Well, you are clearly a veteran traveler and thank you for sharing this advice with me. I'm returning from NCE rather than VCE, so your 2nd or return example does not apply. But I will see if it is possible. I do have a companion ticket I might have left unused this year. That might be a perfect purpose, repositioning with it. Keeping costs down. But there are two sides to my thinking, of course. Part of me thinks that D1 is not that big of a deal, but the times I have flown it going overseas were a pleasure. I like that side of things two. Plus you arrive in much better shape with less "recovery time" needed.
Oops, guess I transposed a letter in the airport code. There's 80K available on NCE-MSP on July 7th and on NCE-DTW on July 8th (also for NCE-CVG/IND -- more DL gateway cities).
