80,000 reasons to finally book a flight.

So it begins. Yesterday, I booked my first flight for what I’m hopeful will be A Great Journey!

After slowly accumulating Skymiles the last year or two (full disclosure: I did a mileage booster on Delta back in May, in anticipation of this trip) and patiently waiting for summer 2016 flights to become available for booking, I found an offer I couldn’t refuse: 80,000 miles for a flight from LAX to Johannesburg…via Paris…business class!

This is definitely happening now.

Delta is notorious for having terrible availability on award flights, so I made it a point to set a calendar reminder to scope out schedules and pricing as soon as they became available…especially because I’d be starting the second leg of this trip in the peak summer season.

A while back I determined that I really wanted to (and simply had to, given my fortuitous location) spend one last, glorious summer in Seattle – specifically, to enjoy Seafair, my favorite summer weekend – and that doing so would preclude me from hitting Africa without feeling rushed, trying to make it overland from South Africa to Uganda in time for the discounted Silverback Gorilla trekking passes. So, I settled on going from Cape Town to Cairo in the 2nd stage of this trip, after my sister’s July 15th wedding. This meant counting back 330 days or so from that date to start looking at flights from the US to CPT or JNB.

I was tempted to extend my US stay through August 7th, so I could sneak up to Seattle for Seafair 2016, but decided to simply come home for the wedding, give or take a few days, so that I wouldn’t get out of RTW mode. And things couldn’t have worked out better.

As many people know, I’m F.A.F. (frugal as f*ck), much to the dismay of past girlfriends. But living below my means and being smart about spending is what’s allowing me to do this trip (sorry I’m not sorry, ladies). So I’m all about value and getting a good deal. And there are few better travel deals than nailing a $9800 flight for 80,000 miles, when flying coach would have cost 50,000 miles. Just had to do it.

It was a bit of a splurge, as it ate up 30,000 extra miles I could’ve used to come home from Asia or South America. But, it’s two 10+ hour flights in very comfortable conditions with a 10 hour stop in one of my favorite cities in the world (hello catacombs, dinner, and beautiful, well-dressed mademoiselles with insanely sexy accents). A helluva way to start the 2nd leg of A Great Journey.

Granted the really nice new Business Class arrangement above is only for the LAX-CDG flight, but I won’t complain about the A380 configuration from CDG-JNB because it’s far better than coach.

Truth be told, I’m more excited about the Cape Town to Cairo trek than any other portion of the trip. Having spent six weeks in South Africa – an amazing country and one of my absolute favorites – with a couple of brief stops in Zimbabwe and Zambia, and two in Egypt, I’ve already fallen in love twice with this continent. I’m looking forward to doing it again.