Kindness of Strangers

We thought we had the last laugh.

After deciding to purchase our RTW ticket through American Airlines’ One World Alliance, we began the arduous task of using their on-line, interactive map to plan our itinerary.  The One World program can be an excellent value, but it is mired in bureaucracy; I feel pretty confident that some government official created it.  What looks like planning a simple route soon becomes an exercise in artfully dodging red tape.  Ten hours later, you’re scratching your head, wondering how you’ll ever get from Europe to Asia using two of your twenty alloted legs (only 15 of which can be stopovers).  It is, quite simply, a logistical nightmare.  Hindsight is 20/20, and if we could do one thing over, it would be communicating with the airlines earlier in the process. 

But it’s more complex than that.  I am someone who hates to be told “no,” so I usually avoid tasks at which I think there is a good chance that I’ll be disappointed.  This, I believe, is the chief reason I didn’t want to call the airlines earlier.  I knew it would be complicated, and I knew they would take down each of our carefully crafted plans one by one, like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.  And they did.  We have created nearly 20 versions of our itinerary, and each one has contained a fatal flaw that catapults a wrench in the works, gumming up our plans and causing us to start all over again. 

We thought we had pulled the ultimate fast one over on American Airlines.  In becoming initmately involved with the ins and outs of the map, Maikael discovered what looked to be a direct route from Rome to Sydney.  While you, dear reader, may consider this an insignificant detail, it represented a major coup.  We are interested in the One World Explorer pass, which bases your ticket price on the number of continents visited — not on mileage, as is the case with the Global Explorer pass.  Therefore, in bypassing Asia completely, we could save nearly $800 per ticket, plus the cost differential between the two plans, of which the continent-based program is cheaper. 

We were practically dancing around the house singing, “This is it!”  We excitedly called American Airlines, who proceeded to dash our hopes and dreams.  They told us that there is a stopover in Hong Kong between Sydney and Rome.  And, because you are required to change planes and, therefore, set foot on Asian soil, it counts as a continent, as well as an additional leg. Have you ever heard the sound of American Airlines laughing at you?  It sounds like this. 

This seemingly minor issue kicked off a two-day process of revamping our itinerary, becoming way more familiar with the interactive map than we would care to admit.  By Saturday night we were haggard and embittered.  It was becoming clear that there was no ideal itinerary, and that we were going to have to make some difficult decisions.  Destinations had to be cut.  But how do you decide between the Galapagos and Easter Island, knowing the chances of ever seeing either of those hard-to-reach locations is slim to none?  I had grown so tired of this planning process that I wasn’t even sure what I wanted anymore.  I couldn’t remember the places that had initially excited me.  I began to wonder:  at what point are you being flexible, and at what point are you giving up your original vision?  At this juncture I didn’t even know what my vision was, and I wanted to bag the trip completely.

We decided to clear our heads over Chinese.  At the end of the meal I cracked open my fortune cookie to reveal the following message:  “One always regrets what one should have done.  Remember that next time.”  It was a message from the universe, albeit in cookie form.  I would be more likely to regret not going on this trip than making a few compromises.  In the end, the things that were dragging me down were just details:  stone heads instead of blue-footed boobies. 

We went home and, pumped full of MSG, cranked out our best itinerary yet.  We called American Airlines this morning with the final three versions of our itinerary, and for the first time they didn’t shoot down each one like clay pigeons.  We may still have the last laugh.