If you live long enough you get to have a 60th Birthday. Having met the first criteria of not dying first mine is arriving. Having had prior experiences that led me to believe it might never arrive I decide to explore places that only a few years ago (before FlyerTalk) it seemed that I’d never have the opportunity to see. The places happen to also be on my list of places to visit prior to dying.
It has been a number of years since I posted a trip report here on FT but the other day
dhammer53 posted a
link to one of my old ones so I thought that it might just be appropriate to take some time and write another one once again. Having a 3 week trip am sure that there will be plenty of time to bore each and every one of you with the musings of an old man.
We, my better half and I, have booked a pair of oneworld awards that will take us to
SCL-IPC-TLS-BUD and home. 140kAAdvantage points each in C – not a bad bargain IMO. And in Santiago and Budapest we will be exchanging *points for our hotel stays. No *woods on Rapa Nui or in Toulouse but all in all it seems like what the neighbors would call a “trip of a lifetime” and what I would call my big trip for 2007 or even the big trip for this half of 2007. All in all there are some good things to say about always being on vacation and with FlyerTalk added into the equation it ensures that one doesn’t have to be limited to one trip of a lifetime even though philosophically speaking each trip is essentially once in a lifetime and really can’t be duplicated again. Read along and digress with me as much as it seems that I will.
Statistically speaking we will fly 11 segments on this trip for a total of 27,834 miles and I’ll add one new airline flown, LAN Chile, and 5 new airports, LIM, SCL, IPC, TLS and BUD to my existing numbers for new totals of
44 airlines and
70 airports. Also will visit two new countries, Chile and Hungary, for a new total of
33 countries visited. In addition we will participate in another
FT DO in Toulouse which includes a visit to an Airbus facility and a tour of the new 380 along with some technology that isn’t quite as old as I, that is to say the Concorde and a dinner in a castle.
And the best statistic will be that sometime during this thread I will probably do my 3000th post on FlyerTalk. For some reason I have a feeling that it will happen 7 years, 2 months and 20 days after my join date.
Prelude - Why go on such a trip without doing another just before?
As some you might know/remember my son was injured in Iraq back in December and has been recuperating at Scofield Barracks in Hawaii.
The Mission The ways things work out the best time for me to go see how his recovery is coming along is April 4-10. Means I arrive back at SFO just shy 5 hours prior to leaving for SCL. Sure there have been others who regularly fly KOA-LAX-SFO-JKF-LIM-SCL or something similar so what the heck it sounds doable. 10581 miles, two redeyes (one in coach) in 32 hours.