Getting in the spirit!

I'm really starting to get in the TdF spirit!  I really can't wait for this trip!  I've never been to France, so that's going to be a new experience for me.  I'm also looking forward to having a car and driving around.  Who knows: we might go also have time to visit Switzerland or Spain while we're making our way down to the Pyrenees.  With nothing in particular on the agenda, we have a lot of flexibility!

I picked up a book at the library last weekend called French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France. It's about a guy who did an unsupported recreation of the TdF on about 2 weeks' notice. It's a pretty interesting story, and it made it clear that I might want to learn a bit of French before I head over to France.
Long story short, now that we have tickets, I can really start to get excited about this trip!

Bike MS coming up soon...

The Bike MS in Sedona is fast approaching.  It is coming up on April 14th and 15th.  I am planning to do the longest possible route which is 105 miles the first day and 45 miles the second day.  The first day will be my first century, if I can finish.

I would feel pretty confident about my being able to finish the ride except for the fact that there is a pretty ridiculous hill climb right at the beginning of the ride.  While I feel that I should be able to get up this climb, my concern is that I'm going to have to use so much energy getting up the hill that I'm going to be totally burned out later in the ride.

If you have any interest in sponsoring me as I ride in the Bike MS to help fight multiple sclerosis, please visit my fundraising page here.  Thank you!

I better learn a bit of French!

With us going to France in 4 months, I suppose I ought to at least be able to speak and/or read a tiny bit of French.  I assume (probably a bad idea) that most people speak at least some English, but for signs, menus, TV, etc. it would probably be good if I had at least a bit of knowledge of the language under my belt.

I've therefore put on hold the first two parts of the Pimsleur language course for French.  Pimsleur is very good at helping you to learn how to speak a foreign language as it is all about listening to CDs and carrying on practice conversations. On the other hand, the reading portion of the course is a bit week.  For that I have downloaded an app on my iPhone (MindSnacks Learn French) that is more focused on word recognition and reading than it is on speaking.  Hopefully, between these two I will be able to pick up enough French that we'll be able to get around.

Tickets reserved...

Well, I managed to get two tickets to Paris for a grand total of 175,000 frequent flyer miles.  We will be flying on US Airways through Philadelphia.  In addition, Nathan will be coming from Eugene to Phoenix the night before and we will fly out together from Phoenix the next morning.

The only downside is that to get tickets for this number of miles we actually had to leave even a day earlier.  Therefore, we are leaving Phoenix on Thursday, July 12th and come back on Tuesday, July 24th.  This is going to mean that we are in France for 3 days longer than the original plan.  I know there are worse things than spending extra time as a tourist in Europe, but that does mean additional room nights, additional food, additional rental car days, additional tourist expenses, etc.

The tickets are actually not purchased yet, but are just on hold.  My plan is to call everyday over the next few days to see if I can push the whole outbound trip back one day.  If they will do that with no change in points required, I'll do it.  Otherwise, we'll just suffer and spend an extra day in France.

This is a big milestone for our trip.  For a while I thought we would not be able to pull it off because of the difficulty finding tickets for points, so now that we have these tickets in hand we are definitely going.

Potential good news regarding tickets to France

By being a bit more flexible on my dates, I can get the number of miles per ticket down to something more reasonable.  Originally, two US Air tickets were going to cost 240,000 miles.  However, if we fly out a few days earlier, we can save over 30,000 miles per ticket.  Therefore, it looks like we are going to spend a few more days in France, but there's worse things than that, right?!

Hopefully, tonight is the night that I will be able to make the arrangements.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Finding flights...

Planning the flights for this trip is absolutely brutal. I'm trying to use points for the flights because tickets are $1500, but I don't have enough points in any of my accounts for 2 tickets. On top of that, we need to get down to the south of France which is over 500 miles from Paris, but most of the airlines don't fly into Toulouse which is much closer.

Long story short, I need the following:

• One ticket from PHX to somewhere in France that can be bought with points, and
• One ticket from EUG to the same place in France that can be bought with points, and
• Both flights must arrive around the same time, and
• The arrival time must give us enough time to drive to the Pyrenees.

My head hurts just thinking about it...

Tickets to France

Hey, thanks Olympics for making tickets to Europe really difficult get get around Tour time.  It looks like tickets are running around $1100+ and US Air (my primary airline) is charging 120,000 points per round trip ticket to get close to the travel dates I need.

After reviewing options, we might actually fly into Madrid then home from Paris as Madrid is a little easier to get to and actually closer to Bagneres-de-Luchon than Paris.

We might also just go ahead and rent a car while we're there.  That would surely make getting around a lot easier and extend our range of sightseeing options a lot.