Why the heck not?

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Okay, okay, joking…that is not a full post obviously!  When He and I were first dating, we talked about travel…A LOT.   And then we did travel…A LOT.   So we made a list on Google Drive and shared it.  It was separated by continent and we added in countries we wanted to visit.  Then we drilled down from there and listed places and things in each country we wanted to see or do.  And then we just started checking them off.

African Safari and hiking on Mount Kilimanjaro?  Incredible.

A cross country train journey from Chicago to Napa?  Just your typical spring break, right?

Camping with the (really loud and smelly) penguins on Antarctica?  Our engaged Christmas.

Then more places we went, the longer the list grew because of who we met.  Each new friend had been somewhere else and told us such magical stories that we had to include it in our own lives.   Suddenly this little one page list was turning into a full college style outline with website links and bullet points.   How were we ever going to be able to get everywhere?  We work 9 to 5’s, we get 2 to 3 weeks vacation a year and generally it is balked at to take more than a week at a time (darn the American work ethic…). We would be exhausted and poor trying to go to each place for a week at a time and come home again.   There had to be a better plan.

My sister was the one who first mentioned the Delta Skymiles Around the World ticket to us.   I’m not sure she was aware at the time how much of a goal she planted in our brains, but quickly we ordered new credit cards to earn miles, took the day flights to DC on milage runs to hit the next bonus level, and updated the spreadsheet (and we’ll pause here for my family to laugh and mock because there’s nothing I love more than a spreadsheet or 7 to plan my life…my wedding…my Christmas gift list) of tracking our miles down to the very last one…and then one day, while neck deep in wedding planning and not watching the miles quite as closely as we had been, we realized we did it.   We managed to save 560,000 miles and were ready to start planning our ticket.

While we focused on the weddings, the honeymoon, the upcoming holidays, Delta threw us for a loop: they announced the program was ending in 2 months and if the ticket wasn’t purchased with all dates and stops selected by that date, it would never be available again.  So we went back to our spreadsheets and figure out how to start our trip a year early…kicking our lives into hyper planning and saving mode for months to make this dream come true.

Because, why the heck not.