One month to go

We're now less than one month away from our departure date!  Instead of spending the weekend working through our (still quite long) list of things to do before we leave Japan, we spent it celebrating Kaori's Brother's wedding!  It was a splendid affair~

In other happy-family news, Kaori's sister has (finally) set her wedding date for the end of March next year.

When Kaori and I started planning this trip, we were actually dreaming of taking a year off and hopping around the globe on a one-world ticket.  But then our plans started taking shape in the midst of all this matrimony...  Soon our plans got trimmed to a 3 continent, 5 month trip.. then ultimately down to a summer vacation abroad.  (Advantage: ALT - 6 weeks in the summer, unpaid.  Don't even have to quit my job.)

With a little over a month to work with, we were on the fence between doing the Eu-rail around Europe trip and doing a greatest-hits South America.  What finally tipped the scale was the physical demands of the trip.  Machu Picchu was number one on our SA bucket list (as I'm sure it is on most people's).  I remember being totally floored by the story of the "Lost City's" discovery and gaping at the photo in my 4th grade social studies text book.   I made the case that the only way to really discover the site for ourselves was to do a proper 4-day hike on the Inca trail.  Naturally, we should tackle this trip while we're still young.  We can always potter around Europe in our old age, right?

Even though logic won in the end, there was still a fair amount of speculative cost/benefit analysis done on the EU v SA decision making.  This was mostly inspired by the difference in airfare costs.  At one point, there was a $700 round trip ticket to Paris from Tokyo on South China airlines.  We eventually paid $2750 for round trip to Lima - almost 4 times the cost..  There are still lost of unknown costs lurking in this spread-sheet, but I thought it would be interesting for everyone to see...