The Beginning of a Blog – Welcome to Luggage Tags!

June 26th, 2012- A freshly minted online journal dedicated to our crazy, once-in-a-lifetime Round The World trip. When we decided to embark on our trip around the world, we knew we wanted a way to memorialize the whole experience and share it with friends, family, fellow travelers, and anyone out there who might be interested. We wanted to share everything we could from photos of Bucharest to a review of what beers are the tastiest in New Zealand. We’re just getting started and feeling our way through WordPress so bare with us as the blog grows and takes shape. In this blog, we will share the preparation required for planning a trip around the world, as well as chronicle our experiences while we travel. We are excited to share our adventures, both big and small, and give helpful hints for anyone who may be planning their own trip!

So, how did we happen to find ourselves on the cusp of such a trip?

About 3 years ago, we had planned to go on a short vacation to the Dominican Republic in February. We thought going to an all-inclusive resort in the middle of winter would be the perfect getaway. Unfortunately, nature did not agree and due to a snow storm in Atlanta and volcanic ash filling the air in DR, our trip was cancelled. No big deal, we got our money back and the Delta SkyMiles we had used for the tickets were refunded into our account. We scheduled a last minute trip to Las Vegas (it is kind of our “go to” in such situations) ,and on the plane began a dream. Here we had all these unused SkyMiles–what to do with them? That is pretty much the moment when our trip around the world was conceived.

We knew that the SkyTeam (of which Delta is a member) offered an around the world ticket that one could pay for using SkyMiles, and so began our saving. From that day, we became Delta loyalists, paid for anything we could with our American Express SkyMiles card and did all kinds of free promotions to save SkyMiles. We knew we needed 180,000 SkyMiles for an around the world ticket, but who wants to take all those long -haul international flights riding in coach? We made it our goal to save 280,000 SkyMiles each in order to fly Business Class on our trip. Thanks to an incredibly generous wedding gift from several friends (they gave us 133,000 SkyMiles all combined), we were able to save the amount needed in about two and a half years. To be fair with many destinations in Ohio, New York and Atlanta, flying almost exclusively on Delta was rather easy.

Now, here we are. A lot has happened between the time we reached that magic number and now, but we’ll get to all of that in future blog posts when we talk about the preparations. For now, just know that this started out as a small dream while we flipped through Sky Magazine on the way to Las Vegas. Now, we are less than a month away from taking the trip of a lifetime. People often say to us, “Who does this? How is it possible? I could never do this.” We are here to tell you: If we can do it, you can do it . If it is something you dream to do, make it happen. Fortune favors the bold. Seize the Day. In short, you only live once, so you might as well make it count.

We’ll let you know how it goes for us. We’ll hopefully share helpful hints and help you to avoid the pitfalls we will likely fall into. That’s all part of the adventure!