After a few days in New Orleans with friends, it’s time to set off for the far east and start one of the most ridiculous travel itineraries I’ve ever created.

28 hours is a long time to travel, but by no means is this the first time I’ve been on a long trip.  Years ago I took a bus from Santiago to Buenos Aires.  24 hours on a bus with no toilet paper is a long time, and a long time without toilet paper teaches you to never get on a long internationally traveling bus without spare TP ever again.

Fortunately, the flights below should all have toilet paper, so at least for the next two days, I’ll be fine.

New Orleans was a blast, and there are about 20 new pictures loaded as a result.  I took about 400 pictures, so over time I’ll most likely go through and add more after I clean some of them up and see which are the best.  I’ll add anything that looks decent to the facebook account associated with this monster of a trip.

As for me right now, I’m in the Global First Class lounge in the international terminal at Washington D.C.  Through the wonder of MANY flights from Madison to Reno for work, I happened to have the 70,000 United flight miles required to fly first class the entire way from New Orleans all the way to Vietnam.  My flight path can be seen below.

As for jetlag – my immediate plan is that I will try to stay awake for as long as possible on the way to London.  The reasoning behind this is that if I can be as tired as possible when I arrive into London, it will help me sleep during my 11 hour flight from London to Thailand.  Not that I could ever sleep even half of the 11 hours of the flight, but my goal is that I’ll be ‘waking up’ around the time we land in Bangkok – since 6AM is a normal time for me to get out of bed.  Ultimately I assume that my body will be a mess when I get to Hanoi, but we’ll see.  I’ve also thought that sleeping to London, being awake for about half of the flight to Thailand, then sleeping through the end, could also be a good strategy.  I’ve get to really come up with a great plan, since I’ve never done 12 hours worth of timezones at one time.