112 Days - Booked!

With all the talk of plane tickets on here, I couldn't resist booking a ticket today. I studied spanish for 90 minutes tonight, and then started hunting around for ticket deals. This morning when I looked they were all around $1,400 or so, but I eventually stumbled onto a cheap Continental leg and it became the basis for my trip.

I actually had it down to about $1,000 at one point, but the cheap leg sold out before I got a chance to book it. Anyways, I did manage to get a pretty cheap leg, so we're go for launch.

My official plan is to leave on January 4th from Vancouver and end up in Buenos Aires. That should give me enough time to recover from my New Year's eve hangover and do my final bit of visiting and packing. I'll be staying in Buenos Aires for roughly three months, and then bouncing back through New York City at the beginning of April. I was there a few years ago, and absolutely loved it. It was crazy hot and humid when I went, so I'm looking forward to visiting when it's not a sauna. Plus, last time I hung out mostly around Times Square, which in restrospect was dumb, so this time I'm going to explore some of the cooler areas like Chelsea and Greenich Village.

I purposefully dumped myself on the east coast after Buenos Aires so I could skip across the Atlantic after New York City. It seems like the cheapest way to get to Europe right now is via Aer Lingus, the airline of Ireland. A one way ticket to Ireland is about $600 right now from New York. Since my friend Andy is currently living in Ireland right now, I think I'll probably head there for a visit and to check out the sites for a week or so. Afterwards, I'm not really sure. I've been told you can usually get a cheap charter flight back to Vancouver from Europe, most likely on Air Transat. So I'll probably wait until I get to Europe before thinking about when I'll finally head back to Canada.

As I've pointed out before, I'll be working on this trip. I'm going to be renting a furnished apartment with WiFi in Buenos Aires while I'm down there, and probably doing some combination of hostels, hotels, coffee shops, and temporary accommodation in Europe. I have a lot of friends in Europe I've been promising to see for 10 years now, so I'm hoping I can see them all on this trip. That would involve a trip to France at some point, and also Serbia. Hopefully I can make it all happen.

Anyways, tonight is really the first night I've started to get excited about all of this. In my head this has always been a great adventure, but it wasn't until today that I actually got a few butterflies booking the first flight and finally committing to it.

I'll be giving notice at the end of this month, and then spending the next two selling off furniture and packing stuff out to go into storage.