My Trip Around the World

For the next couple of blog postings I will be retelling the story behind my travels around the world.  It started off here in Ft. Lauderdale at FLL.  It was the beginning of my around the world trip which was my 15th birthday present from my Dad.  The main goal of the trip was to go see the Paris Air-show, but in addition to this we also decided to see friends in Zurich, the magnificent buildings in Dubai and the culture in Hong Kong.  I will be splitting the blog postings by city but I will concentrate on the airports and the stresses of flying stand-by.  My Dad and I were going to be flying NRSA, this stands for Non Revenue Space Available, but this was only going to be across the Atlantic and the Pacific.  The reason is that United Airlines does not fly from CDG (Paris Charles De Gaulle) to ZRH (Zurich Kloten International Airport).

Back to FLL,
My Dad and I got to the airport early and we were hoping to either get on a flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Chicago or Ft. Lauderdale to Washington Dulles.  On this day United had a systemwide computer crash which was causing delays across the board.  The day was not off to a great start.  Eventually a plane arrived and it was headed to Washington Dulles (IAD).  The plane was late, but it wasn't extremely full so we were able to grab two seats.  Once on the plane my dad began looking at the list of flights we might take out of IAD.  Due to our delay most of our possible flights were crossed off the list.  We were hoping to fly into London Heathrow (LHR), Frankfurt (FRA), or Paris (CDG).

When we landed my dad told me to hurry off the plane because a flight to LHR was leaving in 10 minutes.  So as we rushed off the plane we hurried down to the gate for the LHR flight and managed to get there just before they were going to retract the gate.  The gate agent printed off two Economy Plus tickets for us and I was on my first flight across the Atlantic aboard a United Airlines 777-200ER painted in the Star Alliance color scheme.

I have included a map of all our flights so you can see where the next blog postings will be headed.