The Plan

After discovering the challenge 3 days ago, I spent most of my time since then researching flights, reading about Damien Hirst, following the trips of other "challengers" in their many blogs, articles, Twitter. By now, I have a rough plan for this adventure. I will update this post as it becomes clearer, but won't post it all at once, maybe it will be more interesting for you to follow the steps one by one. However, I will share some flights I found in case you also want to do the challenge (hurry!). You can subscribe to the blog by email (on the right), I'll also set up a Facebook and Twitter page in a bit.

A big part of this trip is to show some people interested in art the sculptures the father of my girlfriend is making. I'll be taking one of them along to take some nice pictures of it on the trip, and post more about it here later. You can already check them out here: www.bikbaev.de

Another big convincing argument to do this trip for me was that I don't know Los Angeles and Hong Kong - so I'll try to spend a fair bit of time in both those cities to get to know them.

Stage 1: USA and London
Tuesday, Feb 7: In 6 hours I'll hit the road in Dresden, Germany and hitchhike to Amsterdam. The cheapest flight to Los Angeles I could find starts from there Wednesday morning (460€ with a stopover in New York and ending in London). Let's hope I won't get stuck or freeze on those 750 kilometers.
If I make the flight I will be in LA for almost a week until Feb 14. Wish me luck!
I'll then be in New York on Feb 15 and London on Feb 16, both only during the day, before returning to Germany for Viola's birthday.

Here's a map of the flight routes during this first stage of the trip, thanks to Great Circle Mapper:


AMS (52°18'31"N 4°45'50"E) IAH (29°59'04"N 95°20'29"W) 296.6° (NW) 8067 km
IAH (29°59'04"N 95°20'29"W) LAX (33°56'33"N 118°24'29"W) 287.4° (W) 2219 km
LAX (33°56'33"N 118°24'29"W) EWR (40°41'33"N 74°10'07"W) 65.9° (NE) 3950 km
EWR (40°41'33"N 74°10'07"W) LHR (51°28'39"N 0°27'41"W) 51.3° (NE) 5576 km
STN (51°53'06"N 0°14'06"E) LEJ (51°25'57"N 12°14'30"E) 88.7° (E) 831 km
Total: 20643 km