As of early this week, I’ve got a fantastic new travel itinerary for the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip, courtesy of independent travel specialists, Trailfinders.
Last Sunday evening after the Travelling Geeks event in London, I was chatting to some close friends about the 7 Wonders in 7 Days itinerary and they pointed out a couple of problems with my scheduling.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been working with Kathryn Gregory, World Travel Expert at Thomas Cook Manchester to plan the itinerary so far and Kathryn has been helpfulness itself.
As it stands, the Thomas Cook itinerary had me spending two nights in India and managing only 4 hours in Beijing, something that stuck out like a sore thumb on a mostly manageable itinerary.
Anyway, my friends asked me to chat to Trailfinders as they had used them to book a number of trips in the past.
I took their advice and dropped by the Manchester branch of Trailfinders on Deansgate on Monday morning. I spoke to a lovely travel agent called Anna about the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip for about 10 minutes and then dashed off to my first training session of the week (I deliver training sessions on social media for my consultancy, Real Fresh TV amongst other things).
Within a couple of hours, Anna rang me back to say that my current itinerary had me arriving in India on the one day of the week the Taj Mahal is closed (Friday), something my friends had spotted the night before.
In addition, she was able to put together an itinerary that took into account my internal travel within each country so that I could potentially get to each of the 7 wonders within 7 days.
After some discussion, we had to scrap Anna’s initial itinerary because there were problems with fitting in the Taj Mahal if I set off from Italy as previously detailed.
Here’s the latest version of the itinerary. Notice I now travel from Manchester to China and then make my way around the globe, flying backwards as I ‘follow the sun’ as suggested by Sharon in this comment a few weeks ago.
I’ll post updates to this itinerary as I get details. The costing for the trip is still being calculated but it’s looking closer to the original £7k budget. This means I have a lot of fundraising still to do!
As it happens, I’m working on a rather exciting T-shirt project that should really kickstart things as far as fundraising is concerned.
Here’s the itinerary:
dep. Heathrow 08Sep 1255 – Pre-trip flight out to the starting point, China
arr. Beijing 09Sep 0545 – Day 0 – See Wonder #1 Great Wall of China, China
dep. Beijing 09Sep 2050
arr. Delhi 10Sep 0140 – Day 1 – See Wonder #2 The Taj Mahal, India
dep Delhi 11Sep 0530
arr. Amman 11Sep 0845 – Day 2 – See Wonder #3 Petra, Jordan
dep. Amman 12Sep 1115
arr. Rome 12Sep 1405 – Day 3 – See Wonder #4 Colosseum, Italy
dep. Rome 13Sep 0615
arr. Amsterdam 0845
dep. Amsterdam 1000
arr. Lima 1545
dep. Lima 14Sep 0520
arr. Cuzco 0640 – Day 5 – See Wonder #5 Machu Picchu, Peru
dep. Cuzco 1640
arr. Lima 1805
dep. Lima 2200
arr. Sao Paulo 15Sep 0445
dep. Sao Paulo 0730
arr. Rio 0830 – Day 6 – See Wonder #6 Christ Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
dep. Rio 2015
arr. Miami 16Sep 0405
dep. Miami 0945
arr. Cancun 1025 Day 7 – See Wonder #7 Chichen Itza, Mexico
dep. Cancun 18Sep at 1505 – Journey back to the UK
arr. Dallas 1800
dep. Dallas 1920
arr. Heathrow 19Sep 1045
Mission accomplished!
Your comments, queries and questions welcome as always. Please post them in the comments below.
Image Credit: www.controlware.de
Related posts:
- 7 Wonders in 7 Days Travel Itinerary – So Far
- The 7 Wonders In 7 Days Travel Itinerary Gets Much Better
- I need your help. Please Turn This 10 Day Itinerary into a 7 Day Trip
- Travel Update – 7 Wonders Trip Probable in 7 Days #90909
- Do You Love Travel? Do You Have Diabetes? Join Our Facebook Q&A
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] raising £14,000 because I am inviting one lucky person to join me on the trip which has been estimated as costing around £7000 by independent travel experts, Trailfinders. Find out how you can join [...]
[...] The following 7 Wonders in 7 Days travel itinerary, kindly provided by the Manchester branch of independent travel specialists Trailfinders [...]