How much will it cost to get there?

This is a really tough question to answer. In the last few months the amount your dollar will buy abroad has been improving. Three months ago it took nearly two US dollars to buy one British pound. Today one British pound can be purchased for less than 1.5 US dollars. How long this trend will continue no one really knows. I would guess that until the economy world-wide starts to perk up the US dollar will increase in value against most major currencies in the world.

Airfare will be one of the major costs of your trip if you are going to another continent. The cost of air travel can be reduced in some instances. You can buy your tickets well in advance of your trip though right now with the cost of fuel going down this may or may not save you money. You can use accumulated mileage plan miles for some or all of your airfare.

For example, the airfare from Anchorage, AK to Cairo, Egypt today is about $1250. Bonnie and I each had about 40,000 miles on our airline account. American Airlines is a partner with the airline we fly most often and they have a 40,000 mile ticket to Europe. Just remember your dates often have to be very flexible when you use this method. I talked with a ticket agent giving her approximate dates we would like to depart and return. I was also very flexible on the European city we would travel to as our first leg. Now American flies many places in Europe but for our dates and the fact we need two seats we ended up going to London. The cost from Anchorage to London was $150.10 each, round trip. To get mileage tickets you need to book well in advance. I booked these tickets in September 2008.

Since we were flying to London and have never been there we decided to spend a few days there before we went on to Cairo, more about that part of the trip later. We decided to spend three days in London, surely not long enough, before we moved on. Checking the fares to Cairo from London required using a travel site on the web. We chose to use Yahoo Travel, http://travel.yahoo.com/. I looked at a lot of travel sites and this one seemed to come up with the best fares because they peddle other site's fares and not their own. We were looking for a direct flight if we could get one. Now since the dollar had been rising against other currencies I didn't buy right away. About once a week I would look at fares, when the cheapest flights started going away is when I bought our tickets. I actually bought the tickets from a British travel agency (http://travel.ebookers.com/) and the fare was about $495 each, round trip. There are cheaper fares today (about $400) but I decided not to wait. The bottom line then turns out to be about $650 and 40,000 miles each round trip from Anchorage, AK to Cairo, Egypt. I think that's cheap and pretty cool.