Making an easy trip rather complicated

Several months ago a friend had a reasonably good idea: a Belgian beer drinking excursion in the middle of the winter.  In Belgium.  Piece of cake.  Just buy a plane ticket to Brussels and go drinking.  Or not.  Sure, that would get me there and I’d get to have my beers with friends, but it just isn’t that great of an adventure.

Looking at various fares to get there I discovered that there were a lot of creative routings that I could pursue and it wouldn’t really require any extra costs on my part.  And give the option for greater adventure at the same price, why not?

I’ve got a friend in London that I haven’t seen since her wedding in Turkey back in September.  Since I’m going to be so close anyways, planning a stop in London to see her seemed like a good idea.  A quick check of the fares showed that adding the London stop was basically the same price as the non-stop flight, so I added that to the itinerary.  I’m also in seed of additional pages for my passport as it is filling quite quickly.  I’ll be stopping off at the US embassy in London, assuming I have time and can find it, to address that problem, too.

Getting from London to Brussels has many options available, from frequent jet service on a number of airlines to Eurostar service to prop plane service.  So many choices.  How to pick just one?  By random aircraft and airports served, of course!

It seems that the flights between London and Brussels were about the same price as flights from London to a number of other cities near Brussels, including Antwerp, Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Luxembourg.  Hmm…Luxembourg.  I passed through a few years back, but never stopped off to actually see the Grand Duchy.  Now I’ve got the perfect opportunity to do so.  And, again, no real extra cost for the extra stop.  Awesome.  Even better is that the flight is operated from London’s City airport, which is supposed to be quite fun to fly out of.  Book me a window seat for that flight!

Add on a quick train trip from Luxembourg to Brussels and now I’m ready to meet up as expected for good Belgian beer.  We even are throwing a side trip to Bruges into the mix, again on the train.  Why?  Because it is there.

So my easy NYC-Brussels-NYC trip became somewhat more complicated Newark-Heathrow, London City-Luxembourg, Brussels-Newark routing, with trains added in between to connect the dots.  A bit more complicated, to be certain, but way more fun, too.