::A Geek in Korea::

I was awakened this morning by a call from my parents. They Skype’d me and I got their call forwarded to my phone (that’s so awesome). Anyway, I was awakened and then forced to decipher dates and make decisions about our European vacation coming up in a few months. This is not my idea of a good wake up call.

It turns out my parents will have an excuse to see me for some time while we are in Europe. We’ll check out London together if things work out. The call was about what when we would meet. They are working out their reservations, so now we know when we have to make it there.

We’ve had our tour book planners for months, but we haven’t seriously cracked them open more than a few times to play with Google Earth for some research. Having a concrete day to meet my parents broke down all the “maybe” and “what about this” ideas we were having about planning the vacation. We sat down and worked out an actual route we could both agree on. We made compromises and set time frames. We had everything set. We knew where we were going. All we needed were the tickets to get on the plane to go.

Problem.

We’ve been in contact with travel agents today and trying to reserve tickets to fit our new plan. We’ve run into problems trying to find a flight that’s going where we need but isn’t insanely priced. It seems that between when we called in the morning for information about tickets, and when we called back to make reservations, all the “cheap” tickets they told us about somehow disappeared. Hmm. That’s an awfully strange coincidence.

It seems our normal booking agent doesn’t really handle “backpacking” tours well. We’ll have more research to do to find a cheap flight. Once the tickets get bought, we’ll move onto the details of planning what we’ll bring, what we need, and where we’ll go in more detail. That’s my favorite part.