in the beginning

It's been a long long time since I've traveled. I don't mean the "drive 5 hours" type of traveling, but the "pack a couple suitcases, cross a couple oceans and leave your life behind" kind of traveling. When I was younger, my family used to take 3 or 4 weeks and travel, but since I got older and had responsibilities (like school and work) and expenses, it was lucky if I could even get away for 10 days.

Thus, when my sister moved to Hong Kong, I knew I was going, too. I counted up my vacation days (again and again and again), and determined that I could take 3 weeks off to go to Hong Kong and Malaysia. Matt needed to stay through the election, so that meant we were looking at mid-November to December. We'd miss the Thanksgiving travel-hell and hit the very beginning of the rainy season in Asia, getting back with a few weeks to prepare for Christmas. Perfect.

I'd assumed that we'd be buying tickets, so I started scanning the airfares and made myself a little crazy doing so. It's really hard to effectively comparison-shop international flights, especially ones where we're going to be making a few stops and no dates are set.

Matt, bless him, decided we were going to fly on miles, and fly well. He did a lot of research to figure out how to convert our Amex/Starwood points to miles for different airlines, and even enlisted online expert help. And so for the low price of 13,000 extra points that we needed to "borrow" from Amex, we were able to fly first-class on Cathay Pacific. Yeah baby!

The next few months were spent doing some research on things to do, places to see, food to eat, and nailing down the dates we'd be spending in each place. It seemed so far away in the beginning, but from about 3 weeks out it seemed like time sped up and I was scrambling to get everything in order before we left, especially because we'd be leaving directly after work. We made it, though, which gives me the opportunity to ramble on in the second installment of our travels.