Booking the Big Trips

I have really been putting off writing about this trip. It was a lot! As Andy likes to say, this was my master class in vacation planning. When I finally asked him what he meant by that he talked about how prepared I was. I will admit that I have planned many a vacation with a location and that’s it. We figure out what we want to do when we get there. This was not that vacation. In fact, when it came time to leave I had a binder with every page printed out of what we were doing on this trip complete with a calendar and flight details. Tip: When you are traveling to a developing country, do not rely on wifi or cell service. You need to print things out just to be safe. We have been to plenty of developing countries and been in a dead zone when we needed to pull up a ticket or map. This trip came about 1 summer after Botswana (where we went in 2024) because we had American Airlines points burning a hole in my pocket. At the time I thought I only wanted points with one airline and had chosen Delta. Tip: Points from any and all airlines are good. You do not need them just for one airline. We had wanted to go to Egypt for a long time and with flight time, I wanted to add Morocco on this trip. Andy can get 2 weeks off work at a time, so it was going to be tight. I booked well in advance to get the best points price and then froze. This happens to me sometimes with big trips that need to be planned a lot, so I just walked away. Tip: If you’ve planned far enough in advance with your tickets, it’s ok to not immediately plan the rest of the trip. By December of 2024, I knew we needed to start planning based on the list of things that we wanted to do. And for this trip, I knew I was going to need help. Andy sat at the desk top and I was on a laptop as we planned what we were going to do on what dates. He had a calendar up and would say dates we could be places and then I would be on the airlines website booking the flights. We ended up getting everything booked within 2 days. I thought it was all set. Then a couple of months later our flight out of the US got changed. I got the email at work and panicked. We had Egypt Air flights, Morocco Air flights, a cruise, hotels all booked. I got home to the itinerary and realized that we were ok. Tip: Leave space on either side of your trip for flight changes. I had put the cruise right in the middle to protect it from just this kind of thing. Everything else was flexible, except my job. They had me leaving on my last day of the school year (teacher work day). I talked to my principal and was able to work that out. It happened to be a Tuesday after Labor Day that we were supposed to leave. I then thought, why are we wasting the weekend when we could be there? And moved the flight up. Tip: If the airline moves your flight, you are able to change it without penalty. This now gave us more time in Morocco. So we added some beach time that we thought we would not get. Make sure you check back the next two days to learn more about this trip to Morocco and Egypt!