New Posts Coming!

We have just returned from our four-country Asian tour and will start blogging shortly. 


This time my blog will have a different format. I won't detail the mundane boring daily list of things we did. Instead, I'll go through our photos in non-chronological order and describe the things we saw. This will be a photo-heavy blog, therefore, if you receive your updates via email without photos you'll want to click the blog link to see the photos.


Just to give y'all an overview of our trip, the idea came about because Paul wanted to "go big" and decided to use his timeshare in Phuket, Thailand. He invited us to join him, which we emphatically took him up on! Then, since we had friends in Taiwan, we incorporated a trip to Taipei into it. We figured out that the least expensive airfare was not to do a three-stop (MSP->TPE->HKT->MSP) but rather a "trip within a trip". We purchased a round-trip ticket from MSP to TPE via Narito (Tokyo), and then another round trip from TPE -> HKT (Phuket). Paul and Cresta (his girlfriend) did the same ... but instead of Taipei, they stayed in Shanghai a couple days. We managed to coordinate things such that our flights from TPE to HKT went through PVG (Shanghai) and we were on the same flight to Thailand as Paul and Cresta. 


I know this is confusing ... so here's the timeline:


Sep. 12: From from Minneapolis to Tokyo to Taipei.
Sep. 18: From from Taipei to Shanghai to Phuket.
Sep. 24: From Phuket to Bangkok to Taipei.
Setp 26: From Taipei to Tokyo to Minneapolis.


The first challenge is that we had to book the tickets in two stages ... i.e. we had to "almost book" the TPE->HKT tickets to see the price ($450 on China Eastern). Then we had to actually book the MSP->TPE tickets and pay for them. Then we had to quickly go back to China Eastern to buy those $450 tickets ... but that's when we ran into problems. We couldn't get them. Their website constantly bailed on us ... and for Paul too. So we tried the USAA (our bank) travel website, and we ran into the same problem. In the end, we ended up paying $800 for each ticket, which increased the cost significantly. Not only that ... since Paul and Cresta were spending more than 48 hours in Shanghai, they needed a tourist visa, at $180/each. This also created confusion for the immigration officials. They wanted proof that we were going to leave China and Taipei, that we had tickets out of the country. However, we had managed to lose our itinerary someplace in Taipei so all we could do was show them my Google calendar on my phone to "prove" we had a flight from Shanghai to Phuket ... and when entering Taipei, we had to "prove" that we were not living in Taipei and that we were flying to the US in a couple days.


Ultimately this worked out well. Stay tuned as we share our trip with you!