Hello from Chicago!  The Mrs. Guru and I just completed the first leg of our next adventure…earlier this morning, we flew up from Greensboro, and have a relatively short layover here.  Our next stop is Toronto, where we have about 4 hours – just enough time to head into the city for a quick lunch.  From Toronto, we continue on an overnight flight to Istanbul, Turkey.  The Toronto to Istanbul flight will be about 10 hours long, so fortunately we were able to score seats in their Executive First Cabin:

We’ll land in Istanbul at about 9:30 am tomorrow (Saturday) morning.  Turkish Airlines has recently completed some huge upgrades to their lounge in Istanbul, which is widely viewed as one of the world’s premier lounges, complete with a library, billiards table, movie theater, popcorn machine, and private showers.  There’s not much that can beat a hot shower after a 10 hour overnight flight!

At that point, we’ll have about 14 hours to go out and check out the city.  As I wrote about recently, this is just a long layover, and doesn’t count as an actual stopover.  It’ll be a quick visit, but it’s better than not seeing it at all!  After spending the day in Istanbul, we’ll have a quick (1 hour) hop from Istanbul to Athens late on Saturday evening.

We’ll spend a couple days in Athens, and then head out to Santorini for the rest of the week.

At the end of the week, we’ll make our way home, with another long layover in Milan, Italy to meet up with some of my family that will be in Milan at the same time.

On this trip, we’ll both get to visit 2 countries that we’ve never been to: for the Mrs. Guru, Turkey and Greece will be new.  For me, of all the places I’ve traveled to, I’ve never actually been to Canada.  So this will be my first time to Canada, as well as my first time in Turkey.

We’ve both been looking forward to this trip for a long time!  Other than the first flight from Greensboro to Chicago, which was on a small plane with only Coach, the rest of the trip will be in First and Business Class!!  Plus, we were able to tack on an (almost) free one way flight to the Cayman Islands, which will be in November.  Since all of our long layovers (Toronto, Istanbul and Milan) are under 24 hours, none of them count as an official stopover…so we’ll use our 1 allowed stopover back home for 3 months, and then finish the last legs of the trip (even though it’s really 2 completely separate trips).  You can read more about how to add a free or almost free flight onto an international award flight here.

As excited as we were for the trip, we did have one vote against it: