Come Fly With Me!

Next week, I begin a trip over a year in the making.  I'll circle the globe over the course of 7 weeks with every flight booked on airline points that I've been collecting for the better part of a decade.  I've been lucky to be afforded two months off of work, so as a points geek and travel nerd I figured the best way to spend that time was in "free" seats in first class cabins and to visit places I've never been to before.  Booking every flight just under a year in advance I was able to spend just under 500,000 points to put together my ideal itinerary.  It's a mix of over the top first class cabins like Singapore First Class Suites on the A380 and Cathay Pacific First Class on a 777 to traveling in coach on an Aerolineas Argentinas 737 or on a 50 seat South African Airways Q400 turbo prop aircraft.  Below is my complete itinerary of where those 500,000 points will take me over the course of 50 days.

For the flyer nerds among you, I'm sure you're wondering, Enzo, which airline's miles did you use to book these flights and what airline are you flying?  What cabin are you seated in; what kind of plane is that?  Fear not!  All that info and more than you'd ever want is yet to come!  (Also, this blogging platform is not great about fitting wide spreadsheets on the page in a readable way, cause trust me, I have lots of 15 column spreadsheets!)

If you're more visually inclined, here's what all those air routes look like courtesy of a handy website called Great Circle Mapper.  Click here to go to Great Circle Mapper's website to see more details about my route!

GreatCircleMapper.com is an easy to use and free site to create your own route maps!

ProTip: My highly scientific research from varying websites of questionable authority tells me that flying west with the sun is just slightly easier on your body than flying east.  I think that's because you really never lose time, you only gain it, well except for when you cross the international date line.  But don't worry, I'm not really going to try and make any sense of that any more than I'm going to try and understand the many temporal paradoxes encountered by Captain Janeway and her crew in the seven seasons of Star Trek Voyager.

"To hell with the temporal prime directive! I've got to get my crew home!"

I'm of course not restricting myself to just airplanes, in between many of those flights above you may have noticed some gaps between cities. I'll also travel by helicopter, by train, by bus, by safari Jeep, by bungee cord, and even in a rental car driving myself on the wrong side of the road down under!  Yes, I got the insurance, don't worry!  I also wouldn't be a true points nerd if I didn't book at least some of my lodging on points as well.  Though, being a little late to the hotel points game, I was only able to get about halfway there on hotel points.  Then finally, half of the fun of round the world travel as a points geek is exploring new airports and of course first class lounges!  Hopefully some of the lounges and airplane cabins offer some decent wifi so I can keep up with this little blog and share and memorialize my experiences along the way.  So, welcome onboard, hope you like cheesy puns, pictures of airplane seats, and selfies starring yours truly, because you're about to go Enroute with Enzo!  Flight attendants, please be seated, we're number 1 for take off!