Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Day 1

So, I'm here.  Auckland feels mostly like any other western city except that everybody driving seems to have a death wish.  How else could you convince every single person to drive on the wrong side of the road.  This is short because today is just a reading and planning and catching up day.  Kayla (my college friend and onetime roommate) picked me up from the airport but still has to work today.  I also still need to book everything else I'm going to do in New Zealand.  Also this is her view:
If I wanted this view in SF it would cost me 4k+ a month... ridiculous.

Friday, November 18, 2016

First thing I want to talk about is the stuff I have booked.  I did say that I wanted to use a travel agent of some kind but as it turns out I'm not doing that.  I have spent the last 6 months reading everything that is written on the web about travel and travel hacking and decided I want to try and put that to good use.  Maybe it blows up in my face and Maybe I'll Learn Something (MILS).

1) San Francisco to Auckland (11/28/16) on Air New Zealand courtesy of a young adult deal on StudentUniverse (371$)
2) Christchurch to Melbourne (12/21/16) on Qantas (233 NZ$ = 167.70$)
3) Sydney to Bangkok in FIRST CLASS (1/27/17) on Thai Airways
+Bangkok to Seoul in business class (3/18/17) on Thai Airways
+Okinawa to Manila in economy (4/28/17) on Asiana Airlines
(72,500 United miles and 106$)

I don't know if you can tell but that last flight is what is really exciting to me.  For perspective in economy alone those flights are worth 469+113+310 = 892 (this uses any airline and nonstop for the 2 legs which are also nonstop in my itinerary) which to be fair is only about a penny of value per mile.  However I got a much better booking than that set of flights.  Using the same airlines and the same routes the numbers are 469+328+487=1284 (1.6 cents per mile).  Using my actual booking is 2549+813+487=3849 (5.2 cents per mile).  Interestingly when I initially booked the 2 premium legs cost even more (the first leg was over 4 thousand dollars) and I had a valuation at time of booking in the range of 8-10 cents per mile.  Thing is I'm not complaining because I still get to fly first class and I never would have paid for that ticket out of pocket.
So 10 days left.  I haven't written because I've gotten distracted and I can occasionally get a bit lazy.  Problem is now I leave in 10 days, so I have lot to catch up on.  First I can't believe it but yes I'm actually leaving.

I've debated changing the name of this blog and rebuilding it repeatedly but I'm getting to the point where really I just need to get stuff on paper.  If I get to a stage where it makes sense to upgrade things I will.

I'm going to break up the next series of posts into discrete posts because there is a ton to catch up on.