Almost all the major bookings are made now.
I had to book a few hotel stays in between tours and cruises - I've booked places to stay in Manchester, Cambridge, New York and Fort Lauderdale. I wrote before about how expensive the hotels in London and Copenhagen are - well, Cambridge gives them a good run for their money, specially if you decide to stay close to the centre of the city to avoid hiring a car. In the end I've gone with the Crowne Plaza - close to the city, easy to access public transport including to the war museum even though it's a fair way out of town. And, it's in the same street as three of the places on my 'things to see in Cambridge' list - Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences, University Museum of Zoology, University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. And, by the time we get there, hopefully I can forget the fact that we've paid more than $600 to stay for three nights. eeek.
Another step along the way - I've booked our flights to England - two very long flights for old people like us. We're going with Emirates - even my Qantas Club membership and the thought of a stack of Frequent Flyer points couldn't bring me to pay the huge extra amount Qantas wanted to charge us for the flight. We leave Sydney late on 21 August, almost 15 hours flying time to Dubai, then a two hour transit, then another almost 8 hours to England. However, both flights are on an Airbus A380, and our experience with the A380 to Los Angeles last year was that it was enormously more comfortable than our previous long flights on 747s. So, we'll see.
We're not going to London first; instead we're leaving a couple of days earlier than we originally planned, and we've picked a flight that goes direct to Manchester. Once we've recovered from the jetlag, we're going to visit some little country towns where some of Paul's ancestors came from - places like Hayfield and Glossop and Chinley. Then, we're going to Cambridge as we originally planned, to see the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and also just to see Cambridge - it seems to me that you could spend months exploring Cambridge, but we've got three days! Then, we'll be off to London to start the coach tour.
Have also booked the flights from London to Copenhagen (British Airways) and from Washington to Miami (American Airlines). Nothing much interesting in the way of choice for either flight - there were some cheaper flights but mostly on airlines with less comfort, more charges and less service, more fighting over seating / overhead lockers and in some cases less certainty that the flight will actually happen :-) Rather than flying, we're going from New York to Washington via Amtrak, and that's booked too!
There's only one more major thing we have to book, which is the flight home from Los Angeles. It's still a bit too early to actually book the flights, but of course I've been checking it out. Same as for all the rest of our flights, it's a one-way trip so there's little to no chance of ever getting a special deal. I'm really torn about this one.
- It would be possible to fly home for as little as maybe $800 each, but that's on Air Pacific with a stopover in Nadi and reviews tell me their fleet of planes is fairly old, not so comfortable and with fairly ordinary inflight entertainment.
- Qantas of course is an option. At the moment it looks like they'll charge us about $1390 each - a bit annoying when an American on the same flight travelling to Sydney and back going back to Los Angeles later will have only paid about $1290 return! The Qantas flight would almost certainly be on an A380 and of course direct to Sydney. And, because of Qantas Club (and frequent flyer points) it would be a better deal for us than almost any of the other airlines we could fly with. Princess will kick us off the cruise ship before 10am but most flights to Australia leave late at night, so there's a long wait in LA regardless of who you fly with, and the Qantas Club is a reasonable place to wait in..
- There's also a possibility that Princess will be able to book a flight for us. Mostly it doesn't make a lot of sense to let a cruise line pick your flights, for normal return trips especially - they often chose horrendous connections and you regularly get charged a lot more than you would to book it yourself. But, for one-way fares, they can be really really competitive because you can get the benefit of their bulk fare purchases.
- And finally, Air New Zealand offers a really interesting alternative. They're currently saying around $1300 each for the trip, with a stopover in Auckland which isn't all that exciting since it's not long enough to leave the airport, it just means it takes 2 hours longer than the Qantas option. But, the attractive thing about Air New Zealand is that for an extra $300 each, we can get one of their Skycouches. This means we'd get three economy seats together for the two of us. This alone is definitely a huge improvement in comfort over only having two seats. But, even better, the Skycouch seats are deliberately set up so that the footrests can come up level with the seats and create almost a bed to sleep on - not quite long enough to stretch out and not particularly wide either but definitely room to lie down. I suspect we're going to be really worn out by this time, and the thought of this level of comfort for such a small extra price is very attractive. I've got a little while longer to decide, but this is looking like a fairly good plan right now.
