The planning of our trip started as early as Christmas 2000. A few years ago, our father, Tor, had commuted weekly to Scotland in his work, and as a consequence had earned a huge number of bonus (frequent flier) points on these flights. These points could be exchanged for free flights for the whole family, but some of the points would expire in 2002, so we had to decide where to go soon.

After exploring several options, we eventually decided that the USA would be a perfect choice. May Tina and me had been there three times, but for our parents (Tor and Kirsten) it would be the first visit. The US is a huge country, so we realized that we would only be able to explore a small part of it. Having consulted various travel literature, we found the Northwest to be the best option.

The focus would then be on experiencing nature and beautiful scenery. Besides, lots of Norwegian emigrated to the US about a 100 years ago, most of them settling in this area. It would also be interesting to see what remained of Norwegian culture in the US. Also, we had a distant relative called Vernon near Seattle, who Tor had been corresponding with via e-mail. He had several times invited us to visit him, so we figured this would be a nice opportunity. Finally, we figured that being so far north, the climate would be not too hot and roughly similar to Norway (how wrong we were!).

Tor did not have enough bonus points to enable us all to fly to the US western zone, but we could all get to the Eastern zone (which actually stretched quite far west). We therefore decided to fly to Rapid City, South Dakota which seemed like a perfect place to start, with the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore close by. Our idea was to rent a car and drive to Seattle to visit Vernon, while stopping at interesting places along the way. Then we would go back through Canada and return to Rapid City. In Mission, Canada we would visit Hetty and John Versavel, who me and May Tina had been corresponding with after they sent us a very nice e-mail regarding our travel diary from Southeast Asia.

So, our plan was more or less complete. We realized that doing such a large loop in only three weeks would require a lot of driving and we would unfortunately not be able to stay more than a few days at each stop, but nevertheless we were very excited about the trip.

The only thing remaining was to actually book the tickets, which turned out to be easier said than done. Tor was in contact with Braathens (who are in the alliance together with KLM and Northwest) several times already in January, but according to them all flights to Rapid City in the summer were already booked out! Obviously, they don't set aside many seats for people travelling free on bonus points. We tried alternative cities, like Minneapolis, but everything was full. The only place we could actually get seats was to Memphis, which was completely out of the question.

We therefore decided to postpone the trip until the summer of 2002. Instead May Tina and me went to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize in the summer of 2001. Tor tried to book the flight tickets as early as possible, and this time we managed to get seats all the way to Rapid City. Although, we weren't actually able to fly on our chosen dates, we were reasonably pleased in the end.

We needed to rent a car and searched the internet for the best prices. Apparently there was little difference between the various companies, and in the end we decided on Hertz. The rental car in itself was not that expensive, but all kinds of additional insurance meant it was not as cheap as we would have liked (about 1800$ for three weeks). However, to our delight the exchange rate for US dollars became much more favorable for us from 2001 until we left in 2002. In fact, going one year later than originally planned meant that everything in the US was 20% cheaper!