de-I...Travel Arranging Wizard

For those of a certain age, you should be running The Who's 'Pinball Wizard' as the soundtrack in the background.

It has been a while since Wife and I did a real, honest-to-goodness, break the bank, personal travel extravaganza. But we both felt the need to do something despite the pulls of the Theodora Project and Wife's focus on working out to maintain her physical well-being.  I think I have mentioned, we based the current trip on finally getting Wife to Ghana. So we are flying there first where we will spend almost two weeks hosted by my partner and his Wife who have just relocated there. There will be a lot of just sightseeing...learning about the county...but also Wife meeting many of the people who have become such a part of my life there. And there will be a bit of work on the project as well.

Then we are headed to Berlin where we will be hosting two grandchildren - 2.2. and 2.3  - whom we hardly ever get any alone time with. But we had about 8 days in between Ghana and Germany that we had to kill. Plus we are heading to southern Turkey to meet up with #2 and 2B for a few days R&R. We ended up deciding to go to Poland. With the flying to and from Ghana which is difficult logistically and financially, trying to make the other parts of the trip work without awkward flight times and high prices was proving challenging.

But somehow today, I was able to sit down and make an itinerary really work for us.

First, we had to get to Warsaw, Poland. Because of our flight out of Accra, Ghana is a red-eye, it seemed that we would have a long, long layover in Istanbul. But when I went to make our reservation, there was a flight only two hours after our scheduled arrival. At first, I was thinking this would not work because it was going to be a separate reservation and would require us to get our luggage and recheck-in. But I decided to chance to call the airline and they were able to make it work with a coach ticket that was no more than I would have normally spent on the flight booking it individually. So great, now I have it as a connection with our luggage checked through. Perfect.

The next challenge was getting from Berlin to Antalya, Turkey. All the options were connections. It looked like we either had to get up very early or get in later than we wanted. I have been using a number of search engines for air travel but had gotten away from Kayak. I went back to them and found a direct flight on an airline that looked like it was a fly-by-night but was, in fact, a joint venture of Turkish and Lufthansa.  We saved a bunch of money and flight time and have almost the perfect departure and arrival times.

I had one more leg from Antalya to Istanbul to book but that was fairly straightforward. In the end, we saved almost $500 over what we originally estimated. AND have a much better set of flights from a standpoint of body wear and tear.

I would take a victory lap. But I think I will take a nap instead!