My Final Blog for This Time and a Summary of My Trip

My big trip is over. The trip I planned and booked almost a year ago is over. It was my longest trip ever, in both time and miles, and it included all the things that I love to do.

As you might remember, all my stops had a theme:

·         Costa Rica – nature and animals

·         California – family life

·         Fiji – beach and snorkeling

·         New Zealand – hiking

·         Hong Kong – shopping

Every stop “delivered” according to plan. But I learned a couple of things:

·         If you want beautiful beaches, good snorkeling/diving, eat good local food and experience the culture – DON’T GO TO FIJI!!!! It is a bad tourist trap. The hotels are expensive and they don’t deliver even to low expectations. The rooms are bad, the food is at best OK (and definitely not local) plus the local “culture” that is offered is just student back-packer activities (games and dancing that appeals to the younger generation). Invest your money in a trip to South East Asia instead. 1000 times better!!!

·         To visit a big city after the tranquility of New Zealand was not a good idea. I got headaches from the big city noises and crowds.

Therefore I didn’t like my Fiji and Hong Kong stop as much as I liked the others. But you can’t win them all. They were still OK and they just lost in comparison with the other places I went to.

My highlights have been:

·         The night walk in Costa Rica. We saw so many animals and it was so exciting to do the walk in the dark

·         The helicopter ride to Grand Canyon. I just love to fly helicopter and to do it over and in Grand Canyon – it was just amazing!!

·         Disneyland with my brother and nephew. I have been there so many times, but it was extra fun to do all the rides with them. All of us giggled like little kids after Space Mountain.

·         The snorkeling on the Blue Lagoon beach in Fiji. Great snorkeling in good company.

·         Copland hike in New Zealand. What an amazing hike with a GREAT gang.

·         The multi-activity day in New Zealand. We started with sea-kayaking, continued with hiking on the beach and ended with a tunnel walk looking at glow worms. Talk about adventure.

·         3 hour SPA packet (Chinese massage, foot massage and a facial) in Hong Kong. It was nice to be pampered for such a long time.

My BIG BONUS on this trip is that I have met SOOOO many great people. I have done quite a lot of adventure trips before, but I haven’t always been so lucky with the groups and the tour leaders of the trip. This time I did 2 organized trips: Costa Rica and New Zealand and both trips had the best tour leaders ever and the groups were amazing. I have had so much fun! Thank you ALL!!! You made my trip fantastic!

I’m extremely grateful I got to do this trip. But I also know that I could never have done this if I would have had kids or a partner. I would not even be able to do a trip like this with a friend. I mean, this trip had a couple of special requirements:

·         Not too many people (in my age) can take 2,5 months of vacation and the chances that 2 people could do that at the same time is not very big

·         I flew on my airline points and the chances to find anyone with the same amount of points (or can afford to pay for the ticket) and that want to travel to the same places as me is close to zero.

I will always be sad that I never got kids and/or a husband, but I am proud that I’m making the most of/enjoying the life that I have. And this trip was the BEST THING I have ever done. I’m so happy that I got to do it!

And NO – I will not stop travelling! I have another 145 countries to explore. I will keep this blog to my next trip, but I will not write anything until then. And since I’m out of vacation and money – it will be a while before I write again.

Thank you all that have followed me on my trip around the world. It has been a pleasure to share my experiences.

I travelled without a ticket :-)

I’m back home after 11 weeks of vacation. It is a strange feeling. It is like my soul is not home yet, just my body.

I met a new friend in Hong Kong. (Come to think about it – I met new friends on every stop on my trip. J ) I met her on the shuttle bus on Saturday evening and we ended up spending the evening together. Then we met up again on Monday night (my last night in Hong Kong) and had another dinner and drinks. There were both really nice evenings and I got a very nice end to my trip.

This is what I love about travelling on my own – I meet so many nice people all the time. People tend to talk to you more when you are travelling on your own and I’m also more open to meet new people.

During my whole trip I have been prepared to have problems with my flights. The reason for this is that when you are flying on your points/miles you have the lowest priority if something happens, meaning that if your flight is cancelled you are the last one they will take care of - if they do that at all. I was flying with my Lufthansa miles, but I was only travelling with Lufthansa on a couple of flights. All other flights were handled by other airlines in Star Alliance and that increased my risk of being stranded. I didn’t however expect any problem on my first and final flights since they were with Lufthansa.

But that is exactly what happened. I have had no problems during my whole trip, but when I got to Hong Kong Airport with my ticket, Lufthansa told me that it didn’t exist in the system and if the ticket doesn’t exist in the system I couldn’t get a boarding pass. My face must have looked like a BIG question mark. How can a ticket that I have been using for 2,5 months suddenly not exist in the system?? I asked Lufthansa this and they told me “yes, we can see all your other flights here, but the flight to Frankfurt doesn’t exist in the system”. I didn’t know what to do or think. I asked if they thought I would be stranded in Hong Kong and they just said that they can’t let me on board the flight without the ticket and asked me to sit down and wait for the information.

Let me tell you – it was a very confused Lena that sat down. I try to always have a back-up plan, but I just didn’t think I would suddenly be without a ticket. I figured that the worst case scenario would be that I had to buy a new ticket, which would make a really, really deep hole in my pocket (one-way tickets tend to be more expensive than round-trips).

After the Lufthansa staff had been running back and forth a few times asking me questions like “have you made any changes to your ticket” and I answered NO to all the questions, they suddenly asked me to come along and checked me in. Now I was even more confused and asked them what had happened. They just stated that since they could see in the system that my ticket had been there and I hadn’t made any changes they decided to let me on board without the ticket and figure out what caused the problem later. Thank God for that!

So I came home as I should and now I’m sitting here making a summary of my trip, which you can read about on my next blog.