Although it may seem that we’re just traveling northwards arbitrarily until we get back to California, we do have something of a plan/itinerary. For a variety of reasons, we had always planned to be back home by spring 2009. I began searching for airfares back in October, when we were living in Buenos Aires. Seeing the prices for one-way tickets from South America to California and having already spent a small fortune flying from Beijing to San Francisco to Beijing to Seoul and then from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, we decided to try to book a ticket home using miles. We then discovered that miles-wise, it’s cheaper to fly to the US from northern South America, which worked out for us because we were planning on traveling the continent pretty extensively. It was when I was searching for dates that we could get a one-way home with miles from Lima or Quito that Joylani shared one of the greatest ideas she’s ever had (in my opinion, not hers). Since one-way and roundtrip tickets cost the same amount of miles, Hawaii is politically part of North America, and many flights to Honolulu connect through SF or LA, then we could get a roundtrip from Lima or Quito to Honolulu and just stay in California on the return journey. In other words, after finishing up South America, we could go to Hawaii for a few weeks, then fly home…all for 30k miles apiece! Pure genius. So, as it stands, we’ll be traveling northwards until we get to Quito, where we’ll catch a flight to Honolulu (via the US) at the end of January. Then we’ll chill on Oahu for three weeks before ditching our onward flights at LAX. So not only do we do have a rough itinerary we’re trying to follow, but our days in South America, on this trip, and as homeless hapas are numbered.