Travel Tales - Day 1

Day 1 - if we can call it that? We departed Chicago late - around 10:30pm - on Wednesday night and enjoyed a life of luxury, flying Business Class on Turkish Airlines. Brandon open-mouth snored a solid 5 hours of the journey, so I imagine we are safe in assuming he enjoyed the accommodations as much as I did. We both dabbled in the fine wine offerings (B later crossing over into the world of Turkish beers), and the Turkish delights were a plenty. We arrived to Istanbul as well rested as we could possibly be after coming off an overnight, 12 hour jaunt....

A word to the wise when using reward miles - when you book Business Class on your own carrier, it apparently does not apply to all legs of the trip if operated by an affiliate airline. As you can imagine, this was a pretty big blow to our egos when we were refused entry to the extravagant Turkish Airlines lounge that occupies Istanbul's airport. Needless to say, after our minor cultural/customer service-related dispute with the desk attendants, we found solace elsewhere.

40 EUR a pop later, we are in the poor man's lounge enjoying beverages, clean bathrooms, food and Wi-Fi. This will likely be the most significant purchase of the entire trip - I'm not sure if we would have lasted 7 hours in the food court with such Turkish delicacies as Popeye's, Burger King and Sbarro....

So now we wait! We have about 2 more hours until we board for the final portion of our journey to Africa. We take off around 1am local time and are hopeful we can sleep through most of the flight.  Though I must admit, sleep pales in comparison to my dream of Brandon's sales skills being pushed to the extreme and scoring us two seats in Biz Class... Here's hoping!

We are scheduled to land around 1:40pm in Cape Town, after stopping briefly in Johannesburg. We couldn't be more excited to finally arrive - 2 continents later!

Until Day 2......