Travel Arrangements are done

Greetings blog watchers & friends…

We are almost another month closer to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and plans are moving forward.  I have organised all the flights for myself & Fiona, and have sorted out & paid for the internal flights around Brazil. Other than taxi’s and maybe some ad-hoc car hire, all our transportation arrangements are complete….

I have also scoped out the times and budget for the Chilean portion of our pre-trip, and passed them on to Fiona so that she can start her planning process. I think the current plan is to spend some time in Santiago with Fiona’s cousin before heading north to San Pedro de Atacama, as part of our now customary ‘Desert’ visit. We are expecting that Fiona’s cousins that live in Chile may join us for a portion of our time in Brazil, in Salvador hopefully.

So that’s about it for this month’s update….. We have the core components for our trip booked, just need to wait and see how lucky we are with the ticketing process…..

Starting to get real....

Since my last blog entry, I made the changes to the Itinerary that I proposed last month and have successfully progressed all the bookings for our accommodation in Brazil accordingly. 

So the  schedule now looks like this: -

• 6th June – Arrive Sao Paulo – Oscar Freire Suítes  - BOOKED
• 13th June – Arrive Fortaleza – Beach Apartment – BOOKED
• 30th June – Arrive Salvador – HouseGuest Penthouse  - BOOKED 
• 16th July – Arrive Rio de Janeiro – Atlantis Copacabana – BOOKED
• 20th July – Arrive Manaus – Caesar Business Manaus – BOOKED
• 26th July – Fly to Sao Paulo for return international flights

 

Yates has booked his international flights and will be arriving 1 day early in to Sao Paulo on the 5^th June, and Fiona & I are planning to meet him on the following day. I am still progressing my international flight bookings, but I am hoping to have that all squared away by the end of this month, or early October.

 

Once we have the international portion of our flights booked, we will both need to sort out our internal Brazil Airpass flights soon too..!

 

Yates & I have also submitted our initial request for 4 sets of tickets each in the first sales phase ballot of the World Cup ticket process, (specific matches identified in my previous blog post). Now we just need to keep our fingers crossed that we do better in the first sales phase than we did for the previous World Cup in South Africa, where we were allocated only 1 set of tickets out for the 14 we requested…!

The first sales window closes on the 10^th October and we will know what we have been allocated soon after that. Yates & I will then be ready and waiting with our credit cards in our hands to purchase any tickets we miss out on in the initial phase, when the "First Come First Served" phase starts of 5th of November. Exciting huh...?

Here is an overview of the remaing ticket sales phases:

With only 276 days to go now, it is starting to get real.... :-)