This edition of the Sunday Summary is coming to you from an ANA flight in route to Singapore. This is flight number 2 of 9 for me on a round the world ticket which was booked completely using miles and points. Speaking of points...

I'm sending this email out a couple of days early to let you know👇

Last Chance: This Increased Offer Ends Today ($1,000+ Free Travel)

A few weeks ago I told you that one of our favorite travel credit cards added a $300 travel credit on top of its already 60,000 point sign up bonus.

We've gotten word that the $300 travel credit ends today (not sure exactly when)! So, if you meant to sign up during the increased offer, I just wanted to give you a heads up that it's ending.

This Week(s)

It's been a few weeks since you've heard from me, and once again we've packed in a lot of travel!

After hanging out with the gorillas in Uganda we jumped on a flight to:

Scotland - We spent an amazing 10 days in Scotland. Our trip started in the capital city of Edinburgh. Eating veggie Haggis and going for trail runs in Holyrood was a great way to start the trip!

But the real reason we were in Edinburgh was to start our 5 day trip onboard the Royal Scotsman (the U.K.'s most luxurious overnight train)! They offer several different journey's through Scotland, and we chose the Scotch Malt Whisky Experience. So, in addition to all the amazing aspects of a luxury train trip, we also got to visit a different distillery everyday of the trip! We knew very little about Whisky before starting the trip, and now I think I could lead tours around a distillery! This was without a doubt one of the top two train trips we've ever taken!

The train dropped us back off in Edinburgh and from there we rented a car and drove to see our friends Craig and Aimee. They are currently renovating a cottage in the Scottish Highlands! I can't say we helped much with the renovations, but we did have a great couple of days together hiking and just catching up on life!

Wales - From the Scottish Highlands, we made the 8 hour drive south to Snowdonia, which is such a cool name for a national park! But we didn't see any snow during our trip because we spent most the time 1,300 feet underground in the world's deepest hotel!

The journey to get to the hotel ended up being the best part! We went on a 6 hour journey through the world's largest slate mine which included sliding across zip lines, repelling down into darkness, and climb across via ferrates ALL UNDER GROUND!

Italy - After a night in the world's deepest hotel, we drove to the Manchester airport, dropped off our rental car, flew to Verona, Italy, pick up another rental car, drove 3 hours into the alps, and hopped on a Gondola that dropped us off at Europe's highest hotel!

We pretty much lived in a giant cloud the first two days, and couldn't see any of the views. Thankfully the morning we were scheduled to leave the clouds cleared and we were treated to what might have been the most beautiful view of our entire lives! From the hotel we could see 100+ 3,000 meter peaks!

Because the hotel sits on a glacier, we were also able to go skiing in OCTOBER!

Next Week

As I mentioned at the beginning of this email, I am currently flying 24,000 miles around the world in business class! As a miles and points nerd, this journey has been on my bucket list since before covid because it's one of the best ways to get the maximum value out of points.

If you'll allow me to nerd out for a minute...

This round the world ticket was booked through a Japanese airline called ANA. The entire journey, that allows me to fly all the way around the world on 6 different airlines in business class only cost 145,000 points and $1,300 out of pocket.

Had I paid for the flights with cash they would have cost over $20,000 which means that I'm squeezing over 12 cents worth of value out of each point. I'll quickly show my math:

$20,000 - $1,300 = $18,700

$18,700/145,000 = $.1289

To put this in perspective, getting 2 or 3 cents worth of value out of points is usually consider a good redemption!

Ok, hopefully at least 2 of you found that interesting, haha.

Finding all the right seats for this itinerary took over 40 hours of research, and it would have been almost impossible to find 2 awards seats for each flight. So, Kara allowed me to go on this journey alone, and we're meeting back up in Toronto.

I booked her a flight to Toronto in Emirates first class using points as well. So, it wasn't too much of a sacrifice for her!

Once we land in Toronto, we'll spend a few days hanging out with our friends Eamon and Bec before flying north for another epic wild life adventure!

New Videos

​7 Days Overlanding Iceland (Part 1)​

We took my parents to Iceland, and renting these crazy expedition vehicles allowed us to get to some crazy remote places that few other tourist get to see! Plus, the northern lights reallllly put on a show for us night 1!

​7 Days Overlanding Iceland (Part 2)​

There was too much amazing Icelandic landscape to squeeze into one video so we split it up into two parts! The highlight of part 2 was Kara and my mom learning how to drive 😅

​5 Hours with Wild Mountain Gorillas​

This is without a doubt one of our favorite videos of the year! If you're only going to watch one of these 3 videos, make it this one.

Cheers from Japan,

P.S. Kara always proof reads these emails before they go out, but we're on different time zones at the moment so I had to do my best. Apologies for any and all typos that I missed!

P.P.S Most of the photos from the last few weeks are on Kara's phone (apparently I only take videos), so I also apologize for the lack of images in this email.