Our next Mega Trip

When Julie and I were on our big trip to Umbria this year, we talked about taking a trip next year to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.  Once we settled back in here at home, Julie started doing travel planning.  Our next major adventure will be Spain and Portugal in April. 

We weren't really in a hurry to book anything, but we saw that the flights would be about $1500 each.  Not horrific, but certainly not cheap.  On top of that, the trip is a little more awkward because we want to fly into Lisbon and out of Barcelona.  Airlines do one well, but often not the other.  We started poking around with frequent flier miles and ended up getting from Salt Lake to Philly to Lisbon, for 32,000 miles.  I normally have problems getting from Salt Lake to LA for 32,000 miles.  Getting back wasn't quite as good, but still very reasonable.

The lesson, if you can possibly plan a trip a full year out, you can actually get some nicer frequent flier opportunities.  The sad news is that between Italy and Spain, our frequent flier buckets are almost empty for both American and Delta.