That said, I was, actually, getting antsy about buying our plane tickets. So Jen and I looked at travel wiki for round-the-world ticket options, and eventually priced out tickets at roughly $5000-$6000 apiece. Though definitely a satisfiser and not an optimizer, even I was feeling a little ungrounded nervousness that I could be missing some majorally better deals.
Enter my wonderful, detail-oriented, retired-manager father. Though we may have all given him a hard time about his mutli-colored spread-sheets charting the different possibilities for satisfying my undergrad degree requirements, this kind of exaustive approach combined with dad's inexaustable enthusiasm is exactly what we needed right now.
Since chatting with him 2 days ago, we have recieved 3 update emails with his ongoing discoveries. One of the major new developments to come out of these is as follows:
Since one-way tickets are often the same price as round-trip tickets, it may make more sense to use SFO as a "home base" and buy two round trip tickets for the two parts of our trip: one to either Sydney or Bangkok for the South-east Asia/Oceania part of our trip, and other round trip ticket to London (maybe) for the Europe part of our trip. We would then explore over-land options or cheaper local flights for getting around within those parts of the world.
This sort of approach looks like it could get the ticket prices down to about $3000-$3500 apiece--a big improvement!
There are only two dilemmas: 1). We would have to get back down from Alaska to SFO, and 2). We would have to move the Peru part of our trip from the beginning to the end.
All in all, these seem like managable problems.
Finally, a nice all-around resource dad pointed us to can be found here: http://www.artoftravel.com/
