Every year, Chris and I take a trip for our wedding anniversary. A yearly honeymoon, if you will. It’s a tradition that we cherish and plan to continue forever. Our trips have ranged from big to small and everything in between: Lake Tahoe (2003); Playa del Carmen (2004); New Orleans (2005); Kansas City (2006); St. Lucia & Bequia (2007); Anguilla (2008); Santa Barbara (2009); Grand Cayman (2010); Galapagos (2011).

Feb 2, 2012 is our 10 year anniversary. We wanted it to be BIG. Like, really big. As we started to plan our trip, a former colleague was posting about her sabbatical trip which included a round-the-world ticket from her preferred airline. Bingo! I had completely forgotten about the OneWorld ticket that American Airlines offered. The wheels in my head started spinning. Hard and fast.

I travel for work. A lot. This translates to thousands of frequent flier miles and hotel points. I decided that now was the time to cash all those miles and points in for a trip anywhere we wanted to go (well, anywhere American Airlines or their partner airlines go).

How did we decide where to go? First, the city had to have a Hilton or Hyatt. Second, American Airlines or one of their partners had to fly there. Once we started there, deciding where to go was pretty easy. Our only requirement – hit as many continents as we can. So, we are going to almost all of them. Here is our itinerary:

Buenos Aires, Agrentina (5 days)

Madrid, Spain (5 days)

Hong Kong, China (4 days)

Auckland, New Zealand (5 days)

Queenstown, New Zealand (5 days)

Sydney, Australia (5 days)

Brisbane, Australia (2 days)

Great Barrier Reef (5 days)

Cape Town, S. Africa (5 days)

(We would have included Antarctica but AA doesn’t fly there)

Some of you are probably wondering how the hell we can take seven weeks off of our jobs to do this. Well, we are both self-employed. Since I work on a project-to-project basis, I had some time off in between projects. Chris owns his own recording studio and is able to make his own schedule. Our only other responsibility is our cat, Hermes, and he will be taken good care of by a great friend who will be housesitting as well.

I hope you keep in touch with us through our blog. We promise to take time to document our adventures. If you have any suggestions of people, places, and things that we should see during our trip, we’d love to hear it!

– kb