In my last post I made a reference to EGB. That might have made some of you scratch your heads. EGB refers to our house, on EaGleBend Lane. We adopted that name for our house some time back because of our love for travel and because of my tendency to refer to cities by their airport code (EYW is Key West, for example). The FAA currently is not using the code EGB, so if anyone ever wanted to get me a really unique gift, perhaps the FAA would be so kind as to officially designate my house as EGB. Hopefully that wouldn’t cause planes to land here.
So far I have only used 1.5 days of my 16 vacation days per year. I receive 3 weeks and 1 personal holiday. It’s kind of a nice feeling, given that 1/3 of the year is already behind us. We have been talking about the possibility of a motor home type trip with Bobby & Ian late in the summer, and very soon we will need to go visit Tim & Kate. That will be a long weekend, and there may be some other long weekend trips in there too, perhaps to SFO or ATL (San Francisco or Atlanta).
Another exciting development this weekend was that James has settled on a plan for advancing through the educational system and to hopefully become a college professor. It’s exciting to have a target to shoot for, and to think that he could actually be done with school and working on an H1-B in about three years’ time. Going forward with this plan, we may need to head off to Australia at the end of this year. I will need to save a bunch of my vacation time to make that happen, but I love planning for trips like this, even if the trip is 7 months away. I need to earn 20,000 more freakin’ flyer miles so that I have a total of 250k so that we can fly business class. I may have to make another transAtlantic trip in order to do that, but I figure it’s worth a $400 flight to earn the miles to fly business. I’ll never be able to afford to pay $7,500 each for business class tickets, and even if I could afford that I doubt I’d spend the money for it.
I have to also figure out how far I can stretch those award tickets. They’ll let you have a certain number of stop-overs, and we need to get from DFW to MEL via LAX and probably SYD. I don’t mind paying for a ticket on Qantas from MEL to SYD (we’ll spend some time in both cities) as they are reasonably priced, but I’m hoping we can add on another city where I have never been before, like Perth or Cairns. Perth is on the west coast and has lovely beaches, and Cairns is the tropical resort area near the Great Barrier Reef.
See, look – I’m already excited! 🙂
Current mood – I just told you
Current music – “Sydney From a 747”