Monthly Archives: December 2006

Mork to Orson, Come in Orson…

Posted on by

One thing we’ve been doing a lot of research on running up to the last days before we leave is telephones and phone cards. Keeping in touch with folks back home is really important to us so we want something reliable, but we also don’t want to pay a lot for that muffler.

Telephony Without Hassel

We looked at Skype, GSM phones, etc. but phonecards just seemed like the easiest way to go. But since we’re both turning off our cell phones we’d like for there to be some way besides email for people back home to contact us.

Enter eKit, it’s a global phonecard with access numbers in most of the places we’re going and it offers subscribers voicemail accounts, eureka! Chocolate AND peanut butter.

Enter the Crackberry

The phonecard should cover 90% of our calls, but there was some concern about making emergency calls, recieving urgent calls from home, etc.

That’s when our friend Lynn Reisdahll entered the picture. She works at T-Mobile and very generously offered to give us her old Blackberry 7100t. Convieniently, T-Mobile will unlock their subscribers phones for free so it was pretty easy to turn the phone into a GSM phone that will work on any network …with the right SIM.

SIM Hunting

There are a lot of SIM services out there. We plan on using two SIMs on the trip, both from Telestial:

SIM Explorer – It’s has great rates, free incoming calls in many countries and coverage everywhere we’ll be traveling except Africa.

Mobal SIM – Crappy rates, but good coverage, especially in Africa. So that’s probably the only place we’ll use it.

So the phonecard/GSM phone combo is what we’re going with swapping out SIM’s as needed to get the best coverage.

Plan D

Posted on by

Okay, this one is our bad. After getting screwed by the Irish travel agency back at Thanksgiving we decided on another course of action. “Originating” our OWE flight in the UK. It was going to be great, we would fly there for a few hundred, maybe catch a soccer game, stop in Dallas to see LeeAnnes family on the way to New Zealand and be on with our trip.

That’s before we waited two weeks to get the flight to the UK. Now the prices are a lot higher to get there and that again puts us in a situation where, we are making a lot of very tight turn arounds during the holidays and not saving very much cash. I really wished we would have bought the London tickets when we formulated this plan, but we were so exhausted from the whole Ireland thing we just dropped it.

So now the plan is this: We originate our flight in… (drumroll please) New Zealand! Thank you, thank you!

We will pick up the hit of the tickets to NZ, but originating in NZ is still even cheaper than the UK, and WAY cheaper than the US. And we won’t burn any of our North American segments of our OWE tickets so once we get back to the US we can pop around a bit and visit some folks we don’t often get to see. There are benefits.

And this time I am buying the tickets to our originating country as soon as I can.

So, let’s review our history of iteneraries:

  • Plan A – US Depature – Too Expensive, let’s get it cheaper somewhere else.
  • Plan B – Ireland Depature – Cheaper, but the Travel Agents gave us the wrong price. Not as cheap as we had hoped.
  • Plan C – UK Depature – We screwed ourselves and now the cost of the flight over negates most of the savings we would have seen.
  • Plan D – New Zealand Depature – Still cheaper! Significantly streamlines our flights during the holidays, and gives us flights in the US after our RTW trip is over. Who could ask for anything more?

Now, let us never speak of it again.