Adventure Awaits in Austria

Austria Posts

Adventure Awaits in Austria

What I Learned Traveling Solo

Overnight Layover in Chicago

Wien

Introduction to Hallstatt

Hallstatt

Mauthausen Memorial

Melk Abbey

On a Saturday back in May, we were in route to Crater Lake when the Twitter notifications started coming. Now this is an everyday occurrence, but 99.9% of the time, the deals are not out of our home hub, so we either pass them over or along to friends or family who might be able to take advantage of them. But on this particular morning, round-trip flights from Chicago to Austria were coming up on American at $344 per person, a deal almost too good to pass up because of the low fare price and the amount of miles earned by flying it are almost enough for a free domestic one-way ticket.

In these situations, our motto is book now, ask questions later because there is nothing to lose. It seems a little crazy to live this way, but there is almost always an out. There is a DOT law that requires US airlines to allow 24 hours to exit out of an airline booking. Most airlines like United and Delta allow a cancel/refund of money if done within 24 hours, but American Airlines in particular allows their consumers to hold international flights at the locked-in revenue rate for 24 hours! This is convenient because it gives us some time to think through the logistics a little without being charged anything.

So there we were; pulled over in beautiful and mountainous southern Oregon, trying to get service to connect hotspot to the laptop and frantically putting flights on hold for ourselves and others on multiple fall dates.

The page timed out multiple times because service was intermittent, but we were able to get flights on hold before the dates and fare disappeared.

Over the next 24 hours we had a chance to think and talk about it more, it was decided that I would cross the pond with our three friends, but Matt would stay home this time around. At this point, most of his PTO had already been allocated for the year, and he didn't want to risk only having 1-2 days of PTO left in case of sickness. I'll miss him dearly on this trip, but I trust it will be a growing experience for both of us.  

"There are only two things I like to do alone: reading and traveling, and for the same reason. When you travel, and when you read, you are not actually alone, but rather surrounded by other worlds entirely, the footsteps and phrases of whole other lives keeping you company as you go." -Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

I can taste the strudel and sauerkraut already.