Part 1: Trip overview...How we didn’t really plan this trip

Planning for a big international trip is an interesting topic all by itself. Everyone is so different when it comes to travel, and the time frame of travel can make a huge difference. Some people need to plan everything out in advance, have everything set and reserved and map out almost every hour so there is no "wasted" time. "If I only have 7 days for this experience, I want to fit in as much as possible and then decompress when I'm back at home" they'd say. With the benefit of more time, others may take a more whimsical approach and sort of just make it up as they go… "If I plan it all out in advance, I could miss something really great that I only know about once I'm on the ground, so once I have my first flight I'll just figure the rest out on the fly".

At points in time, I've been on both ends of this spectrum. Having only a short period of time in a cool location and stacking experiences back to back then being completely exhausted for a week after the trip but feeling it was totally worth it. Other times, I've been in exotic locations for long periods of time which allowed me to really dig into an area and discover places off the beaten path that a 7 day tourist would miss or wouldn’t fully appreciate. Kristy and I are somewhere in the middle of this travel spectrum but leaning more toward the longer, slow, and whimsical travel planning approach and that definitely influenced how we approached this trip.

Now that we are in the middle of this big international experience (about 1.5 month into the 3 month trip) and we've locked in a broad framework for the whole 3 months, it's fascinating to look back and see how this whole thing developed…. Well, it's fascinating for me and hopefully to our tens of readers (Except Suneil, we don't really care how he feels).

Here are some high level stats of our trip including future plans:

Where do we go from here?

Before flying to Bangkok we didn’t have much planned beyond "we'll spend 3-4 months in SE Asia and the first month will be mainly in Chiang Mai, Thailand…oh, and we are flying Business class to get there." We sort of just figured the rest would work itself out, and while we wanted to get to spots like Vietnam, Laos, and Singapore nothing was set and we'd see how things were going and build the plan as we went. Who knows, maybe after a month we miss the cold darkness of Seattle winter and long to come back home! It's always hard to tell in advance how much travel is too much especially considering how different each destination can be and from my prior experience of longer term travel I felt that burnout really starts to creep in around 3 months so keeping our options open and not getting locked on "needing" to be gone for a specific amount of time was key.

With a trip like this, It's important to get the ball rolling and at least book the initial flight, which we did in July 2022 after I spent about 2 month searching for and obsessing about the best business class flights to Bangkok (more details about the tools, points used, etc. in part 2). Next we knew that we wanted to initially stay for at least a month in a single location to help set a base to get used to being abroad and decompress. Chiang Mai was a great option. Its known as a popular expat spot in Thailand, but without the craziness of Bangkok. Kristy has already written extensively about our time in Chiang Mai, but it's safe to say it was a great slow travel choice and we'll miss it as our base.

Really just winging it...

The long period of time in Chaing Mai allowed us to build out the rest of the trip. It fits firmly in the middle of the long vs short travel spectrum, with some short stays just to see a city (Kuala Lumpur, Singapore), some longer stays like 2 weeks in Laos where we plan to just relax and chill, and some parts in between like meeting Jenny and Cory "the Higgins-folk" in Ho Chi Minh for a week during Tet, Vietnam's new years and biggest holiday week. To escape the craziness of the cities of SE Asia, part of our plan was to build in some quick beach stops in multiple places like Danang, Vietnam (I'm currently writing this from our ocean view room at the Hyatt on Danang's amazing Non Nuoc Beach), and a new Kimpton Resort on Koh Samui in the Thai Islands later in February.

Hyatt Regency Danang Vietnam - Not a bad place to spend a few mornings away from the city.

Even though we initially planned to stay in SE Asia, Kristy really wanted to go to Australia and that turned into to doing a mini tour of Australia during the last month of the trip in March. Since we were already planning on spending time in Singapore, it was a short (if 5.5 hrs can be considered short) international flight from Singapore to Perth. Perth has always been one of my favorite cities since I last went there in 2014, and since it's so isolated from everything else, it's hard to add it to a normal trip. This made it the perfect place to start our Australian leg of the trip, going from Perth, to Melbourne, and finally Sydney over 2 weeks. My initial thought was to fly directly home from Sydney but somehow in our planning we got the idea of going to Japan for a week and we found a great deal on biz class flights back to the US from Tokyo using Alaska Air miles, so the last 7 days of our trip will be in the Tokyo Area mostly on Hyatt awards nights given how crazy expensive Tokyo hotels can be when paying cash. The maps below shows the whole trip:

Entire Map of the trip starting in San Francisco, going through SE Asia, to Australia, Japan, and then back to SF.

SE Asia portion of the trip: Thailand (Bangkok, Chiang Mai), Vietnam (Saigon, Hoi An, Danang, Hanoi), Laos (Vientiane, Luang Prabang), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), and Singapore.

Australia tour: Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney

Overall we ended up doing a good mix of Airbnbs, Boutique Hotels, Fancy Beach hotels, Airport hotels (for 1 night to make a 10+ hr layover more manageable), Serviced Apartments (Kristy's top priority in a place is a washing machine :) ), and city center standard hotels. Our idea going into the trip was to book business class flights on points for long international flights, and try to use points for the "fancy" high priced hotels, then pay cash for the Airbnbs, shorter flights, and other hotels. We managed to get pretty close to that goal so far in the trip and for what we have planned. In part 2, I'll add the details of all the trip legs and award points used including the original cash price or "value" of the award redemptions. The spreadsheets will come out in part 2!