The fourth member of our group

Currently in the middle of entering our itinerary into Google calendar, largely due to Liz’s new obsession. Google calendar is pretty cool, but I’m not sure if there’s a point in having so many different versions of next year’s plan (we already have the STA print-out, the excel chart Liz made, and I’ve written it down in my own calendar). It’s not like we’re going to forget at the end of November that we’re supposed to be leaving Ecuador. Entering these flights into the calendar is tedious but it’s forcing me to take a closer look at exactly what we’re going to be doing next year. I hadn’t realized, for example, that’s it’s going to take us 2 days to fly to Sydney from Paris.

I was getting so bored putting in all of the times and destinations for our flights that I decided I would write on the blog. I’ve been putting this off for a while because there will be much more exciting things to write about once we leave New York. The most exciting development at the moment is Liz’s new discovery on the internet: Clocky The Amazing Mobile Robot Alarm Clock. Here’s a description of our new friend: “Clocky is the alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don’t wake up. Clocky gives you one chance to get up… but if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide.” I hope he turns out to be as special as I think he will be. He sounds pretty incredible. Liz is just as excited as I am (a little more so actually, as she did just say “it sounds like the most amazing thing ever”). The website says he can jump up to 3 feet, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

We’ve bought the tickets!

Ahhh!! We’ve finally done it! The tickets have been bought.

As much as I was originally rushing to buy the tickets on Saturday, I’m really glad we took them home and worked out a couple little details, or rather the Collases did and I just agreed to whatever they decided. Nonetheless, here is the new schedule, which now includes a night in New York and a couple days in New Delhi. The leave date, however, remains the same. 29 days to go… am I counting right?

Booking Confirmation

Good news!

Ariana and I just got back from STA. We spent well over two hours creating the perfect itinerary with Ryan, who looked like he had spent quite a significant amount of time perfecting his really-hung-over-and-just-rolled-out-of-bed look. He actually turned out to be a really helpful guy, and, although we couldn’t buy the tickets, we do have confirmed seats on 13 flights over the next 3 months. I’m going to post the itinerary so you (and we!) can keep track of our journey. I’m also going to try to find the thing on the STA website where you can make a map of your trip to put on the blog.

We also got our student ID cards at STA. We realized that we should have gone a few years ago to get $22 fake IDs because we could have provided any information at all and got a nice official looking card. You don’t need to prove anything. You can say you’re from any university at all and give your date of birth as anything over 12 and under 26. I can’t believe more people don’t take advantage of this.. well actually I’m sure many do, I just wish I had found out earlier.

Anyway, the important thing is that we now have seats confirmed and student IDs. We leave September 7th and visit 10 countries over 10 months. The other amazing thing is that the average flight cost is under $300! Under $300 for international flights.. it’s so nice to be a student. Anyway, 34 days until lift off!!