We’ve bought our second set of plane tickets for our trip! It wasn’t quite as cheap as our first flight, but we were still able to use miles!
The Africa leg of our trip will be concluding in Cape Town, and the next stop on our journey is Prague in the Czech Republic in Central Europe. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to search for award flights between these two airports.
As with our flight to Africa, the Star Alliance seemed to be the best bet for finding an award flight because they have the most members that fly in the region. It costs 30,000 United miles to fly from South Africa to Europe. Luckily, Della just got 50,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points (transferable to United) from the Ink card, and Eric had just enough left over from his Sapphire bonus.
Award availability was good for the week we wanted to fly as well. For a while we just watched the flights and pondered which day of the week we wanted to leave. It seemed like the best bet was going to be on Turkish Airlines flights with a layover in Istanbul. However, by the time we got around to booking, that flight on that day had disappeared.
But… we noticed one of the other flights that was available had a 8 hour layover in Munich, Germany. Sounds like a good chance to add another country to the itinerary! Eric was especially excited when he found this well-organized guide to Munich layovers. It is always nice to have the options so well laid out, plus a chance to see the oldest brewery in the world is hard to pass up!
In the end, the fees were a little higher than the Turkish Airlines option: $100 a person. But, the departure date was right and the opportunity to (briefly) see Germany seemed cool too, so we went ahead and booked:
Globe Gazers 
Great connection that you found. (also I was thinking be careful there isn’t any critical info in your screenshots that web crawlers could use)
Yeah, I made sure to blank out the payment information and frequent flyer number.
True story: Nathaniel and I once ventured out to Freising on a whim while staying in Munich, and ended up wandering around aimlessly for 4 hours after finding the Weihenstephan brewery shut down (to the public at least) – they had packed up shop and headed to Munich already in preparation for Oktoberfest starting about 3 weeks later. We were sad.
I bet you were sad! Hope that doesn’t happen to us…
In Prague I went to a bar that was founded in 1420. It was just down from the castle. I could probably figure it out if you want to see a map.
That sounds pretty cool! Would love to see a map you could figure it out
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