"Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan."
John C. Maxwell
I know what you're thinking. He's really never going anywhere. Believe me, I've laid awake many a night thinking the same thing. But this time the change was at my direction and has multiple benefits. I'll explain.
The last itinerary iteration seemingly was a result of the airlines conspiring to keep me from taking this trip. I'm convinced there was some curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder, a red stapler, and a transistor radio holed-up in a dimly-lit basement poking around at travel itineraries for poor slobs like myself and just deciding to fuck with the traveler. OK, maybe not convinced, but it did cross my mind. I'm not privy the systems that connect multiple airlines' schedules and infrastructure, but I'll go out on a ledge and guess that they're infinitely complex and intertwined. I'm actually surprised it works at all.
Since American Airlines and Qatar Airways couldn't seem to put together a reasonable itinerary for me, I decided use AA miles to fly to round trip Doha and to bite the bullet and book my Doha to Kathmandu round trip legs separately...and pay out of pocket for the privilege. This was the only way I could get into Kathmandu and have sufficient time to process my visa to Tibet. Last night, while fighting the useless trivial thoughts that keep me awake in bed, it occurred to me that projects at my job are dreadfully slow and that I might actually have more travel flexibility than I did when I revisited this trip last year. So at 3:00am, I decided to go online and expand my departure date options, whereupon found an itinerary I could live with if I was able to depart Texas on April 8th instead of the 11th. Even better was that the entire trip was available on AA miles with no out of pocket airfares. Even better than that was the fact that this improved itinerary cost me 40,000 fewer award miles than the previous one. It really makes no sense, but I'll take it. In fact, I took it.
So now my itinerary looks like this:
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| 32 Grueling Hours in the Seat |
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| Seems like a long way to go until you consider the route traverses to top of the earth. |
On the bright side, I've never been to Paris or Sri Lanka. On the less than bright side, I don't have time to get out and explore either stop, even if I had visas. As grueling as this itinerary seems, it will land me in Kathmandu with almost four full days to acclimatize and get over jet lag from jumping forward 11:45 hours.
At 26 hours, the return trip is no cake walk, but it lands me back in Texas in time to be home for lunch.
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| This route flies over the future 51st & 52nd states of Canada & Greenland! |
