves on the rental or parking at ORD.
IIRC there should be Amtrak service too, Chicago (about two blocks from the "EL" line to ORD) - Milwaukee - Madison - St Paul. For flying, instead of using UA through ORD, look at DL through either DTW or MSP. Madison is close to midway between Minneapolis and Chicago.
AFAIK there wouldn't be significantly better options from MKE than MSN. MKE is a small (but new) airport that sometimes has good fares, while MSN is generally expensive. Using MKE rather than MSN is unlikely to cut a connection from the route.